Event

Vivre sa Vie

Vivre sa vie was a turning point for Jean-Luc Godard and remains one of his most dynamic films, combining brilliant visual design with a tragic character study. The lovely Anna Karina, Godards greatest muse, plays Nana, a young Parisian who aspires to be an actress but instead ends up a prostitute, her downward spiral depicted in a series of discrete tableaux of daydreams and dances. Featuring some of Karina and Godards most iconic momentsfrom her movie theater vigil with The Passion of Joan of Arc to her seductive pool-hall strutVivre sa vie is a landmark of the French New Wave that still surprises at every turn.

"Karina gives her most heart-clutching performance, which seems more like the apparition of a whole unknowable self in all its discreetly shaded moods, stalking through Paris like a cross between Louise Brooks and an exultant cat. So alluring and anarchic, Karina is not just a beautiful muse: a fabulously protean actress whose many transformations for Godard still feel strange and new, at play with the films themselves, mixing giddy abandon with gasping vulnerability." - Sight & Sound

"Whereas Breathless achieves the suspense of poetic gratuitousness, My Life to Live is dictated by the logic of poetic necessity. Godards heroine is destroyed by the very terms with which she is defined My Life to Live, by the very violence of the reactions it evokes, is the most profoundly modern film of the year." - Village Voice, 1963

"Godard, like Oshima, is a pillar of visceral, astringent filmmaking. In My Life to Live, his then-wife, legendary muse Anna Karina, shines as Nana, an aspiring actress who, instead of pursuing success in cinema, drifts into a life of vagrancy and prostitution." - Samantha Vacca, Brooklyn