General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Vivre sa vie

Vivre sa vie: film en douze tableaux (released in English as My Life to Live or Vivre sa vie) is a 1962 French black-and-white drama directed by Jean-Luc Godard, told in twelve tableaux, about Nana, a young Parisian woman who leaves her partner, fails to build an acting career, and drifts into prostitution.¹ It stars Godard's wife and muse Anna Karina, with Sady Rebbot, André S. Labarthe, and Guylaine Schlumberger, and won the Special Jury Prize at the 1962 Venice Film Festival.²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Vivre sa vie: film en douze tableaux; English release title My Life to Live³
Director and writer	Jean-Luc Godard; produced by Pierre Braunberger for Les Films de la Pléiade⁴
Cast	Anna Karina (Nana), Sady Rebbot (Raoul), André S. Labarthe (Paul), Guylaine Schlumberger (Yvette), Brice Parain (the philosopher)⁵
Key crew	Cinematography Raoul Coutard; music Michel Legrand and Jean Ferrat; editing Agnès Guillemot⁴
French release	20 September 1962; CNC-registered length 80 min (2,270 m)⁶
Awards	Special Jury Prize, Venice Film Festival 1962²
Standing	Ranked =157 in the Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll of the greatest films¹

Spoilers

Story and structure

The film follows Nana, a shopgirl in a Paris record store who aspires to be an actress. After breaking with Paul, she struggles to make her rent; short 2,000 francs, she is expelled from her apartment and sells herself for the first time. She falls under the control of the pimp Raoul, meets a man in love with her and then a philosopher, and dies by a stray bullet at the moment Raoul is trading her for money.⁴^•⁷

Twelve tableaux. The story is divided into twelve episodes, each announced by a silent title card in the manner of chapter headings in classic novels; the cards also comment on the characters, as when the card before Nana's jukebox dance tells the viewer she is wondering whether she is really happy.⁸ Time Out describes the twelve tableaux as Brechtian, moving from a documentary treatment of prostitution to a stylized gangster ending, with the gangster elements functioning as a distancing device.⁵ The New Yorker's Richard Brody, a film critic, traces the tableau-like structure loosely to "The Threepenny Opera" and notes that Godard built the film mainly as a series of poised, artful long takes that frame Karina's performance.⁹

Production and style

Godard shot the film in black and white with his regular cinematographer Raoul Coutard. The BFI highlights one of Coutard's most celebrated shots, showing Nana and a customer in the record store before the camera turns to look out of the window.¹ The score is by Michel Legrand, with Jean Ferrat also credited as composer, and the editing is by Agnès Guillemot.⁴ The soundtrack is deliberately unpolished in places; in the opening café scene some dialogue is nearly lost in the background noise of the room, and the musical motif fades in and cuts off abruptly rather than running continuously.⁸

The film borrows the aesthetics of cinéma vérité documentary, an approach fashionable at the time, and its long takes and frontal framing give what the Larousse film dictionary calls a totally exterior approach to Nana that lets the viewer grasp her interior.¹⁰^•⁷

Godard and Karina

Vivre sa vie was made as a vehicle for Anna Karina, Godard's wife at the time, and it is the third of the seven features they made together.⁹^•¹ The BFI calls it the high point of their collaboration and of their short-lived marriage, a paean to the actress's beauty that links her to the silent-era stars Louise Brooks, whose bobbed haircut Nana shares, and Maria Falconetti; in one of the film's most striking sequences a tearful Nana watches Falconetti in Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928).¹ Time Out reports that Godard later described the film as the first stage in the dissolution of the marriage, with the director-star relationship mirrored in the film's client-prostitute dynamic.⁵

Release and reception

The film opened in Italy on 28 August 1962 and in France on 20 September 1962, followed by releases in West Germany, the United Kingdom, Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland, and Denmark over the following year.¹¹ At Venice it won the Special Jury Prize, Godard's first major recognition at that festival, two years after the international success of Breathless.²^•¹²

Its critical standing has held up. In the 2022 Sight & Sound greatest-films critics' poll it was ranked joint 157th, with votes from critics including James Schamus and Ariel Schweitzer and from directors including Wes Anderson and Béla Tarr.¹ The Criterion Collection released it on home video as spine number 512, and on Letterboxd it holds a rating of 4.01 out of 5 from about 148,100 users.³ The Larousse dictionary calls it Godard's first fully accomplished film.⁷

Place in Godard's work

The film is widely treated as a turning point in Godard's career. Eye Filmmuseum describes it as such and notes that it has reached the status of a classic.² Prostitution as a subject, which Godard saw as a crystallization of the relations between the individual and consumer society, recurs in his later films Masculin féminin (1966), Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle (1966), La Chinoise (1967), and Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1979).¹³ A restored digital version, repaired by Les Films de la Pléiade with Les Films du Jeudi and the support of the CNC, circulates for theatrical and home viewing.⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1960s › Released 1960 to 1965

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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