Vivre Sa Vie - Godard

Plot 

Nana (Anna Karina), a beautiful Parisian in her early twenties, leaves her husband and infant son hoping to become an actress. Without money, beyond what she earns as a shopgirl, and unable to enter acting, she elects to earn better money as a prostitute. Soon she has a pimp, Raoul, who after an unspecified period agrees to sell Nana to another pimp. During the exchange the pimps argue and in a gun battle Nana is killed. Nana's short life on film is told in 12 brief episodes each preceded by a written resume. Godard introduces other idiosyncrasies to focus the viewer's attention.

Godard 

Raoul Coutard, the cinematographer who worked side-by-side with Godard during this period, has his camera track back and forth, first behind Nana's head, then Paul's, their faces glimpsed in the mirror. "The film was made by sort of a second presence," Godard said; the camera is not just a recording device but a looking device, that by its movements makes us aware that it sees her, wonders about her, glances first here and then there, exploring the space she occupies, speculating.

One of Vivre Sa Vie's major themes that Godard seems to explore is the subject of verbal and non-verbal communication between people within real life and also within the cinema. In one of the greatest sequences in the film the character of Nana spends the last money she has on the viewing of Carl Dreyer's silent masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc. The audience witnesses Nana weep as she identifies with Joan, the teary eyed martyr on the movie screen, as Godard brilliantly captures and iconized the tragic art of the cinema, in a heartbreaking sequence without the use of words.

http://www.classicartfilms.com/vivre-sa-vie-1962

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-vivre-sa-vie--my-life-to-live-1963