Against Interpretation

by Susan Sontag

  9

  Thus, Vivre Sa Vie must be seen as an extension of a particular cinematic genre: the narrated film. There are two standard forms of this genre, which give us images plus a text. In one, an impersonal voice, the author, as it were, narrates the film. In the other, we hear the interior monologue of the main character, narrating the events as we see them happening to him.

  Two examples of the first type, featuring an anonymous commenting voice which oversees the action, are Resnais’ L’Année Dernière à Marienbad and Melville’s Les Enfants Terribles. An example of the second type, featuring an interior monologue of the main character, is Franju’s Thérèse Desqueyroux. Probably the greatest examples of the second type, in which the entire action is recited by the hero, are Bresson’s Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne and Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé.

  Godard used the technique brought to perfection by Bresson in his second film, Le Petit Soldat, made in 1960 in Geneva though not released (because for three years it was banned by the French censors) until January 1963. The film is the sequence of the reflections of the hero, Bruno Forestier, a man embroiled in a right-wing terrorist organization who is assigned the job of killing a Swiss agent for the FLN. As the film opens, one hears Forestier’s voice saying: “The time for action is passed. I have grown older. The time for reflection has come.” Bruno is a photographer. He says, “To photograph a face is to photograph the soul behind it. Photography is truth. And the cinema is the truth twenty-four times a second.” This central passage in Le Petit Soldat, in which Bruno meditates on the relation between the image and truth, anticipates the complex meditation on the relation between language and truth in Vivre Sa Vie.

  Since the story itself in Le Petit Soldat, the factual connections between the characters, are mostly conveyed through Forestier’s monologue, Godard’s camera is freed to become an instrument of contemplation—of certain aspects of events, and of characters. Quiet “events”—Karina’s face, the façade of buildings, passing through the city by car—are studied by the camera, in a way that somewhat isolates the violent action. The images seem arbitrary sometimes, expressing a kind of emotional neutrality; at other times, they indicate an intense involvement. It is as though Godard hears, then looks at what he hears.

  In Vivre Sa Vie, Godard takes this technique of hearing first, then seeing, to new levels of complexity. There is no longer a single unified point of view, either the protagonist’s voice (as in Le Petit Soldat) or a godlike narrator, but a series of documents (texts, narrations, quotations, excerpts, set pieces) of various description. These are primarily words; but they may also be worldless sounds, or even wordless images.

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  All the essentials of Godard’s technique are present in the opening credit sequence and in the first episode. The credits occur over a left profile view of Nana, so dark that it is almost a silhouette. (The title of the film is Vivre Sa Vie. A Film in Twelve Episodes.) As the credits continue, she is shown full face, and then from the right side, still in deep shadow. Occasionally she blinks or shifts her head slightly (as if it were uncomfortable to hold still so long), or wets her lips. Nana is posing. She is being seen.

  Next we are given the first titles. “Episode I: Nana and Paul. Nana Feels Like Giving Up.” Then the images begin, but the emphasis is on what is heard. The film proper opens in the midst of a conversation between Nana and a man; they are seated at the counter of a café; their backs are to the camera; besides their conversation, we hear the noises of the barman, and snatches of the voices of other customers. As they talk, always facing away from the camera, we learn that the man (Paul) is Nana’s husband, that they have a child, and that she has recently left both husband and child to try to become an actress. In this brief public reunion (it is never clear on whose initiative it came about) Paul is stiff and hostile, but wants her to come back; Nana is oppressed, desperate, and revolted by him. After weary, bitter words, Nana says to Paul, “The more you talk, the less it means.” Throughout this opening sequence, Godard systematically deprives the viewer. There is no cross-cutting. The viewer is not allowed to see, to become involved. He is only allowed to hear.

  Only after Nana and Paul break off their fruitless conversation to leave the counter and play a game at the pinball machine, do we see them. Even here, the emphasis remains on hearing. As they go on talking, we continue to see Nana and Paul mainly from behind. Paul has stopped pleading and being rancorous. He tells Nana of the droll theme his father, a schoolteacher, received from one of his pupils on an assigned topic, The Chicken. “The chicken has an inside and an outside,” wrote the little girl. “Remove the outside and you find the inside. Remove the inside, and you find the soul.” On these words, the image dissolves and the episode ends.

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  The story of the chicken is the first of many “texts” in the film which establish what Godard wants to say. For the story of the chicken, of course, is the story of Nana. (There is a pun in French—the French poule being something like, but a good deal rougher than, the American “chick.”) In Vivre Sa Vie, we witness the stripping down of Nana. The film opens with Nana having divested herself of her outside: her old identity. Her new identity, within a few episodes, is to be that of a prostitute. But Godard’s interest is in neither the psychology nor the sociology of prostitution. He takes up prostitution as the most radical metaphor for the separating out of the elements of a life—as a testing ground, a crucible for the study of what is essential and what is superfluous in a life.

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  The whole of Vivre Sa Vie may be seen as a text. It is a text in, a study of, lucidity; it is about seriousness.

  And it “uses” texts (in the more literal sense), in all but two of its twelve episodes. The little girl’s essay on the chicken told by Paul in Episode I. The passage from the pulp magazine story recited by the salesgirl in Episode II. (“You exaggerate the importance of logic.”) The excerpt from Dreyer’s Jeanne d’Arc which Nana watches in Episode III. The story of the theft of 1,000 francs which Nana relates to the police inspector in Episode IV. (We learn that her full name is Nana Klein and that she was born in 1940.) Yvette’s story—how she was abandoned by Raymond two years ago—and Nana’s speech in reply (“I am responsible”) in Episode VI. The letter of application Nana composes to the madam of a brothel in Episode VII. The documentary narration of the life and routine of the prostitute in Episode VIII. The record of dance music in Episode IX. The conversation with the philosopher in Episode XI. The excerpt from the story by Edgar Allan Poe (“The Oval Portrait”) read aloud by Luigi in Episode XII.

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  The most elaborate, intellectually, of all the texts in the film is the conversation in Episode XI between Nana and a philosopher (played by the philosopher, Brice Parain) in a café. They discuss the nature of language. Nana asks why one can’t live without words; Parain explains that it is because talking equals thinking, and thinking talking, and there is no life without thought. It is not a question of speaking or not speaking, but of speaking well. Speaking well demands an ascetic discipline (une ascèse), detachment. One has to understand, for one thing, that there is no going straight at the truth. One needs error.

  Early in their conversation, Parain relates the story of Dumas’ Porthos, the man of action, whose first thought killed him. (Running away from a dynamite charge he had planted, Porthos suddenly wondered how one could walk, how anyone ever placed one foot in front of the other. He stopped. The dynamite exploded. He was killed.) There is a sense in which this story, too, like the story of the chicken, is about Nana. And through both the story and the Poe tale told in the next (and last) episode, we are being prepared—formally, not substantively—for Nana’s death.

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  Godard takes his motto for this film-essay on freedom and responsibility from Montaigne: “Lend yourself to others; give yourself to yourself.” The life of the prostitute is, of course, the most radical metaphor for the act of lending oneself to others. But if we as
k, how has Godard shown us Nana keeping herself for herself, the answer is: he has not shown it. He has, rather, expounded on it. We don’t know Nana’s motives except at a distance, by inference. The film eschews all psychology; there is no probing of states of feeling, of inner anguish.

  Nana knows herself to be free, Godard tells us. But that freedom has no psychological interior. Freedom is not an inner, psychological something—but more like physical grace. It is being what, who one is. In Episode I, Nana says to Paul, “I want to die.” In Episode II, we see her desperately trying to borrow money, trying unsuccessfully to force her way past the concierge and get into her own apartment. In Episode III, we see her weeping in the cinema over Jeanne d’Arc. In Episode IV, at the police station, she weeps again as she relates the humiliating incident of the theft of 1,000 francs. “I wish I were someone else,” she says. But in Episode V (“On the Street. The First Client”) Nana has become what she is. She has entered the road that leads to her affirmation and to her death. Only as prostitute do we see a Nana who can affirm herself. This is the meaning of Nana’s speech to her fellow prostitute Yvette in Episode VI, in which she declares serenely, “I am responsible. I turn my head, I am responsible. I lift my hand, I am responsible.”

  Being free means being responsible. One is free, and therefore responsible, when one realizes that things are as they are. Thus, the speech to Yvette ends with the words: “A plate is a plate. A man is a man. Life is … life.”

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  That freedom has no psychological interior—that the soul is something to be found not upon but after stripping away the “inside” of a person—is the radical spiritual doctrine which Vivre Sa Vie illustrates.

  One would guess that Godard is quite aware of the difference between his sense of the “soul” and the traditional Christian one. The difference is precisely underscored by the quotation from Dreyer’s Jeanne d’Arc; for the scene which we see is the one in which the young priest (played by Antonin Artaud) comes to tell Jeanne (Mlle Falconetti) that she is to be burned at the stake. Her martyrdom, Jeanne assures the distraught priest, is really her deliverance. While the choice of a quotation from a film does distance our emotional involvement with these ideas and feelings, the reference to martyrdom is not ironic in this context. Prostitution, as Vivre Sa Vie allows us to see it, has entirely the character of an ordeal. “Pleasure isn’t all fun,” as the title to Episode X announces laconically. And Nana does die.

  The twelve episodes of Vivre Sa Vie are Nana’s twelve stations of the cross. But in Godard’s film the values of sanctity and martyrdom are transposed to a totally secular plane. Godard offers us Montaigne instead of Pascal, something akin to the mood and intensity of Bressonian spirituality but without Catholicism.

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  The one false step in Vivre Sa Vie comes at the end, when Godard breaks the unity of his film by referring to it from the outside, as maker. Episode XII begins with Nana and Luigi in a room together; he is a young man with whom she has apparently fallen in love (we have seen him once before, in Episode IX, when Nana meets him in a billiard parlor and flirts with him). At first the scene is silent, and the dialogue—“Shall we go out?” “Why don’t you move in with me?” etc.—rendered in subtitles. Then Luigi, lying on the bed, begins to read aloud from Poe’s “The Oval Portrait,” a story about an artist engaged in painting a portrait of his wife; he strives for the perfect likeness, but at the moment he finally achieves it his wife dies. The scene fades out on these words, and opens to show Raoul, Nana’s pimp, roughly forcing her through the courtyard of her apartment house, pushing her into a car. After a car ride (one or two brief images), Raoul hands Nana over to another pimp; but it is discovered that the money exchanged is not enough, guns are drawn, Nana is shot, and the last image shows the cars speeding away and Nana lying dead in the street.

  What is objectionable here is not the abruptness of the ending. It is the fact that Godard is clearly making a reference outside the film, to the fact that the young actress who plays Nana, Anna Karina, is his wife. He is mocking his own tale, which is unforgivable. It amounts to a peculiar failure of nerve, as if Godard did not dare to let us have Nana’s death—in all its horrifying arbitrariness—but had to provide, at the last moment, a kind of subliminal causality. (The woman is my wife.—The artist who portrays his wife kills her.—Nana must die.)

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  This one lapse aside, Vivre Sa Vie seems to me a perfect film. That is, it sets out to do something that is both noble and intricate, and wholly succeeds in doing it. Godard is perhaps the only director today who is interested in “philosophical films” and possessses an intelligence and discretion equal to the task. Other directors have had their “views” on contemporary society and the nature of our humanity; and sometimes their films survive the ideas they propose. Godard is the first director fully to grasp the fact that, in order to deal seriously with ideas, one must create a new film language for expressing them—if the ideas are to have any suppleness and complexity. This he has been trying to do in different ways: in Le Petit Soldat, Vivre Sa Vie, Les Carabiniers, Le Mépris, Une Femme Mariée, and Alphaville—Vivre Sa Vie being, I think, his most successful film. For this conception, and the formidable body of work in which he has pursued it, Godard is in my opinion the most important director to have emerged in the last ten years.

  APPENDIX: The advertisement drawn up by Godard when the film was first released in Paris:

  VIVRE SA VIE

  Un

  Une

  Film

  Série

  Sur

  D’Aventures

  La

  Qui

  Prostitution

  Lui

  Qui

  Font

  Raconte

  Connaître

  Comment

  Tous

  Une

  Les

  Jeune

  Sentiments

  Et

  Humains

  Jolie

  Profonds

  Vendeuse

  Possibles

  Parisienne

  Et

  Donne

  Qui

  Son

  Ont

  Corps

  Eté

  Mais

  Filmés

  Garde

  Par

  Son

  Jean-Luc

  Ame

  Godard

  Alors

  Et

  Qu’elle

  Joués

  Traverse

  Par

  Comme

  Anna Karina

  Des

  Vivre

  Apparences

  Sa Vie

  [1964]

  The imagination of disaster

  THE typical science fiction film has a form as predictable as a Western, and is made up of elements which, to a practiced eye, are as classic as the saloon brawl, the blonde schoolteacher from the East, and the gun duel on the deserted main street.

  One model scenario proceeds through five phases.

  (1) The arrival of the thing. (Emergence of the monsters, landing of the alien spaceship, etc.) This is usually witnessed or suspected by just one person, a young scientist on a field trip. Nobody, neither his neighbors nor his colleagues, will believe him for some time. The hero is not married, but has a sympathetic though also incredulous girl friend.

  (2) Confirmation of the hero’s report by a host of witnesses to a great act of destruction. (If the invaders are beings from another planet, a fruitless attempt to parley with them and get them to leave peacefully.) The local police are summoned to deal with the situation and massacred.

  (3) In the capital of the country, conferences between scientists and the military take place, with the hero lecturing before a chart, map, or blackboard. A national emergency is declared. Reports of further destruction. Authorities from other countries arrive in black limousines. All international tensions are suspended in view of the planetary emergency. This sta
ge often includes a rapid montage of news broadcasts in various languages, a meeting at the UN, and more conferences between the military and the scientists. Plans are made for destroying the enemy.

  (4) Further atrocities. At some point the hero’s girl friend is in grave danger. Massive counter-attacks by international forces, with brilliant displays of rocketry, rays, and other advanced weapons, are all unsuccessful. Enormous military casualties, usually by incineration. Cities are destroyed and/or evacuated. There is an obligatory scene here of panicked crowds stampeding along a highway or a big bridge, being waved on by numerous policemen who, if the film is Japanese, are immaculately white-gloved, preternaturally calm, and call out in dubbed English, “Keep moving. There is no need to be alarmed.”

  (5) More conferences, whose motif is: “They must be vulnerable to something.” Throughout the hero has been working in his lab to this end. The final strategy, upon which all hopes depend, is drawn up; the ultimate weapon—often a super-powerful, as yet untested, nuclear device—is mounted. Countdown. Final repulse of the monster or invaders. Mutual congratulations, while the hero and girl friend embrace cheek to cheek and scan the skies sturdily. “But have we seen the last of them?”