Vivre sa vie

Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre sa vie (also known as My Life to Live) won the Special Jury Prize at the 23rd Venice International Film Festival in 1962, his first major recognition at Venice, two years after the international success of Breathless. For us it is the central work of Godard's first phase, between Breathless (1960) and Pierrot le fou (1965). It is built in twelve numbered chapters with intertitles, and it is the most formally rigorous of his early features.

Anna Karina, the lead, was Godard's wife when it was shot (they had married in 1961). It is the third of their seven films together, after Le petit soldat (1960, banned by French censors and not released until 1963) and Une femme est une femme (1961, also a Silver Bear winner at Berlin). Few director-actress partnerships in twentieth-century cinema mattered as much as theirs did over those six years; it ended in 1967 with Made in U.S.A., the year of their divorce.

Raoul Coutard, the New Wave's founding cameraman, shot it, as he shot every Godard feature from Breathless through Week-end in 1967. Michel Legrand's score uses extended passages of his own music alongside Bach. In a famous central sequence the film engages directly with Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, cutting between Karina in a Paris cinema and Maria Falconetti on the screen. Sight & Sound's 2022 critics' poll placed the film on its Greatest Films of All Time list.