10 / 40 / 70: Vivre Sa Vie (My Life to Life)

[There is a failed 10 /40 / 70 on Watchmen in the wings, but it's too embarrassing to post now, as Protestant guilt about sneaking a camera into the theater resulted in several botched pictures.]

My Life to Live. The 1962 film directed by Jean-Luc Godard. His most lyrical. Full of long takes. Long takes of Anna Karina, who was married to Godard at the time. Steady tracking shots. Steady pans. Relatively few jump cuts. Full of digressions. 

10: At ten minutes:

Nana, bored, working at a record store. Analogue nostalgia. A customer asks first for Judy Garland. Sorry, no. He then asks for--he can't quite remember the name at first, but then he does--for Raphael Romero. Nana then walks to frame left, the camera tracking with her, asks a fellow employee about it, and comes back, the camera tracking her again. She is so beautiful, here, you know something bad will happen to her. For all his radical dimensions, Godard was a Traditionalist in so many ways. He was a Punisher.

40: Forty minutes:

Nana writing her letter, moving in to prostitution: "Dear Madam: A friend who worked for you gave me your address. I would like to come and work for you. I think I am pretty." The scene famously lingers, in long stretches of real-time, over Nana's literal writing of the letter. There is no Hollywood compression of time, no invisible editing in the service of narrative momentum. Commodifying herself in the letter, as in the movie. Nana's decision to transgress the social code results not in her liberation, but in her death. She's not even a martyr, really, just a piece of meat used and shot dead at the end. 

70: And, at seventy minutes:

Nana's long discussion with the linguistic philosopher Brice Parain (who had been a teacher of Godard's) played by himself. His book Researches into the Nature and Function of Language had been published twenty years earlier, in 1942. He was of a different generation, shaped by the cruelties of Total War. "We haven't yet the means to live without speaking," he says at one point. And Godard's films are full of startling passages of speaking, as well as silence. It's as if Nana is trying to puzzle her way out of the dark maze she finds herself in by conversing with Parain. His words are wise, almost prophetic, but distant, too. Of little real help to Nana. He is another man she meets on her journey to her pointless death on the cold street at the end of the film                                                                       The filmmaker Alejandro Adams (whose work I highly recommend) has written to me that 10 / 40 / 70 "is a mode of analysis which was inspired by having access to certain tools.  Your latest post demonstrates just how much of the playful rigor of your analysis depends on those tools.  With the latest post you implicitly deconstruct your own process." (He was referring to the Watchmen post, which was up briefly, before I took it down.) In one sense, all writing today is meta-writing. The interface, as Lev Manovich and others have suggested, is now separable from content. The resulting alienation demands a response, of which playful rigor, dear readers, most of whose names are unknown to me, is one.

Comments

[Dan North]

I really liked your idea of analysing pre-selected frames from key films, so I thought I'd try it myself (Catherine Grant at Film Studies for Free put me onto the link). Instead of the 10/40/70 approach, I used a random number generator to give me the three frames. I think I got lucky this time. I can imagine scenarios where the three frames might be really difficult to write about, but that's also the fun of it, as I'm sure you've noticed. I may try it a couple more times before I make my students have a go. Here's my first attempt:

http://drnorth.wordpress.com/2009/03/16/jaws-randomised/

[Nick]

Dan,

Great post over at your site--I left a comment over there. I'm trying 10 / 40 / 70 as one of the options for a film class assignment this semester....we'll see how it goes.