Jean Luc Godard’s muse dances like somebody is watching. Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie consists of twelve chapters chronicling the life of a young woman in Paris, starring his wife and muse Anna Karina. At the beginning of the film, Nana leaves her husband and son to pursue acting. She turns to prostitution in order to support herself financially, entering employment under Raoul, her friend’s pimp. Nana later begins a relationship with a young man and decides to leave sex work. In the final chapter, she is killed in the crossfire of a disastrous trade where Raoul uses her as a human shield. A scene in the ninth chapter encapsulates the dynamic of Nana’s relationship to the world, particularly to men. Raoul promises to take Nana to a film on her day off but takes her to a business meeting instead. After failing to secure undivided attention from Raoul, his colleague, or the young man playing billiards, Nana plays a jazzy song on the jukebox and begins to dance. In this moment, she asserts a crucial sense of agency by dancing around the room in spite of being continuously ignored. In spite of her ecstasy, an unignorable tension creeps into the scene: she cannot stop herself from checking if the men are watching her. The mise-en-scene paired with the camerawork, namely the focus on empty spaces and the absence of close ups, expresses Godard’s reductive imagining of the life of a female muse. Nevertheless, Nana continues to perform, and though somewhat restrained by the potential gaze of her male audience, she reasserts her agency and undermines Godard’s directorial authority.

The mise-en-scene draws the eye to emptiness. Unoccupied wooden chairs line the perimeter of the room behind Nana as she dances. This is a space made to be occupied, complete with plenty of seating, a jukebox, and two French billiard tables, and yet Nana dances alone, ignored. This is not the first time in the film Godard takes special interest in empty spaces. The return of the motif in this scene suggests that this is how he sees Nana’s life; it is not entirely empty, but nowhere near capacity, and the few people present are men who only interact with her on their terms. According to Godard’s camera, the life of a muse is only full, only exciting when she is actively desired. Godard makes his wife into a symbol, and Nana into a vapid doll-like prostitute. In this imagining, the embodied muse can only be beautiful, empty, and eroticized. When Nana is not shown attention, all she can do is wait and entertain herself in the meantime. She is initially bored but comes to see an empty room as an opportunity; she sees a space begging for her to fill it with life. In spite of all the emptiness, the camera still follows Nana as she dances, and her energy is more than enough to fill the frame. This is Nana’s retaliation.

The blankness of the room extends to the walls with the exception of a few signs addressed to the billiard players, match charts, and scoreboards. The numbers in the background recall a moment in Chapter 6 where Nana first expresses her ideas on agency, against the backdrop of a scoreboard in a cafe. She then meets Raoul and catches a glimpse of a tally chart in his notebook counting the number of clients his girls have seen. The numbers possess a more ominous presence in this scene than in Chapter 6, as they have gone from being her future, to her present reality by Chapter 9. Godard’s camera sees the muse the same way Raoul sees Nana; she is part of a system, a pawn in a larger game of profits. However, Nana resists their attempt to minimize her. The numbers are stagnant on the empty walls while she twirls, shimmies, kicks up her legs, and throws her head back in delight, emancipating herself from the constraint these numbers have come to represent in her life. She persistently affirms her freedom and responsibility to move and to live, not as a number, or as a muse, but as a woman.

Another way Godard tries to enforce his vision of the muse’s vacant life is through a false POV shot. When Nana moves toward Raoul and his colleague, the camera turns around as if to match her point of view and moves slowly and shakily around the corner of the table.  The camera shows an empty wall, an empty chair, and then the irritated expressions of the two men as they look up at Nana and wait for her to leave them alone. The shot then cuts to the other side of the table, now showing Nana again. Upon closer inspection, the camera does not offer a particularly convincing impersonation of Nana; it moves much slower and with much less energy than she does. It becomes apparent that this is actually Godard’s perspective masquerading as Nana’s. Through “Nana’s eyes” he sees nothing but emptiness and indifferent men. In treating this shot as if it were Nana’s perspective, he tricks the uncritical viewer into seeing Nana, and perhaps his very wife, as a beautiful husk. In front of Godard’s camera, Nana is an object of desire and exploitation, Anna Karina, an icon of the French New Wave, and he does not allow either one to be anything more. Yet, in the shot that follows, Nana and Karina herself, sabotage Godard’s efforts to minimize her by continuing to delight in her dancing, asserting both her presence and her liveliness in sharp contrast to the empty space he tried to pass off as her inner life.

In contrast to an earlier scene which features close ups of Nana’s face as she cries while watching The Passion of Joan of Arc, the camera in this dance scene does not get closer than a medium close up shot, enforcing a distance between Nana and the viewer. Considering that close up shots are the cinematic technique designated for revealing the interiority of a character, the fact that the camera does not approach nearer than a medium close up indicates that it does not want to let the viewer in. The camera treats Nana like a wind-up doll, and getting too close would allow the audience to see the mechanisms that make her dance. First Godard uses his authority to “show” the viewer that her gaze is empty, then he does not allow the camera to approach her as if to prevent the viewer from investigating the truth for themselves. Whatever Nana might be thinking or feeling, how much of her joy is genuine or a performance, is kept a secret in an effort to contain her and preserve her image as a muse.

Nana’s body language communicates in place of dialogue. Earlier in the film, Nana philosophizes that she is responsible for every one of her actions, beginning with the example, “I move my hand – I’m responsible.” This scene begins with a shot of Nana’s hands resting on the jukebox. As she begins to twist her hips, the camera tilts up while Nana brings her shoulders and head into the movement. The dance directly references her speech about agency, literally embodying Nana’s philosophy. However, she is not entirely unrestrained even as she asserts her freedom as there is a male audience in the room. Her eyes dart intermittently between the two pimps and the man playing billiards to see if they are watching. She purses her lips, shoots playfully seductive glances, and at one point reaches out to caress the young man’s arm but does not make contact. She wants to be carefree and also have the men see her as such. She cannot completely separate herself from a dependance on male attention, but she rebels by continuing to dance despite their indifference.

The concept of the muse presents itself explicitly in the final chapter, when Nana’s lover, the young man at the billiard table, reads Edgar Allan Poe’s The Oval Portrait. It is not the lover, but Godard who narrates the story of a painter so intent on capturing the perfect image of his wife, that she dies while posing for the portrait. Nana’s dance poses the question whether Godard is doing the same to his wife, so committed to capturing her beauty that he does not take her presence and her individuality into account. It is certainly what he does to Nana in his dismissive portrayal of how the muse occupies herself when no one is looking at her. The barren mise-en-scene draws attention both to what is absent and to what is present, such as the scoreboards and Nana's indifferent male audience. Godard tries to suggest that her life, as well as her gaze, is empty, devoid even of her own individuality, or exclusively occupied by selfish spectators. While Nana asserts her freedom, she is caught between her simultaneous dependance on and attempt to separate from the male gaze. This gaze, belonging to the men in the room and to Godard, constitutes both Nana and Karina’s respective livelihoods but also their burdens. Although Nana meets a sudden and tragic end, she refuses to die without having truly lived first.




Vivre Sa Vie. Directed by Jean Luc Godard. Panthéon Distribution. 1962.