“Impersonal” Narrative: Fade to Lack—Detachment and Discontinuity

Abstract

Jean-Luc Godard’s film, Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live, 1962) paints a resolutely gloomy portrait of female wanderer Nana Kleinfrankenheim’s meanderings through Paris and her downward spiral to homelessness, police arrest, and eventually prostitution. Despite the fodder for in-depth, psychological character development that such a downtrodden tale could inspire—take Zola’s nineteenth-century eponymous courtesan and Nana’s presumed namesake, for example—Godard’s film remains resolutely distanced from the wandering woman and her story, offering a hint of freedom, if only at the level of narration, for this wandering woman so seemingly enslaved to her destitute state.

Never conclude, never impose a unique vision: the narrator is but one speaker.

—Marguerite Duras ¹