Dissecting Vivre sa vie (film en douze tableaux, 1962) is like attempting to perform an autopsy on a ghost with a scalpel made of light. The operation is doomed to fail in its claim to objectivity, but the process itself reveals the spectral and at the same time hyper-real nature of Jean-Luc Godard's cinematic creature. It is not a film, it is a filmed essay; it is not a story, it is a polyptych portrait, a Byzantine icon whose sanctity is profaned and, precisely for this reason, affirmed. Twelve scenes, twelve stations of a secular Way of the Cross, where Nana Kleinfrankenheim (Anna Karina, whose very existence seems to depend on the camera) does not ascend to heaven, but descends into the most earthly of professions.

Godard, in his golden age of almost incomprehensible creative fury (seven feature films in three years), abandons the semi-linear narrative of Le Petit Soldat and the deconstruction of genre in Breathless to embrace a form that is both essayistic and novelistic. The influence is clearly literary, but it is not that of the 19th-century psychological novel. While the descent into hell of a young woman driven into prostitution by economic necessity echoes Zola or Balzac, Godard's approach is diametrically opposed. Where the naturalists accumulated details to create an illusion of reality, Godard fragments, abstracts, and creates distance. It is the triumph of Bertolt Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt, a theater of cruelty applied to cinema where every element—from the explanatory, almost didactic chapter titles to the sometimes flat acting, to the editing jumps and breaks in the fourth wall—serves to remind us that we are watching a construction, an artifact. We are denied emotional catharsis in order to force us into intellectual analysis. We must not feel for Nana, we must think about Nana.

The film is, first and foremost, an ontological treatise on the face of Anna Karina. Godard, her husband at the time, films her with a mixture of iconographer's devotion and entomologist's coldness. Raoul Coutard's camera, a mobile and curious eye, scrutinizes her, surrounds her, adores her, and nails her down. Karina's face, with that black bob that would become the symbol of an entire era and an entire cinema, becomes a surface onto which our interpretations, the desires of the men who buy her, and Godard's own thesis are projected. It is a face that, like Garbo's, “does not need to show thoughts to signify thought.” The high point, the exegetical heart of the entire work, is the famous cinema sequence. Nana, alone, watches Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc. Godard alternates close-ups of Renée Falconetti on screen with those of Anna Karina in the audience. In that alternating montage, a meta-textual miracle takes place. Nana mirrors herself in Joan's martyrdom, the viewer identifies with the saint, the actress (Karina) confronts an icon of silent cinema (Falconetti), and we viewers observe this triple game of mirrors. Are Nana's tears real? Are they Karina's? Or are they simply the sign required by the director? At that moment, cinema ceases to be narration and becomes pure reflection on itself: on its ability to create and destroy icons, on the nature of performance, and on the condition of the viewer. Female suffering becomes a cinematic lineage, transmitted from one face to another.

But Godard does not stop at the surface, however beautifully lit. In one of the most daring and anti-cinematic scenes imaginable, Nana talks to philosopher Brice Parain (playing himself) about language, truth, and thought. It is a moment that would make any Hollywood producer run for the hills, a block of almost indigestible philosophical text forced into the body of the film. Yet it is the keystone. Nana struggles to express a feeling, an inner truth, but words betray her. “Thinking is one thing, speaking is another,” the philosopher explains to her. This split between her inner world and its external expression is Nana's tragedy. Forced to sell her body, her exterior, she gradually loses touch with her soul, which remains inarticulate, unexpressed. Prostitution is not only an economic condition, but a metaphor for the existential condition of human beings in the age of technical reproducibility: the impossibility of making being coincide with appearance.

Godard's style is a systematic assault on conventions. The opening scene in the café, with the two protagonists filmed almost always from behind as they decide to break up, is a declaration of intent. Godard denies us access to traditional emotionality (close-ups, glances), forcing us to focus on the almost surreal banality of their words. The sound is direct, raw, full of ambient noise, anticipating the work of directors such as Robert Altman by decades. The documentary approach with which the prostitute's “typical day” is described—rates, rules, risks—has the coldness of an instruction manual, which makes it all the more chilling. Yet, amid this rigorous intellectual dissection, moments of pure, unexpected grace explode. The scene in which Nana, in a billiard room, performs a spontaneous and joyful dance to the rhythm of a jukebox is a breath of fresh air, a flash of freedom reminiscent of the anarchic vitality of Bande à part. It is Godard the cinephile, the lover of Hollywood, who for a moment takes precedence over Godard the Marxist philosopher. This stylistic shift is not a weakness, but the very mark of his genius: the ability to hold together the highest intellectual speculation and the purest kinetic pleasure.

Perhaps the most fitting parallel is not with other films, but with the work of Robert Bresson, in particular with his concept of the “model” as opposed to the “actor.” As in Pickpocket or Diary of a Country Priest, here too there is an almost fetishistic attention to gestures, a stripping away of psychological excess, a search for truth through artifice and surface. Nana is not so much a person as a function within a system (economic, social, cinematographic). Her final death, brutal, clumsy, and almost accidental, filmed with the same detachment with which one films a car accident, is the logical, terrible conclusion of this process. There is no drama, no catharsis, just a body falling to the ground, an object no longer useful. The pimp says, “I paid her back,” and the film ends. It is the reduction of human life to an economic transaction, the final and ruthless commentary on Godard's essay.

Vivre Sa Vie is a watershed work. It is the point at which the Nouvelle Vague ceases to be just a stylistic revolution and becomes a way of thinking. It is a film that, just as the Cubists broke down the object to show it from multiple angles at once, breaks down a woman's soul and the language of cinema to reveal its complex, painful architecture. It is a film that offers itself and denies itself, inviting us to watch and then accusing us of voyeurism. It is the portrait of a woman who wanted to “live her life” but was trapped in a film, a prisoner of the gaze of a director-demiurge and of us, the viewers, her silent accomplices. A cold, poignant, and absolutely necessary masterpiece.