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
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© 2013 Mariah Devereux Herbeck
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Herbeck, M.D. (2013). “Impersonal” Narrative: Fade to Lack—Detachment and Discontinuity. In: Wandering Women in French Film and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137339997_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137339997_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-46464-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-33999-7
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