Jan Baetens

MY LIFE TO LIVE

3

 

Likewise, Jean-Luc Godard doesn’t differentiate between his activity as a critic (in the Fifties, at Cahiers du Cinéma) and his film directing. The composition of My Life to Live, however, is the opposite of a discourse articulated as we expect critical discourse to be. There are twelve appearances by Nana, twelve analects a little in the manner of The Flowers of St. Francis11, where the editing is reduced to a minimum. On this point, I think the book has remained faithful to the film's composition. But I wouldn't want to look like I'm locking the latter up in some exclusive sort of discourse. We're nowhere near a state of balance. For example, if the hagiographical temptation is very much in evidence, notably in a long extract from Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc, the credits express otherwise a dedication to B-movies. The book, meanwhile, happily acknowledges the transcendence of the cinematic work, while clearly expressing, in its secular immanence, a preference for images of a small-time Nana.

 

In the manner of Borges, Jan Baetens proposes in his text-program, in addition, changing perspective for a moment, so the film might be considered a brilliant adaptation of the book12. In this mirror, the project's poetic dimension is obvious. Nana's very name forms, along with its interpretation, a little treatise on versification. And it could be argued that the advertising that appeared in newspapers when the film was launched did too; the trivial poetry on display there seems to me to represent, with tenderness and humor, the "humanist" project of the book.

 

A

Film

On

Prostitution

That

Tells

How

A

Young

And

Pretty

Parisian

Salesgirl

Gives

Away

Her

Body

But

Preserves

Her

Soul

While

She

Has

A

Series

Of

Unreal

Adventures

That

Teach

Her

About

All

Possible

Profound

Human

Feelings

And

That

Were

Filmed

By

Jean-Luc

Godard

And

Performed

By

Anna

Karina

 

My

Life

To Live13

 

What are we to make of the back-and-forth between the film and the book? In the end, perhaps, this: the images and the words are by no means rivals; rather, they control the visible world together. From which it follows that it wouldn't be of any use to try to transpose one into the other. And so, in the film, the number of words that are written, read out loud, posted, and postered is impressive. Words are so preponderant sometimes that the characters are filmed from the back, so as not to distract from hearing them14 . By fairly exchanging things, the words and images develop no mutual hostility; quite the contrary, they know how to borrow colors, movement, hesitations, and excess from one another, their themes are reciprocal, crosswise, juxtaposed, or overlapping. We can base our judgment on evidence in the first poem of Section X:

 

a Kleenex stained red

by lips a quick kiss

before after a white kiss

a white Kleenex then afterwards

the lip naively played

 

(   )

 

sulking a true kiss

one handkerchief too many

a Kleenex stained red

behind the plate glass the hand

the brokedown armoire the lip

 

(   )

 

a cigarette and following it

ash around silver

something set in rose gold

the favorite color of the cheeks

a Kleenex stained red

 

What the images and the words express when they sing their love of the everyday is resistance to logical and narrative rationalism, the body of thought into which we're generally tempted to fold them. The philosopher who plays himself in the film is certainly right to say that we betray words as much as they betray thought. Words have their own life, which we limit by our laziness and slow motion. And they gladly get lost at our expense. In this fool's game, the images stand out because reality serves as their handrail. They imprint the reality of their fiction on our picture of the world, they show us how to see their way of seeing things.

 

Words, images, give us this day our daily bread!

 

                                                                                                           Sémir Badir

 

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