58 Years of My Life to Live
On August 28, 1962, as part of the Venice Film Festival, the premiere of Jean-Luc Godard's film "Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux (My Life to Live)" was held.
The year before, Godard and starring Anna Karina had already experienced a triumph at the Berlin Film Festival, each receiving a major prize for the film "Une femme est une femme (Woman is Woman)". And in Venice, respectively, they arrived as favorites. But their repeated triumph was prevented by Andrei Tarkovsky with his film "Ivan Childhood", which received the Golden Lion. However, Godard’s film was not left without an award: he was awarded the Special Jury Prize and the Pasinetti Prize.
The phrase is attributed to Alfred Hitchcock: "To make a great film, three things are needed - a script, a script and again a script." Jean-Luc Godard, one might say, with his film "Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux (My Life to Live)" actually refuted Hitchcock's statement: there was practically no script. Rather, it was something like a table of contents that took up less than one page of text. And it was published under the title "Where is prostitution?" a study of modern prostitution by investigator Marcel Sacotte. All the dialogues were invented by the actors themselves, based on the tasks set by the director.
The film was shot in just 4 weeks. Costs amounted to 40 thousand US dollars, which is equivalent to the current 343 thousand dollars. Frankly speaking, a penny in comparison with current budgets. True, the film brought small fees. We do not have data on total fees, but in North America, the film raised only 24.5 thousand dollars.
But the film got an enthusiastic reception from film critics, as evidenced by the 90% overall rating of professional reviews made by Rotten Tomatoes. True, Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, the newspaper that expresses the views of the United States Democratic Party, confirmed his reputation as a grouch and a bore, writing in his review, full of malice and barbs: "JEAN-LUC Godard, who made "Breathless," that sordid French film in which he got across a curious, offbeat comprehension of the degradation of a young Parisian punk, is at it again, only more so, in his new film, "My Life to Live" ("Vivre Sa Vie"), which opened at the Paris yesterday....The simplest way to describe it is as a simulated documentary film, recounting in episodic sections the decline and fall of a pretty, shallow girl....Mr. Godard is a bold experimenter, but it's time he picked himself a stronger theme."
But our esteemed Roger Ebert, who gave the film 4 stars out of 4 possible and included it in his list of "Great Movies", in 2001 wrote sadly about this picture: "...And now the name Godard inspires a blank face from most filmgoers. Subtitled films are out. Art films are out. Self-conscious films are out. Films that test the edges of the cinema are out. Now it is all about the mass audience: It must be congratulated for its narrow tastes, and catered to....This is a great movie, and I am not surprised to find Susan Sontag describing it as "one of the most extraordinary, beautiful, and original works of art that I know of."
The modern cinema audience highly appreciated this film by Godard: 70% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users gave the film ratings of 8 or higher.According to FilmGourmand, the film "Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux (My Life to Live)" has a rating of 8.563 and is ranked 294th in the Golden Thousand.
