COMMENTS:

From Susan Sontag's article "Godard's Vivre sa vie" (1964):

"The most elaborate, intellectually, of all the texts in the film is the conversation in Episode XI between Nana and a philosopher (played by the philosopher, Brice Parain) in a cafe. They discuss the nature of language. Nana asks why one can't live without words; Parain explains that it is because talking equals thinking, and thinking talking, and there is no life without thought. It is not a question of speaking or not speaking, but of speaking well. Speaking demands an ascetic discipline (une ascèse), detachment. One has to understand, for one thing, that there is no going straight at the truth. One needs error.

Early in the conversation, Parain relates the story of Dumas' Porthos, the man of action, whose first thought killed him. (Running away from a dynamite charge he had planted, Porthos suddenly wondered how one could walk, how anyone ever placed one foot in front of the other. He stopped. The dynamite exploded. He was killed.) There is a sense in which this story, too, like the story of the chicken, is about Nana. And through both the story and the Poe tale told in the next (and last) episode, we are being prepared -- formally, not substantively -- for Nana's death."

[ By Colin Burnett • February 15, 2005 ]