Attention! Anna Karina is coming to New York. She’ll be at BAM tonight to discuss “A Woman Is a Woman,” at Museum of the Moving Image tomorrow to present “Pierrot le Fou” and converse with Molly Haskell (the author of one of the seminal works of modern film criticism, “From Reverence to Rape”), and at Film Forum on Friday to discuss “Band of Outsiders.”
Karina, of course, starred in seven features by Jean-Luc Godard, between 1960 and 1966, and the cinematic inventions of those films, as well as the fashions, styles, and personal bearing of their performers, especially Karina, have proved decisively influential. First, the films liberated the cinema from nostalgia for superseded aesthetics sustained by a hidebound industry. Then, decades later, they nourished a new wave of nostalgia for the very era of radical change that they’d helped to create. Both Karina and Godard have continued to move ahead, but both continue to be celebrated mainly for the work they did together in the nineteen-sixties.
Karina is a special presence in movies—she wasn’t an experienced actress when she started but, rather, a model whom Godard had seen in a soap commercial (not on television but in a movie theatre). Though Godard, with his thoroughgoing devotion to cinematic classics, has praised such sophisticated performers as Ingrid Bergman and Richard Burton, he has also enthused,** **in his critical writings and in interviews, about the people who appeared in documentaries and the non-actors in Jean Rouch’s docu-fictions, who portrayed themselves, or versions of themselves, in stories that they themselves conceived.
Godard’s films certainly are based on characters—for all their supposed avant-gardism, his movies are coherent dramatic (or comic) fictions that chronologically follow the fortunes of characters through clearly discernible and directly emotional actions. The features of the nineteen-sixties that he made with Karina, all of which will be playing at Film Forum May 6-12, turn up now in the modern repertory precisely because, for all their genius, they weren’t all that avant-garde in the first place—they were modernizing and personal transformations of classic cinematic themes and stories so solid and clear as to sustain and unify Godard’s freewheeling inventions.
Yet a mark of Godard’s cinematic genius, and the aspect of it that appears most distinctive and most off-putting to this very day, is his conception of characters and of the performances that realize them. From the start of his directorial career, he took performance as presence and sought not the actors’ continuous and incremental interpretation of characters but the suggestion of characters through emblematic gestures, expressions, and moments—in effect, the transformation of performance into a succession of living masks. Godard has often relied upon highly trained actors (starting with the conservatory graduate Jean-Paul Belmondo) to create such moments, but he has also counted on his own ability to make them happen with non-actors or inexperienced actors who fascinated him.
In effect, what Godard hasn’t cared about at all—not in his films of the nineteen-sixties and not in his later ones—is the Method, the effort of actors to identify with their characters. The psychology that interested him wasn’t that of the characters but of the performers themselves, as in the great scene in the couple’s first collaboration, “Le Petit Soldat,” in which the character played by Michel Subor seems to interview Karina’s character on camera—when, in fact, Godard, perched behind the camera, was peppering Karina with questions, which she answered as herself. (Subor’s voice was later dubbed into the sequence.) Godard composes characters the way that modern artists such as Picasso compose faces, by means of disparate pieces, whether newspaper clippings or fragments of music, a real-estate ad, a shard of pottery, or a perfectly and spontaneously traced line—a series of images, tones, and angles that superimpose over time to create an idea of inner and outer life that’s fuller and richer than mere identifications.
Working with Godard, Karina identified not with characters but with herself, perhaps even more fully on camera than in private life—to create an enduring idea of herself. Karina didn’t become the characters she played; they became her. In this regard, her work with Godard (like that of other actors in his films) is close to the achievement of Joan Crawford, John Wayne, or other Hollywood icons whose limitations and artistry are inseparable. The difference is that Crawford and Wayne came to prominence in an era in which their style of performance was at the core of the industry. By the time Godard and Karina made their first film together, mainstream style had changed, and the Method and its tributaries had come to dominate the movies—and, above all, had influenced the critical sensibilities that defined (as they still do) the notion of good acting.
As a result, Karina—who studied acting in the nineteen-sixties, performed onstage, and went on to enjoy a long and busy career in movies, with roles in films by Luchino Visconti, Jacques Rivette, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Raúl Ruiz, and Jonathan Demme—was marked by the distinctiveness of those early performances, by their difference from all other performances, and she became a living emblem not only of herself but of the French New Wave and of the spirit of the nineteen-sixties over all. It’s a burden too great for any actor, any person, to bear, and Karina has borne it with grace, dignity, and flair. I had the pleasure of interviewing her fifteen years ago, and she spoke to me with insight and love regarding her films with Godard. I expect that the three upcoming discussions will be illuminating and moving alike; her presence here is an occasion to celebrate.
