Background
KARINA, Anna Hanne Karin Bayer was born on September 22, 1940 in Fredriksburg, Solbjerg.
KARINA, Anna Hanne Karin Bayer was born on September 22, 1940 in Fredriksburg, Solbjerg.
Karina had come to Paris in 1955, having made one short in Denmark. She turned down the part in Breathless played by Jean Seberg, but appeared in Godards second feature, Le Petit Soldat (60), and was immediately rhapsodized over by his camera but pushed into betrayal through the force of the film’s suspicions. In the same year she was in Michel Devilles Ce Soir on Jamais. In 1961 she went to England for She’ll Have to Go (61, Robert Asher), appeared in Une Femme est une Femme (Godard), and married its director. They appeared together briefly in the film within Cléo from 5 to 7 (62, Agnès Varda), and then they made Vivre Sa Vie (62).
As the hapless girl in Paris who turns to prostitution, hut who is moved by Falconetti in Dreyer’s Passion cle Jeanne d Arc, who is a hoine-movie Cvd Charisse round the billiard table, and who converses with the philosopher Brice Parain, she is the fragments of Godards ideal but always an actual, diffident, self-sufficient girl. Close-ups of her in that film are made consciously in the tradition of Gish, Falconetti. and Louise Brooks, but there is also that long opening when she sits with her back to the camera and the “documentary” letter-writing sequence. In another episode, Karina and her man read over Edgar Allan Poe’s The Oval Polirait, as if Godard already foresaw the dilemma of the artist who let his beloved perish as lie refined her portrait.
Twice more for Godard, before Pierrot, she was a creature of intense black-and-white romance: as the timid girl in Bande à Pmi (64), and as Natasha von Braun, saint of the Capital of Tears, in Alphaville (65). Between these films she made one episode of Les Quatres Vérités (62); Dragées au Poivre (63, Jacques Baratier); De l'amour (64, Jean Aurel); Le Voleur du Tibidabo (64, Maurice Rouet); and La Ronde (64, Roger Vadim).
Immediately after Pierrot she played Diderot’s novice, Suzanne Simonin, in La Religieuse (66, Jacques Rivette) and worked for Godard, but in a visibly more professional way, in Made in USA (66) and in the episode “Anticipation,” from Le Plus Vieux Métier du Monde (67). She then ventured outside France, mostly in mediocre or overambitious films. In so many ways, she had fought to be free of Godard—yet, without him, she was ordinary. It isn’t the camera that loves an actress, or makes her exceptional. It's the intent behind the camera, the awful hope: Lo Straniero (67, Luchino Visconti); Lamiel (67, Aurel); Before Winter Comes (68, J. Lee Thompson); The Magus (68, Guy Green); Justine (69, George Cukor); Michael Kohlhaas (69, Volker Schlöndorff); Laughter in the Dark (69, Tony Richardson); L’Alliance (70, Christian de Chalonge); excellent in the brooding Rendezvous à Bray (71, André Delvaux); The Salzburg Connection (72, Lee H. Katzin); and Pane e Ciccolata (73, Franco Brusati).
She acted in and directed Vivre Ensemble (74) and appeared in Chinese Roulette (76, Rainer Werner Fassbinder). Since then, she has appeared in Historien om en Moder (79, Claus Weeke); L'Ami de Vincent (83, Pierre Granier- Deferre); Ave Maria (84, Jacques Richard); L ite au Trésor (85, Raul Ruiz); Cayenne-Palace (87, Alain Maline); L'Eté Dernier à Tanger (87, Alexandre Arcady); L'Oeuvre au Noir (88, André Delvaux); and Man, Der Ville Vaere Skyldig (90, Ole Roos).
In recent years, she was in Chloé (94, Dennis Berry); Up, Down, Fragile (95, Rivette); The Truth About Charlie (02. Jonathan Demme). And a pop singer!
When Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina separated, it marked Godard’s abandonment of the heritage of commercial, and especially American, cinema. Within that heritage, the idea of a relationship between a director and an actress that becomes virtually the subject of their films was often illustrated, but never as trenchantly worked out as it was between Godard and his wife. Griffith and Lillian Gish always spoke with Victorian respect for one another; parted, von Sternberg and Dietrich still shimmered in the ambiguous glow' of their films at Paramount.
The closest ancestor to the mutual despair in Pierrot le Fou is Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai, made when he and Rita Hayworth were already separated, but with the couple held together by the revelation of incompatibility. The personal confession at the end of that film is mordant and harsh, but it is only a single film into which the entire sequence of meeting, enchantment, struggle, and alienation is compressed. With Godard and Karina, the story was drawn out over seven full-length films. And because Godard is so intellectual an artist—classifying his own responses but not always feeling them—his work with Karina is the peak of his art, where he attains a glimpse of emotion that illuminates its omission in the rest of his films. Throughout Pierrot le Fou, Belmondo represents Godard, forever discussing and writing about art and emotion, but Karina is the feminine movie sensibility, a photographed woman who turns the spectator’s heart with the speed ol the projector. Her silence withers the desperate words of Ferdinand/Pierrot; her staring into the camera transfixes Godard behind it. Pierrot le Fou is Karinas masterpiece as well as Godard’s. It shows how far a former model had progressed in six years, and proves how intense an impression a girl can make if she knows how to be filmed, if she divines how far the camera exploits her and yet still consents to it without mannerism, irritation, or prudishness. There is not a fuller picture of a woman in movies: beautiful and ugly; spontaneous but brooding; tender but arbitrary; reflective and instinctive; turning capriciousness into an assertion of transience that astounds Ferdinand’s fixed commentaries on her:
FERDINAND (off): What’s the matter, Marianne?
MARIANNE: I'm fed up! I'm fed up with the sea, with the sun, with the sand, tinned food, everything! . . . I’m fed up with wearing the same dress every day! ... I want to get away from here! ... I want to live!
FERDINAND (off): What do you want me to do?
MARIANNE; I don’t know, I want just to go. Anyway, I’ve thrown away the money we had to keep us for the winter.
FERDINAND (off): Where did you throw it? MARIANNE: Into the sea, you idiot! The film is caught in an anguished mixture of rapture and incomprehension at the cinematic beauty of Karina in the south in the sun: standing on a balcony experimenting with scissors; weaving through the trees singing about her luck; Girl Friday to her melancholy lover Crusoe; tucking a rifle butt into her breast: King on a beach at evening; or, finally, wreathed in red. There is a magnificent passage in which Ferdinand admits to the camera his inability to treat this nymph as real, even though he suffers from the effects she has on his
imagination. This moment is like the last room in the Museum ol Romantic Cinema:
FERDINAND: Perhaps I am dreaming even though I am awake. . . . Her face makes me think of music. We have entered the age of the Double-Man. One no longer needs a mirror to speak to oneself. When Marianne says “It is a fine day ” what is she really thinking? I have only this image of her, saying “It is a fine day.” Nothing else. What is gained by trying to explain this? We are made of dreams . . . and dreams are made of us. ... It is a fine day, my love, in dreams, in words, and in death. It is a fine day, my love. ... It is a fine day ... in life.
Married 1st Jean-Luc Godard (divorced). Married 2nd Pierre-Antoine Fabre in 1968 (divorced). Married 3rd Daniel Georges Duval in 1978.