The second tableau or chapter of Godard's Vivre Sa Vie consists of a single very complex shot. It opens on a counter in a record shop where the film's lead character, played by Anna Karina, works. She is servicing a customer, checking to see for him whether the shop has albums by various artists in stock.
At one point she has to move to some bins on a lower level of the shop and the camera pans and tracks with her as she does. In the course of this she chats with two of her co-workers, asking about another employee who's absent from work and who owes her money.
She finds the record the customer wants and returns to the counter as the camera pans and tracks back to the original shot and then tracks along further in the same direction to the cash register, where the transaction is completed by the cashier. The camera tracks and pans back the other way, losing Karina, revealing now a shop window across the street. Continuing to track and pan the camera comes to rest on a view of a busy Paris street seen through the doorway of the record shop.
The whole scene gives us a vivid image of the character's boring work life, her position of deferential service to the customers — a man in this case — as well as a vision of her as someone entirely boxed in by a world of commerce. The camera, panning and tracking, gives us something close to a 360-degree view from her work station, in a single shot. The presence of merchandise and commercial activity wherever the camera looks makes a social statement about the world she inhabits, but the unbroken continuity of the single shot makes us feel it as an oppressive reality.
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