Anna Karina

Anna Karina, who died Saturday, was the most recognizable face of the French New Wave, thanks to the roles given her by Jean-Luc Godard. (He wanted her to do a nude scene in Breathless, but she refused. "But I just saw you in a bathtub in a commercial," he argued. She wasn't nude, she countered, but covered in soap suds.) The lilt of those films, their youthful - if overweening - insouciance, their anarchic air of flaunting convention, is inimitable and by now a fixture of film history. Godard may not have been a master of his craft, but he was determined to demonstrate to everyone his contempt for official cinema. Karina's mad dash through the Louvre in Band of Outsiders with Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur is as iconic - if not nearly as moving or meaningful, because the film wasn't nearly as good - as Jeanne Moreau's run, wearing men's clothes, across a footbridge in Truffaut's Jules and Jim (it helped that both films were shot by Raoul Coutard, unarguably an artist).

Like Hanna Schygulla, who held a similar position in relation to Fassbinder, Karina broke free of Godard's control and enjoyed a career of her own - more lucratively, if far less critically acclaimed. (It wasn't a contest, but the argument over Godard's relative importance was laid to rest long ago. Truffaut won.) Funny how auteurists even now try to downplay her performance in Visconti's beautiful adaptation of Camus's The Stranger, simply because their dogma won't allow them to recognize the film's excellence. (It's so unlike every other Visconti film - which is probably why I love it.) Her performance, as Meursault's unfortunate girlfriend, was touching.

But she is being extolled, yesterday and today, for Pierrot le fou, Masculin Feminin and Alphaville, films as redolent of their time as Sonny Rollins's first recordings. It seems to me intensely sad that lately the only time people want to argue about the meaning of the word "cinema" is when a venerable filmmaker dares to question the validity of trashy superhero movies. (What made it far worse was when he explained what he meant to the halfwits who worship at the Marvel - or Disney's Star Wars - altar.) As long as people who take the subject seriously want to explore what real cinema is, they will find out soon enough how integral a part Anna Karina played in cinema's greatest decade, which was actually only about seven years, 1959-1966. I am sorry that the flesh and blood woman has passed, but her image, her lovely face and form, are as immortal as Garbo's, Monica Vitti's, and Setsuko Hara's. Vivre Karina. (Vivre cinema.)