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Nov 20, 2008 3:07 PM CST |
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If Jean-Luc Godard has a sleepless night, he could well amuse himself by surfing the net to find his most recent film, Notre Musique, in the midst of the American consumerist rating system which otherwise passes for film criticism. So, for example, he might take joy in the fact that Entertainment Weekly gave Notre Musique a B+ while the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review gave it only two stars out of four. Then, a lot of mainstream press didn’t bother to either see it or write about it altogether. Notre Musique is not the greatest film ever by Jean-Luc Godard. But then who cares? I doubt that Godard himself does. What it is is a film that is never less than interesting. Godard is also one of the few filmmakers left who works so quickly, cheaply, and improvisationally that he can afford to have some fun. And how many films today—good or bad—demonstrate any kind of joy in their making? More often, films today are tortured experiences brought to a conclusion by the sheer obstinacy, egotism, or megalomania of the filmmaker. Godard structures Notre Musique in three parts: hell, purgatory, and paradise. And why not? It worked for Dante – why not for Godard? In his later years—he is now 75—Godard has proven himself to be a genius of film editing. This is clearest in his astonishing ten-hour labor of love, History of Cinema, and it is evident in the ten-minute non-narrative opening sequence of Notre Musique. Godard cuts between images of war, scenes from well-known films, the Bosnian war, the Native American genocide. This is more than a stylistic exercise: it is our music—the rhythm and melody of the images which define our contemporary world through the horrors of history that we have wrought. Godard begins the section “Purgatory” with the intertitle: “Do You Remember Sarajevo?,” as Godard then appears on the screen, playing himself, as a director who has come to present-day Sarajevo to talk to university students about texts and image. In Sarajevo, Godard crosses paths with two women: Judith, an Israeli journalist, and Olga, a Russian Jew. As Judith interviews a Palestinian writer and visits the reconstructed Mostar bridge, Olga dreams of martyrdom. The literary conference includes a cast of characters playing themselves—Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo, French diplomat Jean-Christophe Bouvet. But the “center” of the film—its purgatory—is the city of Sarajevo. The city frames twentieth century-history. It is the starting point of the Great War and the ending point of twentieth century genocide. Godard uses this setting to poke into the illusory balloons which blur what really happens on our world-watch. He uses images and maxims that are meant to provoke and unsettle us. Darwish, the Palestinian poet, says that Palestinians are famous only because Israel is their enemy. “The interest is you, not us,” he tells Judith, the Israeli journalist. “You’ve brought us defeat and renown.” What Godard is trying to get at is the representation of victims. Who are perceived as the victims in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict? Palestine or Israel? Truth has two faces. Godard shows two images: a color sequence said to be Jews arriving at their homeland, a black and white sequence said to be Palestinians drowning in the same waters. But the shot turns out to be the very same shot, only the second time, the image is flipped and it is shown in reverse. Images can lie. A taxi-driver movingly underscores the insanity of aggression that marked the Balkan conflict: “Killing a man to defend an idea isn’t defending an idea,” he says. “It’s killing a man.” Godard at one point shows the students a photo of bombed out buildings and asks them to identify the location. Berlin? Stalingrad? Sarajevo? No. The photos are from Richmond, Virginia, during the Civil War. No matter what the cause or conflict, the end result is always the same. What’s the sense of all this? In his astonishing, almost fifty-year film career, Godard has been the rare filmmaker who drastically shifted interests and style. From his first experiments with narrative forms like Breathless or Pierrot le Fou to the political engagement of Weekend and La Chinoise to agitprop in Wind from the East and the more reflective Godard of Nouvelle Vague or In Praise of Love, today we have Godard as something more than a filmmaker: as an essayist, an intellectual, a philosopher, a witness to his time, a provocateur. The man is difficult but smart. In Notre Musique he is not content to lecture. He questions the nature of his own medium—film—and its capacity for truth, even as blood soaks the earth in our Sarajevos, Palestines, Rwandas, Darfurs, Bagdads. Godard is never sentimental, but certainly capable of sentiment. The end of Notre Musique finds him in his Swiss garden with beautiful roses. But even here the music is interrupted when the phone suddenly rings. This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview. Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia.
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