Our Music

There are movies to help you relax on a Saturday night and there are movies that stimulate, even if that means asking questions that have no answers. I didn't understand this movie but I still felt stimulated by its questions. I tried so hard to make the connections and I had a lot of trouble. But you don't read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man once without discussing it and expect to understand it. Nor is the more accessible Three Colors Trilogy meant to be seen only once for complete understanding. The quality of a movie is not determined by its accessibility. It's a limited understanding of the medium to judge film by its accessibility. It can be more than an easy way to relax. It can be the impetus to dialogue. I cared about this movie because I didn't understand it.

It is sometimes hard for creative and well meaning filmmakers to accept the fact that their political and philosophical understanding of the world might not be as rounded as their movie making skills. Godard shows in this excruciating film that he clearly falls into this category of filmmakers. 'Notre Musique' is well intentioned, for sure. Godard seeks to obfuscate the lines between reality and drama, the sensible and the absurd (heaven guarded by US marines). In doing so, however, the film becomes Godard's 'international politics explained' more than an engaging piece of cinema. Being a visual medium as it is, cinema needs to add layers of subtlety to what's seen (so that we look beyond that which is seen), in order to be not only an effective messenger but also an exercise in self-exploration. 'Notre Musique' is a blaring loudspeaker with Godard in control of the microphone.

I've just come back from the cinema and it's raining very hard. But there's the sun, too, which is going down behind the mountains. It's very poetic. But not nearly as poetic as Jean Luc Godard's last film, "Notre Musique".

The movie is divided into three kingdoms: 1 - Enfer, 2 - Purgatoire and 3 - Paradis. The first part of the movie consists in a collage of various war images and situations accompanied by a wonderful music. Some very clever sentences are said off screen, too. "Death can be seen in two different ways: as the possible of the impossible or as the impossible of the possible". The second part shows us the crossed stories of some peoples meeting in Sarajevo for the Book Weeks: J. L. Godard himself, a young Israeli Journalist, a Palestinian and a Spanish poets, A young Hebrew girl with Russian origins, a Hebrew translator with Egyptian origins, some American natives, some natives of Sarajevo and other people speak about their experiences, they wishes, war, peace, poetry, history, life, death, cinema, reconciliation. J.L. Godard gives a lecture to some cinema students and shows them photographs. The third part takes place in paradise and shows us a girl who has been killed in a cinema by Israeli snipers who suspected her of being a terrorist ready to kill herself. She had a red bag with her and people thought it contained a bomb. In fact there were just books in it. The girl wanders near a river and encounters an American marine. Some boys are playing and reading books. Paradise is fenced and guarded by U.S. military forces.

This movie is truly amazing. In fact it is not just a film, it is poetry. In moments like these when cinema industry is dominated by fast, brainless, action-packed movies, it is a real pleasure and mind-freeing experience to see something that beautiful and poetic. This was presented this year in Cannes and didn't get much attention if I remember right. A journalist of "Le Nouvel Observateur" who usually gives very good advices, this time got it wrong saying that "Notre Musique" is a senile work. Not at all. It's the work of a director who has only improved with years and who has reached total serenity and great wisdom. This film does not give you ready-made, simple answers to common questions, it gives you some points which are incredibly interesting to develop and think about. Sarajevo is the ideal place where peoples, histories and cultures mix and sometimes sadly clash. When the young girl is asked "Why Sarajevo?" the touching answer she gives is "Because Palestine. I come from Tel Aviv and wanted to see a place where people can get along in harmony". There's so much to think about this movie. And everything is filmed so well, so limpidly, with such a mastery, you can't stop staring at the screen. "Godard is the only film director in the world" (Freddy Buache)

Leave it up to Monsieur Godard to shoot his first film to directly address the Palastineans since Ici et ailleurs in '76 in Sarajevo with a cast that includes US Marines, Native Americans in full traditional regalia, and Godard himself in counter-sermonizing flesh. At least, and this is much more than trivial record keeping, the maestro has found a way to render his digital photography as gorgeous as the celluloid variety for which he is well known. The quality of the video images takes Notre Musique miles beyond the wan DV sections in Éloge de l'amour. This is all the more interesting considering his response, during the film's central writer's conference, to a question concerning whether or not digital cameras can save cinema. Godard stares into his DV lense and says nothing; the question cannot have an answer other than the one to be provided, immanently, vis-a-vis the unwinding of our collective species activity. Godard, as always, is best when he resists the unavailing temptation to answer the questions which constitute him as one of the most compelling artists of the 20th Century. Though his autodidactic flights of fancy may fail to soar as solidly as before, his discourses remain ultimately profound, his metaphors as unstintingly powerful as ever, his plagiarism as unflappable. He has begun to rely again on Borges, which is always good, and there is much less Merleau-Ponty. The only major flaw of the film is the opening section "Hell" (yes, Dante is backstage here folks), in which the montage is more of a groantage, in the manner of a Baraka (God no!) more than anything Eisenstein might recognize as dialectical. "Heaven", however, is wonderful. All Godard does is take the US Marine anthem at its word.

Godard's status as a filmmaker, and an auteur, cannot be challenged. He no longer needs to make a name for himself and is free (within reason) to pursue the projects he likes, and carry them out to his own satisfaction. He also has an enormous and varied body of work 'under his belt', along with the experience that this has brought. And yet, these facts do not seem to have made him complacent. No one could accuse him of 'going commercial', and though the new Godard is 'nicer' than the strident, know-it-all politician of his Maoist period, he can't be accused of slowing down.

This film is a case in point. Within in, one finds so much going on, so many ideas, and at such a pace, that it really needs multiple viewings. At 75 minutes, it flies by. It is hard, therefore, to cover all the issues raised by the film, but I will try to give a summary of my impressions.

The film follows a basic triptych structure named according to the rather Catholic names of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. Parts 1 and 3 act like short wings to the hour-long centrepiece.

In a brutal first 10 minutes, appropriately called 'Hell', one is confronted with a mix of images of war from film and from war footage. Personally, I've always found documentary footage of war, however grainy or poorly shot, much more troubling than the most violent parts of acted film (such as Saving Private Ryan). Is Godard pushing the two together (implying moral responsibility of the filmmaker), or contrasting them through montage? (Suggesting the dual aspects of film-making, which he will emphasise later in the film, when comparing Israelis, who have become a film, to the Palestinians, who have become a documentary.) Like the rest of the film, it is a brilliantly edited tour-de-force of images and ideas.

The second section, Purgatory, consists largely of discussions between writers and journalists drawn to Sarajevo for a literary conference. The number of questions (though not answers) that bubble to the surface in these discussions is astounding. Citations (a Godardian standard) are given new meaning through editing / montage. And many more eminently quotable lines are added by Godard and the other participants, literary figures playing themselves, such as Mahmoud Darwish, whose analysis is original and perceptive, and Juan Goytisolo. This section has a documentary feel, but an artist's aesthetic. The film itself looks superb, demonstrating a real eye for shot composition. This makes his films 'surface' extremely watchable, even before the 'substance' is broached. The substance is tasty too, with a superabundance of wit on parade, not in the sense of trite humour, but real insight, combined with a sober sigh before the unchangeable.

The last 'movement' is of course 'Heaven', which is amusingly guarded by US marines, and looks a little like the less-than-heavenly site in which the end of Godard's 'Weekend' was played out. This playfulness and self-referentiality was typical of the rest of the film also, for example, in the trio of vocal Native Americans reminiscent of characters in 'Sympathy for the Devil'. Where does quotation end and creation begin? Godard's work is full of citation and self-allusion, but due to the (specifically filmic) nature of montage and narrative context, these citations and allusions take on new meanings.

The film is, therefore, certainly elitist, as are so many great films (and novels for that matter). 'Notre Musique' demands a cine-literate viewer, and preferably also familiar with Godard, since there is a lot of meaningful and playful self-referentiality. (One could also argue that someone new to this kind of film-making might be challenged to improve their cine-literacy). More importantly, it demands an alert viewer, because there is potentially much more happening than merely what is on the screen. Godard, in examining filmic space has also created a space between screen and viewer, making him or her an active part of the process of meaning-making.

Certainly, if all films were of this caliber, one would get a sore head thinking them through, but it is important to be enlivened by such a work as this from time to time, just to remember film's artistic and intellectual potential.