Our Music

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.

"Notre Musique" could be either a late night college bull session or one of those Monty Python skits where historical warmongers sit around rationally comparing their various atrocities with a coolly objective BBC moderator.

Maybe it's a French intellectual's reality show pitch: we'll set up a dialog between a Jew and a Palestinian at a literary meeting in bombed-out Sarajevo as observed by living ghost Native Americans after bombarding them with images of war and genocide through 19th and 20th century history.

Amidst this trumped-up pretentiousness, Godard the filmmaker does make some good points about war and memory. While the historical images, both from fiction and journalism, are colorized to contemporize them, one easily concedes, yeah, war is hell and hey didn't "Saving Private Ryan" prove that to us, when Godard cannily trumps that thought by discussing how war in fiction - from legend and poetry to movies -- touches people more than the reality.

Then just as you're about to protest, hey, you're showing all these war images without their raison d'etre, Godard springs into a profound verbal and visual illustration of the importance of context, leading to an appreciation of how history is written by the victors. The points about the impact on Western psyche of the Trojans from Homer's perspective were more insightful than all of the "Troy" movie.

However, those debaters that are translated in the subtitles talk in didactic epigrams that will make more sense when one can rewind the DVD for reflection (including the explanation of the title). The French intellectual smug superiority gets annoying -- we don't see any images of WW II collaborators vs. Resistance fighters, let alone colonial legacy issues in Algeria or Muslims in France today.

While I'm not sure if the images of discarded books amidst the ruins of war were about the hopelessness of literature and the arts or its unquenchable survival as some are salvaged, Godard has an intellectual's faith in the power of dialog (and cigarette smoking), though pessimistic about the ability of the media to communicate it effectively, as he sets up an overly freighted discussion between an idealistic and ambitious young Israeli woman of Russian descent, whose grandparents were saved from the Holocaust by a Righteous Gentile, and an articulate Palestinian writer, as translated by another Wandering French/Israeli Jew.

I think he was also trying to incorporate suicide bombers into the trajectory of French intellectual thought from Durkheim to Camus that sees it as an existential act of protest against anomie, but well, Jean Luc, we can't all be French.

Typical for a Godard film, the woman to my right gushed that it was her second screening and it was her favorite of his films, and the woman on my left said she couldn't figure out what it was about.

I first saw Notre Musique at the NY film festival, and responded to it strongly because it was, after going through a slew of his more recent work of the 80s and 90s (often hit or miss, more miss), a very well structured, interesting picture with a very distinct look and feel that balanced the elegiac and darkness with some light. Watching it again, I'm still fascinated most by the first segment 'Hell'. If this was just a stand-alone short film, I would rank it among some of Godard's best work from the 60s. It's brash, it's seemingly unending, the narration actually does fit the images on screen (which, from my perspective, is what ends up usually irking me with some of Godard's later work when he does this), and all of these images of civilization decaying through war and other disasters, and the machinery and technology used for all of this death and horror, really works to a great effect.

Purgatory, the second segment, is often quite good, as it's a really well-balanced mix of fiction and documentary as real life writers and professors and journalists go through issues like Sarajevo, troubles in the middle east, and cinema itself as Godard humorously and sometimes somberly goes through a lecture to some students as he's part of the setting. There's even a perfectly understated, interested performance by the lead Sarah Adler. When the film then transforms into the last act, Paradise, it kind of starts to break some of the power and interest in the previous sections of the film (I didn't really connect with much of the symbolism, as beautifully photographed as it all was). But what ends up really impressing me most about Notre Musique is that I really could understand most, if not all, of what many of these long stretches of dialog were about- unlike in some past, notoriously messy films by the director- and it worked without Godard's way of filming subjects and locations. Julien Hirsch's cinematography, going through the director's vision, is often so striking I'd say it's some of the best that was done in 2004 anywhere.

There's still some kind of documentarian's spirit at heart, and it really does work best in the conversations that go on in the film, as lots of subject matter gets covered. This mixed with a partially fictionalized story helps to make something pretty special, if not really sensational, and in its 80 minute running time nothing overstays its welcome. If anything, the film is almost too short by a few minutes. It's a mix of history, politics, poetry, cinema, and the meanings of life and death, and not often does it come off pretentious.

When you go on holiday, do you ever say, "Oh Look! Look at that"? How does sharing it make it different for us? How is the experience lessened when we don't have another person there?

A scientist measures position and momentum of a particle, but no matter how accurate the measurements, there is always an uncertainty in the results. This Nobel Prize theory is known as 'Heisenberg's uncertainty principle' and has profound implications for physics and philosophy. (At the atomic and sub-atomic level, an act of observation noticeably affects what is being observed.)

Godard mentions Heisenberg through one of his (Heisenberg's) anecdotes. Godard's main interest is funnelled through the cinematic device of shot/reverse angle shot. He examines how it can enlarge understanding of deeper issues. In Notre Musique, Godard is protagonist not for political ideology or social comment. He is flag-bearer. For film. For poetry. For film-as-poetry. Like Maya Deren in her copious writings on cinematic theory, he shoulders the burden of artist-filmmaker with all seriousness, proffering a new language. A different way to view the world. He becomes the lens. We make it our camera.

"Heisenberg and Bohr," he says, "were walking in the Danish countryside, talking about physics. They come to Elsinore Castle. The German scientist said, 'Oh, there's nothing special about this castle.' The Danish physicist said, 'Yes, but if you say, "Hamlet's Castle," then it becomes special.'

Godard stars as himself in this mix of documentary, fiction and montage. He is speaking about on text and image, at the European Literary Encounters Conference in Bosnia. In the Heisenberg story, 'Hamlet's Castle' becomes a literary 'shot/reverse shot.' Godard concerns us with the power of romanticism. His takes on Israeli-Palestinian conflict are refreshingly non-judgemental. Notre Musique calls for a revolution of creative force, "that reinforces memory, clarifies dreams and gives substance to images." Continuing his discourse on the power of the 'real' and the 'poetic,' Godard explains how, "the Jews become the stuff of fiction: the Palestinians, of documentary." (Look at the cinematic output of both, and how Palestinians are defined largely in relation to Israel.)

One storyline concerns two young girls visiting Sarajevo – a place 'where reconciliation seems possible.' Judith is an Israeli journalist. She interviews, among others, Palestinian intellectual and celebrated poet, Mahmoud Darwich. (In Darwich's work, Palestine becomes a metaphor for the loss of Eden, for birth and resurrection, and for the anguish of dispossession. As with Heisenberg, this contextual reference is not explained in the film itself. Understanding them is not essential but does enrich the enjoyment of Notre Musique. ) Also at the Encounters is Olga, a Jewish-French student of Russian descent. She videos Godard's lecture and tries to give him a copy. In some ways, she is an alter-ego, a 'shot/reverse shot' of Judith.

The concept of dialogue (in a non-verbal sense) is developed as Godard critiques 'shot/reverse shot' as part of his lecture. This cinematic device, usually used when two people are talking to each other, reverses the camera so we see each person seemingly from the other's viewpoint as they speak. The angle provides a mental continuity for us, even though both people are not on screen together. The actual change in camera angle, now a convention, is not really 180 degrees but anything from 120 to 160. The person is slightly offset, rather than directly facing the camera (which would also appear more confrontational).

Notre Musique is one of Godard's most responsible, articulate and accessible works. Which makes it doubly shameful that many critics failed to expend the minimal energy required to engage with it, preferring instead to give a banal description that belies their clocking-on superficiality, and usually finishing with a self-satisfied dismissal by 'cleverly' observing that Godard has slightly misquoted something or that his ideas are too hard to follow. As if that mattered. (A more mature analysis was given by BFI writer Michael Witt who said the film, "functions simultaneously as a bulwark against the tyranny of received ideas and as a laboratory for the generation of fresh perspectives.") Notre Musique is structured into a somewhat artificial triptych of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. The first covers the horrors of war through the ages up to the present. The second, mental scars left on survivors. The brief 'heaven' follows what might probably have been part two's tragic conclusion (related by a disembodied voice over a phone at the end of the second act). Cinematography and editing have all of Godard's hallmark crispness. Some of the subtitling is sloppy, even misspelling Bohr's name (something that will irritate adherents of form over substance).

A glimpse of a penguin near the beginning gives it an almost anthropological tone, man portrayed as obsessively armed for the extermination of his own kind. Descending from the 'age of fable,' the hollowness of popular morality is hinted at briefly. A woman on her knees beseeches a soldier. The Lord's Prayer is quoted, "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." Irony is underlined in a refrain, "As we forgive them, and no differently," which is twice repeated. It is not a song that has carried much weight against war. Can the music of artists and poets do any better? Recently I watched a multiplex trailer for 'this summer's movies.' It asked, and 'answered' everything I supposedly 'want' from films. Thrills. Excitement. Explosions. Laughs. Being whisked off to an imaginary world. And so on. I listened to the end of the list waiting in vain for something like, "being mentally stimulated." If you are also unsatisfied by the surfeit of cinematic trash that puts your brain on hold, this film might be for you. If, however, like the critics who simply rate it against competing blockbusters and find it lacking, you maybe do not wish to exercise any of those mental muscles then, like this humble review, it will not be the welcome sunbeam that makes or doesn't make your summer.

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.