Review: "Notre Musique" (dir: Jean-Luc Godard)
Notre Musique (Our Music), Jean-Luc Godard’s latest cinematic meander through fact and fiction, unfolds into a curiously balanced triptych: the central section – an ostensibly linear quasi-documentary on a Sarajevo literary convention – is buffered on either side by two shorter, more esoteric pieces. After the perfunctory titles, the film opens with a fifteen-minute montage that combines footage of war and destruction with discordant, unsettling piano stabs. The coherent theme – the savagery and inhumanity of conflict – is clear enough, and Godard’s reverence for the filmic image is demonstrated in the breadth of sources from which he quotes. Mixing old newsreels, a myriad of feature film excerpts ranging from Eisenstein to Coppola to DW Griffith, documentary footage and more, the montage is entitled ‘Hell’ and viscerally lives up to its name. It is a powerfully arresting opening that displays the skill that Godard has mastered in creating shocking and visually rich juxtapositions.
Rather abruptly we segue into the film’s central, and most lengthy, part, subtitled ‘Purgatory’. In an airport in Sarajevo, Jean-Luc Godard and his translator meet with a Franco-Russian Jewish girl before jumping into a car that shuffles sombrely through the city’s landscape. The devastated buildings, lying amidst new developments and reconstructed apartment blocks, pay testament to the wars that have scourged the country over the last decade. At the residence of the French ambassador to Bosnia, the Jewish girl recounts how her family was shielded from the Vichy regime by the ambassador himself. Later on, an Israeli filmmaker interviews a Palestinian poet who considers how art informs and transforms a culture and a land. In another scene, some of the characters mill around a ruined school in which books are piled high in one corner and – in a familiar Godard trope – an ill-fitting American Indian couple appear, in full dress, decrying the theft of their land by the white man. The theme of conflict over land – whether between Israelis and Palestinians, or European settlers and American Indians, hangs loosely over the proceedings, yet Godard layers his narrative (if it can be so called) with murkiness and confusion. Rather than offering anything precise to grab onto, it seems that Godard is merely providing the pivotal setting of Sarajevo for a free-ranging exploration of territorial disputes throughout the ages. In typical fashion he offers no plausible logic or method of arriving at an answer, and layers the framework with aphorisms and wry observations that don’t necessarily lead in any coherent direction. Ultimately, it all becomes a little frustrating.
A more interesting development is when Godard delivers a lecture to a group of disinterested students on the displacement of the image in cinema. He begins by showing a picture of a ruined building and, deflecting suggestions that it is an image from Hiroshima or Sarajevo, reveals that the photograph dates from the American Civil War of the 19th century. He goes on to compare the art of filmmaking with the reconstruction of Bosnia’s famous Mostar Bridge, destroyed in the 1993 civil war. We are shown the rubble of the bridge, which is being rebuilt, brick-by-brick; yet despite its phoenix-like rise it will remain something of an artifice, a reconstruction rather than an original construction. Godard’s point, which he delivers to his jaded audience, is that this operation is similar to the art of filmmaking; the image – once chemically traduced onto a flimsy strip of celluloid – will always remain a facsimile of the real.
The film’s final section, ‘Heaven’, begins when Godard learns that the Israeli girl encountered earlier has been shot dead for imitating a suicide bomber. In a beautiful forest setting, the girl wanders through trees and streams, while young people cavort in a playfully languid style. The audience is left to assume that this is a bucolic afterlife, yet the innate beauty is offset by the quiet presence of US marines. It is a curious, yet not unsatisfying, ending to an intellectual puzzle that in some ways typifies the wilfully obscurant style that Godard has always revelled in.
Rather abruptly we segue into the film’s central, and most lengthy, part, subtitled ‘Purgatory’. In an airport in Sarajevo, Jean-Luc Godard and his translator meet with a Franco-Russian Jewish girl before jumping into a car that shuffles sombrely through the city’s landscape. The devastated buildings, lying amidst new developments and reconstructed apartment blocks, pay testament to the wars that have scourged the country over the last decade. At the residence of the French ambassador to Bosnia, the Jewish girl recounts how her family was shielded from the Vichy regime by the ambassador himself. Later on, an Israeli filmmaker interviews a Palestinian poet who considers how art informs and transforms a culture and a land. In another scene, some of the characters mill around a ruined school in which books are piled high in one corner and – in a familiar Godard trope – an ill-fitting American Indian couple appear, in full dress, decrying the theft of their land by the white man. The theme of conflict over land – whether between Israelis and Palestinians, or European settlers and American Indians, hangs loosely over the proceedings, yet Godard layers his narrative (if it can be so called) with murkiness and confusion. Rather than offering anything precise to grab onto, it seems that Godard is merely providing the pivotal setting of Sarajevo for a free-ranging exploration of territorial disputes throughout the ages. In typical fashion he offers no plausible logic or method of arriving at an answer, and layers the framework with aphorisms and wry observations that don’t necessarily lead in any coherent direction. Ultimately, it all becomes a little frustrating.
A more interesting development is when Godard delivers a lecture to a group of disinterested students on the displacement of the image in cinema. He begins by showing a picture of a ruined building and, deflecting suggestions that it is an image from Hiroshima or Sarajevo, reveals that the photograph dates from the American Civil War of the 19th century. He goes on to compare the art of filmmaking with the reconstruction of Bosnia’s famous Mostar Bridge, destroyed in the 1993 civil war. We are shown the rubble of the bridge, which is being rebuilt, brick-by-brick; yet despite its phoenix-like rise it will remain something of an artifice, a reconstruction rather than an original construction. Godard’s point, which he delivers to his jaded audience, is that this operation is similar to the art of filmmaking; the image – once chemically traduced onto a flimsy strip of celluloid – will always remain a facsimile of the real.
The film’s final section, ‘Heaven’, begins when Godard learns that the Israeli girl encountered earlier has been shot dead for imitating a suicide bomber. In a beautiful forest setting, the girl wanders through trees and streams, while young people cavort in a playfully languid style. The audience is left to assume that this is a bucolic afterlife, yet the innate beauty is offset by the quiet presence of US marines. It is a curious, yet not unsatisfying, ending to an intellectual puzzle that in some ways typifies the wilfully obscurant style that Godard has always revelled in.
posted by DN at 9:10 PM
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