HOMMAGE A GODARDIn Praise of Obscurity II
Notre Musique - Jean-Luc Godard
Wellspring Films, 2004 - 79 minutes - Written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard - Produced by Alain Sarde and Ruth Waldburger - Directors of Photography: Julien Hirsch and Jean-Christophe Beauvallet - With Sarah Adler, Nade Dieu, Rony Kramer, Simon Eine, Jean-Luc Godard, Juan Goytisolo, and Mahmoud Darwich - English, French, and Spanish
"Je suis qui je serai et deviendrai. Je me construirai moi-même et choisirai mon exil. Mon exil est l’arrière-plan de la scène épique. Je défends le besoin des poètes de gloire et de souvenirs, et défends des arbres qui habillent les oiseaux de pays et d’exil, une lune encore apte à un poème d’amour, une idée brisée par la fragilité de ses défenseurs et un pays enlevé par les légends.”(1) --Mahmoud Darwish
CRITIQUE - Godard. Therefore the usually troublesome criticism (grousing) -- that is, “ponderous, lachrymose, unsteady, undisciplined, formalist, disjointed, annoying”. And, as counterpoint, the latterday hallelujah chorus -- “poetic, humanistic, sublime, evocative, heartfelt” -- or in other words the long adieu, one way or another … Again and again until JLG is gone.And yet … Notre Musique soars above a terrain littered with refuse, cinematic and otherwise -- the debris field of history, and cinema’s complicity, or history as carnage and the extermination of the so-called Other. Levinas turns up here (in the form of visual and textual references to Entre Nous), implicated in the philosophical quagmire, an exquisite etude circling the nature of doubling. One, indeed, divides into two. Olga (Nade Dieu) converses with her Self -- through the agency of herself -- in time drowning in/by herself.
In a time marked (and pockmarked) by impatience with abstract thought -- that is, these times -- a much more horrific situation presents itself; the complete impasse between thought and ethics. It is only natural that Godard would repeatedly impose a vertiginous reading of the decaying superstructure (intellectual coordinates) of the fast-moulting humanist worldview, a chaosmos of effects (montage and superimposition coupled with dissolving narrative lines) and affects (the plausible paucity of answers to all manner of unanswerable questions posed by a machinic civilization clawing at itself, mutilating itself). Mapping the monstrous, a wasteland then, and perhaps in turn validating the division of the film into a medieval triptych -- Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. Godard presents the latter as no paradise as such, but, as with all such elective visions of the afterlife, as yet another temptation, and one to which Godard assigns the anti-privilege of a defensive perimeter and United States Marine guard. An idyll already colonized by vacuous signs of empire.
It is Olga’s eyes, then, that betray the radical undermining of the rhetoric of the film’s pretensions, as they meet and merge with the Levinasian Other (nominally, here, presented in the form of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish) -- and, too, Godard undoing himself, unleashing himself, hounding himself. Olga, Russian-Israeli documentary filmmaker, attempting to fathom (divine) the fathomless (hellish) abyss of Sarajevo after the Bosnian war. Olga staring at herself as Other, as all do who come to the edge of things one day looking for the possible-impossible (impossible-possible) antidote.
Following the medieval logic of the structure of the film, the antidote appears in the form of an aesthetic base, an entelechy, constellated today by the depleted weft of abstract thought, or what’s left of what has gone awry. After the much-vaunted Enlightenment (and contra Habermas) comes Living Midnight, with its (ir)rationalist topology -- a terrain in-between here and there haunted by dispossessed spirits, hungry ghosts, and ruined architectural mise en scène. Thus Sarajevo. There, Godard projects Living Midnight as the dark imagination of spent cinema, past and present, spliced together from bits left on the editing room floor. Thus the film opens in Hell, using a torrent of newsreel and vintage footage of the grotesque history of war in the 20th century. There are echoes of Forever Mozart in Notre Musique. Godard, as no one else, knows that cinema cannot be saved except by going through the looking glass into the minefield of the imagination -- toward the poetic. Sarajevo serves as the sinecure for history as battlefield -- yet it is the conflagration of ideologies that has provided the most picturesque ruins, always. The past = After. The future = Before.Godardian dialogue is a patchwork of forces and fields held in tension, scanned and projected, noted in passing, figural gestures, swipes, or wildly thrown signboards burned into the black interstices of the film, brutally. Victimization and the nobility of the victim come forward in the conversations about Palestine and Israel, en passant. It is the scorched imagination that is on parade in Notre Musique. “Did you dream of the Nazis while in the Resistance?”
The (re)construction of metaphysical artifacts (those that have plagued humanity past) fall across the screen in shards of conversation, never so wildly as during the visit to a library that is a ruin and to which Sarajevans amble to return a book or two to a heap of books cast on the floor while a librarian notates their return. Godard serves up a landscape of scars that is essentially metaphysical and he delivers the coup de grace in the form of Olga’s fate, and in the delivery of news of her fate by phone, to himself in his garden packed with petunias and begonias.
Godard appears and disappears, inserting himself and excising himself. He delivers a lecture to students at the writer’s conference (the middle portion of the triptych) on text and image by showing pairs of photographic images that represent the unresolvable, botched nature of duality (cinematic point and counterpoint) emptied of any significance, as an indictment of the fracture that runs through film as much as it runs through the heart of Europe, into the Balkans, and on to the Levant.
Thus we see Sarajevo through a lens that is, indeed, cracking under the spell of the history of cinema as much as the history of unresolved conflicts between East and West. And too, we see Sarajevo going about its everyday business, its reconstruction, becoming again a bazaar for its weary inhabitants -- shopping (in the Koolhaasian sense) as compensatory diversion. Thus Godard arrives and leaves Sarajevo, with the various interlocutors, by way of the most pure of antiseptic places -- the airport, where each time he frames the shot he includes a giant question mark in the form of the Information kiosk.
Godard exits in the strategic manner of returning to a garden full of gaudy plants, somewhere in France, we suppose, while Olga returns to Jerusalem to confront her tragic decision to attempt to make a difference. The final sequence -- Heaven -- answers a fear she has enunciated earlier to her uncle (Godard's translator at the Sarajevo conference) in the form of why death frightens her. It is the unknowable nature of the afterlife that is her major concern, while it is the pain of dying that worries her next. To arrive in Heaven and find it occupied by American Marines and American culture is the last insult en route to the nowhere Godard prescribes as the future, given the present state of things.GK (New York, 11/28/04)
ENDNOTES
1 - Mahmoud Darwish, “Hommage à Edward Said: Contrepoint”, Le Monde Diplomatique 610 (Janvier 2005), p. 28
STRATEGIC BIBLIOGRAPHY
Jean-Luc Godard, La Nouvelle Vague (Ediciones Paidos Iberica, 2004) - Paper, Spanish text, ISBN 9-501-25118-7
________, Cinema: The Archaeology of Film and the Memory of a Century (New York: Berg Publishers, 2005) - Paper, ISBN 1-845-20197-3
________, Constance Lotz (ed.), John O’Toole (trans.), The Future(s) of Film: Three Interviews (Bern: Verlag Gachnang & Springer, 2002) - Paper, 120 pages, ISBN 3-906-12762-1
J. Hoberman, “Two or Three Things He Knows”, The Village Voice (November 24-30, 2004), p. C68
Critique (Libération, 05/19/04) / Godard, Levinas, Blanchot (Liste Blanchot / Libération, 05/15/04) / See also "Week-end au Havre", an article in Cahiers du Cinéma (Decembre 2004) featuring Godard, "critique, découvreur, oracle ..." ...
ELOGE DE L'AMOUR / ETC.
ELOGE - "Eloge de l'amour, c'est d'abord du vrai noir et blanc comme on n'en fait plus. Et il y est question de quelque chose de l'amour, de l'amour de quelque chose. L'amour de la résistance, de la mémoire, du cinéma, de la langue française, de l'histoire..."
Eloge de l'Amour (Le Monde Diplomatique, 05/2001) / More ...HISTOIRE(S) - Regarding Histoire(s) du cinéma, see Alexander Horwath, The Man With The Magnétoscope (Senses of Cinema, 1998) - "For a lack of better comparisons, Godard's method in the Histoire(s) du cinéma is often explained through literary 'affinities' -- with reference to the most prominent meta-literature by Proust or Joyce. With the same sense of helplessness, but in honor of 1920s Austro-modernism and linguistic criticism, I would also like to add: Robert Musil -- 'The before and after is not obligatory, progress is only intellectual and spatial. The content disperses in a timeless way, everything is really always there at once.' Ulrich, Musil's Man Without Features [Man Without Qualities] also has a Godardian idea: that history consists of unfinished, incomplete, suddenly interrupted sentences." / Histoire(s) du cinéma (Paris: Gallimard, 1998) - Paper, 963 pages, ISBN 2-070-11544-5
A PROPOS OF ALL OF 'THAT' - "Musil's extreme, intellectually-charged (unfinished) novel The Man Without Qualities (Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften rendered almost meaningless through translation, and meaning -- in George Steiner's estimation -- 'The Man Whose 'I' Is in Search of His 'Me'') seems poised in/at that place where an aesthetics of an exorbitant beauty (and price) might rise, only if ... only if ... only if 'self-possession' has any currency whatsoever, now and then, versus the empty gesture of autonomy such a term implies in a philological 'landscape' devoid of fiery perturbational, critical-poetic hyper conceits on the path to the Some-thing Else." - See Sublime Aesthetics (RTF) ...
I do not hate people.
I steal from no one.
However
If I am hungry
I will eat the flesh of my usurper.
Beware beware of my hunger
And of my anger.
--Mahmoud Darwish
Adieu, Mahmoud Darwish (The Guardian, 08/11/08)
FOREVER GODARD
James Williams, Michael Temple and Michael Witt (eds.), For Ever Godard: The Work of Jean-Luc Godard 1950 to the Present (London: Black Dog, 2003) - "For the last 50 years, Jean-Luc Godard's work in cinema and video has innovated, provoked and inspired. Reviewing this key film and video maker of the twentieth century, For Ever Godard provides a new context for his work. / In the last couple of years Godard's recent work on film and video has featured strongly in debates about audio-visual art and culture. Especially regarding questions of historical memory, technological change, and the future of cinema in all its forms. This historical moment provides the perfect opportunity for a critical reassessment of Godard's entire corpus and its key role in culture. For Ever Godard addresses new issues like; Godard as an experimental multimedia artist; the importance of voice and music in his work; the influence of Benjamin and Blanchot; and new aspects of production and representation. Godard's work is considered within the context of the history of film, For Ever Godard is providing a new essential view to anyone interested in cinema." (Black Dog) - Cloth, 384 pages, ISBN 1-901-03369-4
