Notre Musique [DVD]

If you loved the 1960's Godard for his ultra-hip irreverence, you might find Godard's current work a bit dull. The 1960's Godard used cinema to show how we moderns use culture (novels, films, pop music) to define ourselves--in Godard's world you might say we are what cultural objects we identify with, or, more aptly, "we are what we consume". The 1960's Godard used the idioms of the Italian realist cinema (as well as American noir)in an ironic way to explore the nature of the modern. Godard's narratives tended to mimic (albeit in an ironic, detached way: the essence of hip and cool) those narrative forms that have become so ingrained in our culture as to become cliches (the gangster picture, the heist picture). Godard's characters, however, consume this stuff without the ironic detachment that wpould allow them some kind of self-awareness, and as uncritical consumers they often begin to resemble the B-literatures and B-movies that they spend so much time consuming. The result is that their lives became reproductions of the very B-literature and B-movies that they spend so much time amusing themselves with. If there is a sense of tragedy in the 1960's Godard films (Breathless, Band of Outsiders, My Life to Live...to name a few) it is due to the fact that characters in Godard films are unable to see that even the form their rebellion takes is borrowed from B-movie heroes... Though there are moments of beautiful spontaneity in some of Godard's 1960's films, these moments stand out precisely because they are so rare. Nonetheless these are the moments that make these films memorable.

There are no moments of spontaneity in the late phase of Godard's career. Films like In Praise of Love and Notre Musique are less films than essays on topics that obsess a Godard who no longer believes in irreverence as a form of rebellion. The early Godard had his characters rush through the Louvre in a moment of liberatory irreverence ; the late Godard has his characters meditate on world culture as though their lives depended on it (and perhaps they do). The obsession of Godard's late phase is how humanity has failed to liberate itself from its chronic failings. This new obsession is perhaps just the continuation nof an old one. In one of his most interesting 1960's films, Pierrot Le Fou, Godard showed how obsessively man tries to liberate himself from himself by reading everything. But only in death does man achieve the ability to stand outside of himself. In Notre Musique, however, not even death offers any sort of liberation for even Heaven is a kind of a militarized zone. What Godard seems to be saying is that we cannot imagine an outside (like Heaven) from which to examine our cultural formations(those things that form us), and that even our imagination has been thoroughly colonized by culture. What the young Godard offered was a glimpse of the trap we are in and he directed us toward the few options we have left--spontaneous disruption, the beautiful gesture toward, if not the ultimate realization of, liberation. Godard's aesthetic (like the Italian neo-realists and American noirs he so loved) was always bleak but in the 1960's films there was an integer, an occasional flash, of hope. The older Godard simply shows us the trap.

Jean-Luc Godard's quasi-update of Dante's Divine Comedy set to the modern world. The first segment of the film is hell and it only runs at about 10 minutes. In it, Godard has cobbled together a devastating montage of scenes of human destruction from the holocaust, Vietnam, the American Civil War, and other scenes of warfare and destruction, all compiled from documentary and movie footage. It's an impressive sequence as he overlaps the scenes of horror over the sounds of a melodic piano score. Then the film moves into limbo, the section usually regarded as the least interesting of Dante's cantos. Godard spends the bulk of his time on this section. In it, a French Jewish journalist attends a literary conference and meets Godard as himself and meets the Palestinian poet Mohmoud Darwish and discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She travels to Sarejevo and witnesses the aftermath of Serbian destruction (a topic which Godard is clearly haunted with), and includes some direct views on cinema from Godard himself. The final section is in paradise. It features perplexing images with the protagonist in a beautiful forest guarded by American soldiers. Notre Musique is about the state of the world at the beginning of the 21st century. It is a powerful and esoteric rumination of the art and history of the past, and a foreboding insight into what the future may look like. The film includes a wonderful piano score from Sibelius and Tchaikovsky and beautiful color photography from Julien Hirsh. The film was shot in 1:33 aspect ratio so don't expect the DVD to appear in scope.

I am and was impressed by this film. The emphasis on the filmic image itself, the film of film, is particularly cogent and asks the viewer to come to terms with not just this or that war or this or that character but in fact the entire business of film-making and film-watching. In the first part, the splicing together of both documentary and movie images of war, combined with the minimalist music that appears arbitrarily to end before the image allows for the end--these events produce the possibility for complex reflection and dissonance in the reader (perhaps in that order). By the time the second part comes, the viewer has been educated not only about violence but about how learning to view a film is like learning to read a hard text in philosophy--each new author, each new film, each new part of the current film, demands to be read anew, in its own way, according to its own terms. What this film asks is for the viewer to become equal to the film, to the overlay of sound and sight that is never quite coincidence. It demands a lot of us. Hence, I suppose, all the negative views. This film says a lot, too much perhaps, and we don't tend to like that very much. We want film to be easy, we want an anti-war film, an avant garde film. We want easy to categorize Disneyland plots, even when we want to be 'progressive.' This is not a progressive film; it is not easy. Those who belittle it seem to forget that they need to do some real work sometimes to see the forest for the trees. Overall, though, I like it. I really like it. It changed me. Not one Disney film ever did that--except perhaps for Snow White and only because Bill Evans made 'Someday My Prince Will Come' like one of the loveliest songs in the world.