My Music: Godard, going towards the light

Confession: my music.  Godard has always been my music.   (But why is it music?  Why does such a master of a visual medium continue to insist on defining himself in terms of music?)

I've been watching Jean-Luc Godard for almost forty years now.  He commands in me the kind of instinctive, absolute fidelity that I give to very few other artists (other examples would be Bob Dylan, or Ian Hamilton Finlay).  But certainly "forever Godard."  (This is the title of a recent collection of essays (London: Black Dog Publishing), itself based on his film "Forever Mozart.")  Forever Godard.

My first Godard film was Bande à Part, and I saw it in Dundee, Scotland, at a back-street cinema called the Tivoli, which maintained a strict policy of showing one week of whatever passed as soft-core porn in 1960s Scotland, alternating with one week of European "art cinema."  That was where I saw Fellini, and Truffaut, and Bergman, and Antonioni -- and Godard.  My music.  The final credit for Bande à Part  does not read "written by" or "directed by."  It says, simply, "Cinéma: Jean-Luc Godard."  For forty years, I have accepted this equation as an axiomatic definition.

So Notre Musique is, it goes without saying, a masterpiece.  Perhaps this is too facile a conclusion.  Godard is a master; all his pieces are therefore by definition masterpieces.  OK, admit that solipsism.  Nevertheless, 45 years after Breathless, he is still taking our breath away.  There is simply no one else in world cinema who continues to push the edges of what film can be, to challenge the boundaries between genres, to answer political questions with aesthetic solutions, to present answers that are both predictably personal and unpredictably new.

So now we have (now we are asked to hear) Notre Musique, a film presented in three "kingdoms."  Not "books," as they might have been in Dante;  the implication is not literary but political.  These are not the realms of literature or theology; these are the kingdoms of power.   Of literal, deadly force.

Kingdom One: Hell

war, violence -- nothing but war -- the infinite imagination human beings expend upon finding new ways to kill each other -- flash of explosives -- dead bodies --- image upon image of dead bodies -- collage -- the deadly beauty of submarines --  bodies spilling over each other -- faces fixed in the last open-mouth bloody grimace -- the aim of weapons -- handguns, revolvers, bombs -- warplanes -- sophisticated instruments of  technology designed, ever so precisely, to kill -- "human remains" -- what is left behind --  enfer

All of this is silent, explosions with no sounds of detonation, gunfire without the chattering of triggers.  Only a slow-motion piano, registering death as

"our music."

And then the continuous intercut (shot; countershot) between documentary footage and film studio reconstruction.   Michael Caine as a brave red-shirted soldier fending off the enemy in Zulu.   Orchestrated stabbing of Teutonic knights in Alexander Nevsky.  Nuclear holocaust in Kiss Me Deadly  (1950s weltpolitik, as seen from the front  row of the Cinémathèque).  

War as entertainment; entertainment as war.   In the field of representation, does it matter whether the image on screen is "real" or "fake"?  A documentary of Auschwitz, or a Hollywood recreation of a cavalry charge?  (With white actors playing dying Indians.)

The whole section closes on that most familiar of modernist quotations: Rimbaud: "Je est un autre."  But in the context of all-out 20th-century war, today in Irak or in Afghanistan, who really is "an other"?  When the fashionably post-modernist artist quotes Rimbaud, how do we understand that statement of identity with an “other”?  Which end of the gun barrel are we on?  

Kingdom Two: Purgatory

So is it a sly joke that Godard's image for Purgatory is an academic conference?

Well, yes and no.  The conference ("European Literary Encounters") takes place in Sarajevo, in the years "after" the war, and one character states that she has explicitly come looking for a state in the process of reconciliation, transition between hell and heaven.  Purgatory.  Yet Godard offers strikingly little about the politics of contemporary Bosnia.  (We do see the Mostar bridge, being rebuilt but still deep in scaffolding.)  Otherwise,  trams pass by on snow-covered streets, quite normally.  People go to markets. The airport looks like any other international airport.  Jean-Luc smokes obscenely large cigars.  Young women scurry to do him favours.

Meanwhile, aphorisms abound.  An obliging assistant, feeding a line for an obvious answer, asks Godard why revolutions aren't started by humane people.  "That's because humane people don't start revolutions," he replies; "they start libraries."    A scowling Spanish novelist adds, on cue, "And cemeteries."  Then winds up his car window.  (In Godard’s “home” city of Paris, might one note, there is neither a library, nor a cemetery, named after Robespierre, that city’s prime revolutionary.)  

Do not, of course, expect in here anything like traditional narrative. Yes, if you look very closely, you will pick out two young women, Judith and Olga, both of them Jewish, both of them looking in Bosnia for solutions to the problems of a vastly different part of the world; Judith the pragmatic reporter; Olga moving steadily (indeed, in many of the film's images of her, running) towards a self-idealised martyrdom.  (Grumpy Jean-Luc receives the news of her death back in his Swiss garden, as if she'd been a blight on his tomato plants.)

What is real in Sarajevo?  Where are the dead?
Against the shot of a swinging light-bulb (an image repeated from previous Godard films, like King Lear), the narrative voice recounts the story of Heisenberg and Bohr visiting Elsinore.   Nothing special, Heisenberg concludes.  But it's Hamlet's castle, says Bohr; therefore it's special.  And Godard's voice continues:

Elsinore the real / Hamlet the imaginary

Shot and reverse shot

Imaginary / certitude

The principle of cinema:

Go towards the light

and shine it on our night

Our music

Kingdom Three: Paradise

The representation of Paradise is always problematical.  That is, how do you represent Heaven?  How do you give an image of endless bliss?  Is it enough to show a few young people reading books by the seashore?

Paradise does take place on a beach, probably a lakeshore, as in several other Godard films.  In Weekend, a rock drummer pounded out the words for Lautréamont's address to "old ocean."  In King Lear,  Virginia Woolf's Percival rode to his death in India.  Here, paradise is an enclave guarded by US Marines, by their presence and by their hymn.  Young people (none old) read books by David Goodis -- forty years later, still don't shoot the pianist .   And here is the ultimate martyr, the innocent suicide bomber, the ultimate performer of "our music:":

It was a fine clear day.

You could see a long way off.

But not as far as Olga had gone.

Hold the shot; cut; fade.

Nothing more to say.  "Our music" is over, is silent.