Notre Musique, directed by Jean-Luc Godard (2004)
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, forty-five 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?
