Notre Musique, Notre Technique
Notre Musique returns again and again to the contrapuntal: the shot-reverse-shot of cinema, the traded volleys of warfare, the interplay between opposing concepts sharing the same space. The film mimics the structure of a fugue, with its iterations, inversions, appearing and disappearing themes, and above all, the melodic reply of counterpoint in ravishing succession. Notre musique, our music. But still, the parts jostle each other; there's the typical Godard-ian jumble of ideas vying for dominance, and not one rises above the others. His filmmaking has developed a more measured pace (but still, that doesn't mean much), and after the explosive montage that opens the film, it settles into an uneasy rhythm, slightly ahead of the beat, easing into the familiar conceit of replacing all deadweight on the screen with airborne ideology. You still get the feeling that a good portion of the film is cobbled together from receipts with hastily-scribbled bits of Camus and Vaclav Havel, and a few shreds from a secret stash of Dashiell Hammett. The film is structured like Dante’s Trilogy, or a medieval triptych, with the first segment representing hell; the second, purgatory, and the final, heaven. Although the images in themselves are terrible, their rhythm carries you, and the piano score (Arvo Pärt?) allows you to drift above them. Some of the images are abstracted from their surroundings; tight shots of artillery fire that barely address the mouth of the apparatus are explosions of color, tinted by hand to vibrant effect. A shot of artillery shells exploding in the air and the water is so beautifully colorized that it resembles a dynamic Frankenthaler painting. The shot that follows it becomes a field of crystals, blighted by brilliant red splotches. The reds in this film are not warm, burnt, but bright and cool, nearly always bleeding outside of their field. We hear a woman’s voice, perhaps the conscience of the pensive Olga (Nade Dieu), over the solemn and elegiac piano score: “And so, in the age of fable / there appeared men on earth / armed for extermination.” With the great ambivalence that characterizes many of his ‘intertextual’ films, Godard examines cultural oppression and domination from a historical perspective, citing everything from Hemingway (the famous “Have you ever been bit by a dead bee?”) to Nietzsche (considering the paradox of embedded journalism) to Martin Buber. The film is set in Sarajevo, Bosnia, perhaps significantly the setting of the event that touched off the First World War. And also, in the words of Israeli journalist Judith Lerner (Sarah Adler), “a place where reconciliation is possible.” The story revolves around the efforts of two Jewish girls to right the imbalance of history by different means: Judith, the journalist, begs a French ambassador and an Arab poet living in Sarajevo to tell their stories; Olga, the student and filmmaker, demands peace and understanding under the guise of a suicide bomber in a movie theater, carrying only books in a heavy bag. Judith sees the possibilities for rejuvenation in the broken Sarajevo, and reconciliation in her own homeland. Olga, however, sees these dichotomies as irreconcilable. Godard, as usual, comes down on neither side. He lets his images and actors speak for themselves, staying aloof from the ideological conflict himself. This is one reason his style of filmmaking is particularly infuriating to some – myself included, sometimes. The complaint is that without the masterful editing or the strange, fractured paths and deconstructed soundtracks of his films, all of which justify a good deal of the praise given to him – without these, there is little to sustain the viewer who looks for that same care in the writing of dialogue. Conversations consist of napkin-size manifestos and clumsy allusions, which work because of a vitality running through them, but often miss Godard’s goal of remaining ‘open-ended’, open to our consideration, because he seldom allows the characters to act directly on them – thus giving us something that's easy for us to object to or agree with. Roomfuls of theory are hard to stomach; one gets tired of the generalization and maxim-driven arguments non sequitur – but, if you can overcome the fatigue of watching familiar ideologies snooker each other on the floor before being swept up by the next round of proclamations, the freshness of the material becomes suddenly accessible. (Personally, I’ve always had trouble reconciling the sometimes fanciful surface elements of Godard’s films – the odd slapstick, the sometimes-obsequious leftist sloganeering (the horrible “Cinemarxism” scrawled on the wall in Sympathy for the Devil) with the human drama within. So I realize my surprise is pretty much unjustified that he’s produced a film that ranks as his Hiroshima Mon Amour.) Examining the Palestinian / Israeli conflict through the eyes of these two women and the people they encounter, Godard sets up a provocative dichotomy between the Palestinians, dominated geographically and press-wise by the Israelis, and the continuous subjugation of Jewish populations by other cultures through history. The complaint of the Arab poet Darwish, that people are only interested in the Israelis, seems frivolous, but we understand the implication. The history of Palestine is more or less self-contained; the struggle of the Jews has all but obliterated it in the world’s eyes. The Homeric task of inscribing history belongs only to the victors: poetry and culture are their privilege alone: turned around, it implies that the conquered peoples are without either. This betrays a colonialist spirit which still lingers in Europe; poetry is a masthead of “enlightenment”, which was used for hundreds of years as a pale justification for subjugating other societies; the insistence on the “backwardness” of more traditional societies being a thinly veiled metaphor for their inability to exploit their own resources. The basic principle of cinema, says Godard, speaking in front of a small assembly of students, is shot-countershot. He illustrates this concept with two stills from Howard Hawks’ “His Girl Friday”: a shot of Cary Grant speaking into a telephone receiver, and a similarly composed shot of Rosalind Russell doing the same. The principle of “shot-countershot” can be readily transliterated into the language of warfare (the modern language) from the language of cinema; he presents a pair of photos depicting a beach landing: first a picture of Zionists landing on Palestinian beaches; then a countershot of Palestinians wading into the waters to defend their land. (“They walked into the water to die,” he says.) Olga, seated with the small group, is wracked with guilt at the Israelis' treatment of the Palestinians. In her last symbolic gesture, she enters a movie theater in Jerusalem and asks if there is one Israeli who would stand with her and die for peace and understanding. No one moves; she is later shot and killed by a marksman, upon which it is revealed that she is not carrying a bomb. The overarching paradox here, incorporating all of the narrower ones, and vetted by them, is that truth is neither absolute nor relative. If, as Godard says, the dominant account is patently untrue, and we are unable to validate the national “Idea” (that is, the common approach to the world by which a culture defines itself), then truth is clearly not the foundation, or perhaps even a participant in, the progression of history. The dialectic excludes those “without poetry”. It is rather a “hue” of things – a gradation which lends no weight, only a qualitative value, an enigmatic slice of spectrum. Godard speaks in terms of light and dark; he sees the liquidity of truth and falsehood, bleeding into each other, stranding us in a twilight of reason, which may look a lot like Sarajevo’s stark scenery. (In a burned-out palace, a remarkable library – a pile of books on the floor, an old man seated at a rickety desk with a ledger and stamp.) “Nature is a temple where living colonnades / sometimes let out confused phrases / Man wanders among symbols in those glades / which watch him / with familiar gazes.”
(Theresa)
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