Notre Musique
Thoughts on Jean-Luc Godard’s latest film.
(First published at Exzibit.net on 28 August 2005)
Decades after his debut with a highly acclaimed A Bout Du Souffle (1959) and the rise as one of the Titans of the “vague nouvelle”, Jean-Luc Godard is still on the look-out for explanation and justification of the modern world, and it is these quests that he has been trying to adapt to the screen. It is certainly not an easy task to pursue, as Notre Musique (France/Switzerland, 2004, 80 min.) well proves. It is best to watch this film in the secluded environment of your own study, where you can stop and contemplate on what you have just seen. But even in the dark cinema hall one can still allow Godard the Virgil to lure oneself into the Dantesque journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise of contemporary world.
Masterful cinematography of Notre Musique, together with a sombre yet poetical story, creates a compelling eighty-minute philosophical narrative. Throughout ‘Hell’ short prayer-like phrases are recited, as wartime documentary footage blinds you with atrocities. This soon is changed by ‘Purgatory’ where people are trying to prevent wars. One of them, Olga, inspired by Godard’s lecture about the imaginary and the real, ultimately fulfils what she thinks is her vocation. Being Jewish, she returns to Israel to die for peace. We then see her in ‘Paradise’, where she and other youths are guarded by American marine officers.
It is significant that Godard has chosen to make a cinematic reverberation of The Divine Comedy. Dante himself was writing his poetic masterpiece at the time of political crises, and how could one possibly describe the early 21st century, except that it is a sequence of critical, overthrowing events that endanger society? Death has become an almost usual outcome of these crises, and the theme of The Divine Comedy – afterlife and the impact of the earthy life on it – could not be more appropriate.
Godard (who plays himself in the film) has remained an adept of the idea of cinema as a great artistic power that influences the viewer. The world is a dark cinema hall, and cinema is the “light” that shines upon it from the screen. Cinema manipulates with the imaginary objects, but only imaginary is certain; reality is uncertain. Reflecting on this later, Olga recognises her alter-ego: ‘She’s next to me, I’ve never seen her, but she is myself. It’s like an image’.
I remember one film critic saying: ‘Can a schizophrenic philosopher be a genuine director? Well, Godard is’. Notre Musique may well disapprove of his opinion of Godard-philosopher, but at any event it is more than an idealistic reflection. It is a ruthless verdict of a recluse genius, and it comprises as himself, as the world around. ‘Humane people’, says the narrator, ‘don’t make revolutions; they make libraries and cemeteries’. Indeed, a humane person is shown, sitting in a ruined church in Sarajevo and making a book register. Now that the war has ended, he is saving books. Two Red Indians, the relics of destroyed civilisation, come to talk to him, but he doesn’t respond. He is absorbed by his task, and of course he is dedicating his work to future generations. But will there be any future, if wars continue?
‘Purgatory’ is an image of everyday peaceful life, and as such, it illustrates the contradiction between people’s desire to forget their past (an episode with a Jewish journalist’s investigation) and their ongoing wish to preserve it, or even to rebuild. The inquisitive camerawork on the reconstruction of the Mostar Bridge in Bosnia unravels the process of a literal “bridging” of the gap between the lost and the regained. The same Red Indians that now appear on the set in their native outfits represent an image of a historical approval of this redemption. Godard implicitly urges to dig the goldmine of world’s cultural heritage, to find healing against war. But it just doesn’t seem to work for the Near East.
Two female characters of the film, Olga and Judith, are antipodes. Although they are both Jewish, the way they relate themselves to the Arab-Israeli conflict is totally different. Judith is probably in accord with the view of Israel as a country that has always been restricted or occupied by someone. She is extremely meticulous and probing when it comes to uncovering the dark sides of someone’s Jewish past or to trying to understand why the Arabs are so violent to the Israelis. On the contrary, Olga comes to see the country of her ancestors as an occupant, and she decides to fight for peace, planning a fake terrorist act. But in the course of the action she discovers that she has no support from her compatriots.
Absurd in its romantic spirit story of Olga’s death as a fake bomber in an Israeli cinema is a disturbing conclusion to Purgatory. It is also in direct reference to a passage on the French cinema audience in Henry Miller’s Colossus of Maroussi (1941). After seeing a documentary on the French homicides in Indo-China, the audience had divided; the minority accused their compatriots of murdering innocent Asians, while the majority accused cinema staff of ruining their timeout. Sixty years on, Godard coldly shows that people still do not relate themselves to war. They are afraid of terrorists, even when they are armed but with books, but they are also unwilling to die for peace.
As a deliberate take on The Divine Comedy, Notre Musique has afterlife as its central problem, only this time it is reached by a new means and will thus have new implications. Death is ‘the impossible of the possible, or the possible of the impossible’, and as a fact has no significance for a philosophical inquiry. Now it is the act of death that matters. In Olga’s case, suicide, or voluntary death, becomes a response of a humane person to violence and the extinction of free will. ‘We cannot free ourselves, and we call that democracy’, says narrator; so, by committing suicide, one returns to his free “self”.
Godard expands Camus’s original definition of suicide as the only truly philosophical problem. Notre Musique successfully shifts one’s mind from the choice between life and death, to the choice between a purposeless forced death in the course of war and a purposeful voluntary death for peace. Both, in effect, are wasted, and we turn the final page of ‘Purgatory’ with a distressing feeling of being unable to ever positively contribute to making peace.
Meanwhile, Olga has found herself in ‘Paradise’. In those heavenly groves, she discovers other young people playing handball or reading books. The wonderful peacefulness of the place is in a tense contradiction with the guarding angels in military forms, armed with rifles and handguns. Through fascinating cinematography Godard sketches an image of Peace that needs to be protected by weapons against weapons. Amidst the rich scenery there is no bliss, and it takes Olga by surprise.
Recalling her earthy past, Olga uses the same vocabulary of opposition between the imaginary and the real. Only imaginary is certain, which means that her image will not be forgotten. This image of a young girl who dies a romantic death for an unreachable goal is indeed popular, as it follows from the media and peace activists’ reaction to the death of Rachel Corrie. But will these images have an impact? The thick river waters in Godard’s ‘Paradise’ also remind you of oblivion. After the carnage of ‘Hell’ and attempts to prevent it in ‘Purgatory’, ‘Paradise’ is a cul-de-sac, the Chamber of Glory for unwanted heroes. We may not make much of Godard-philosopher on other occasions, but the gripping image of modernity that he created in Notre Musique is, sadly, true.
