Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (120 page)

B
Y LATE 2001
, when Godard had completed his three short commissions, the experience of
Eloge de l’amour
’s poor reception by audiences and critics had been fully absorbed. As in the past, a political vehemence came to mask a personal crisis of cinema: in the wake of
Eloge
, in his next film, Godard turned to doctrinaire political advocacy, which served a purpose comparable to that of his earlier hortatory work: it reconnected him with youth.

At the premiere of
Eloge de l’amour
, Godard announced plans for a film called
Notre Musique
(Our Music), about Manfred Eicher and ECM Records, and the influence of that music on Godard’s work. He also intended to make an abridgment of
Histoire(s) du cinéma
for Gaumont to release theatrically,
Moments choisis
(Chosen Moments). In addition, he was hoping to work with the young producer Emmanuel Benbihi, who announced at Cannes a compilation film called
Paris je t’aime
(Paris, I Love You), in which twenty directors would each film a short love story in one of the twenty arrondissements of Paris. Among the directors recruited for the project along with Godard included Woody Allen, Agnès Varda, Bertrand Tavernier, and Emir Kusturica.
⁹
Godard’s idea was to make a film called
Champ Contre Champ
in the eleventh arrondissement. The title was a pun on the French for “shot-countershot” (the classical pattern for filming dialogue) as well as on the (peculiar) proper names, “Shot Versus Shot” (as in
Kramer Versus Kramer
). The love story would be grounded in a study of the use of shot and countershot to represent the differing views of a man and a woman on love.
¹⁰

The first intimations of the effect of
Eloge de l’amour
’s failure were evident in Godard’s abridgment of
Histoire(s) du cinéma
, transferred to 35mm film for theatrical release and presented at Beaubourg on November 29, 2001. This eighty-four-minute work differed significantly from the six-hour project on which it was based; it was an act of self-revisionism. Excerpted moments from
Histoire(s)
had been recast in an entirely new political framework. Godard removed his opening praise of the Hollywood producers Irving
Thalberg and Howard Hughes, whose creative energy and outlaw imagination he had extolled in his initial synoptic introduction to the
Histoire(s)
as the precondition of the movies’ stories, as the story of all stories. In fact, Godard voided the film of its predominantly Jewish character. He removed the specific references to the Holocaust from the essays and, instead, oriented the distillation toward the failures of the cinema in recent days to document and to prevent massacres in Sarajevo, Kosovo, and elsewhere, atrocities perpetrated principally against Muslims. Yet instead of considering the role of Christian Serbs and Croats in the massacre of Muslims in the former Yugoslavia, Godard turned his attention once more to the confrontation between Muslims and Jews in the Middle East.

Even before the attacks of September 11, 2001, political conflict in the Middle East had become reinflamed by the breakdown of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and by Ariel Sharon’s 2000 visit to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. Palestinians began a new campaign of violence against Israel, which caused, in turn, large-scale military incursions by Israel into Palestinian cities, towns, and refugee camps.

As if in response, Godard’s plans for
Notre Musique
underwent a transformation. Instead of making a film about ECM Records, he now wanted to base it on the novel
Le Silence de la mer
, by Vercors,
¹¹
written in 1943, which had been the basis for Jean-Pierre Melville’s first feature film in 1947. The novel and the film are a story of France under German occupation, in which a German officer—an intellectual and a Francophile—is quartered in the house of a French family. Godard’s idea, he later said, was to adapt
Le Silence de la mer
, but with “an Israeli officer, from the occupying army, who speaks in a proper and polite way with a family in their living room.” The conversation would involve the Bible, or perhaps also the Bible and Homer, but Godard dropped the idea, he said, because he didn’t think he had the necessary “book learning.”
¹²

Then he came up with another way to film his notion of the conflict in the Middle East:

We’re in an apartment, and then someone comes and says “God has chosen me, from now on this is my apartment.” I wanted to make a film about that with Marcel Ophüls, where we would show ourselves together in this apartment. And then we would have a discussion, we would try to resolve the question among ourselves, as if we were actually in power. But it didn’t work out.
¹³

Then coincidence intervened: Godard was invited by Francis Bueb, the director of the Centre André-Malraux in Bosnia, to take part in the second annual “Rencontres Européennes du Livre,” literary encounters that Bueb
organized in Sarajevo. Bueb, a former bookstore executive, had gone to Sarajevo at the height of the war and founded the center in order to provide cultural support to the besieged city. With a sort of peace restored after the Dayton accords of 1995, Bueb remained there to help with the city’s reconstruction.
¹⁴

During Godard’s first visit, he presented
Eloge de l’amour
, and he also engaged a group of young cinephiles and film students in several seminars. He returned to the center in June 2002 to present the premiere of a new short film,
Liberté et patrie
, which had been commissioned by Expo 02, a cultural festival of the Jura region of Switzerland. The title of the film, which means “Freedom and Fatherland,” is the slogan of the canton of Vaud and is featured on the canton’s flag.

The film is based on the novel
Aimé Pache, peintre vaudois
(Aimé Pache, Painter from the Vaud), by Ramuz, from 1911. It is a twenty-one-minute capsule autobiography; in title cards, Godard declares that Expo 02 has commissioned “from him, Aimé Pache, painter from the Vaud, a painting called ‘Liberté et Patrie.’” Godard illustrates the film’s brief sections with excerpts from his own films—
For Ever Mozart
,
King Lear, Eloge de l’amour, Weekend, Band of Outsiders
—to recount the voyage of young Aimé from the countryside near Lausanne to Paris, where he lived in poverty and visited many art exhibits, and went to the Louvre to copy “the works of the great masters.” The images of Paris, in black and white, are from
Eloge de l’amour;
but the screen bursts again into full color with the return trip to Switzerland, with a glorious sunset over the hills and the lavish foliage of the countryside. (“And then he leaves, and that’s liberty, and he comes back, and that’s fatherland.”) After the death of Pache’s parents and his abandonment of painting for a time (which, according to the commentary, came “after’ 68”), he resumes his work on “le grand tableau,” the great painting. To bring the self-portrait definitively around to Godard’s primal artistic identity, it features on the sound track no mood music from ECM but the slow movement from the Opus 132 string quartet of Beethoven.

The latest panel of the “great painting,” by which Godard’s reputation would be secured once more, was yet to come; but the trip to Sarajevo played an important part in its creation.

Alain Bergala, who went to the Centre André-Malraux several days after this screening, missed Godard there but collected accounts of his visit:

He was invited for an evening; he stayed three days. They offered to show him around the city. He said, “No, I see better from here.” There was a window from which one could see a corner of the market where there had been the explosion, and there were all the young people, and the young women, who came to the Center… and he was happy there—he was glad that nobody was disturbing him—and he came home and sent them a check for 100,000 francs for “space rental.”
¹⁵

The project of
Notre Musique
was reconceived on the basis of his visits to Sarajevo.

N
OTRE
M
USIQUE
is a triptych. The first section, “Hell,” is a collage of war footage, culled from documentaries, television news, and fiction films. The second and longest section, “Purgatory,” is organized as a visit by Godard to the Centre André-Malraux for the purpose of giving a seminar. Upon his arrival at the airport, he is greeted by his translator, Ramos Garcia, who identifies himself as a French Jew of Egyptian origin whose father had been an anti-Zionist Communist but whose mother had been a Zionist. The section features a second track of action, revolving around the French embassy in Sarajevo. A young Jewish woman named Judith Lerner, a journalist from Israel, has come to the embassy in the hope of speaking with the French ambassador to Bosnia, Ambassador Naville (Godard’s maternal grandmother’s maiden name), about a project of peace between Israelis and Palestinians. She hopes to enlist, as she puts it, “not the ambassador but the man”—the man who had, as a young student, hidden her own grandfather from the Gestapo during wartime and in whose garret her mother had been born.

Several other writers have come to Sarajevo for the seminar, including Pierre Bergounioux from France, the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo (whose
Cahier pour Sarajevo
Godard had cited in his video
Je vous salue, Sarajevo
in 1993 and in
JLG/JLG
), and the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

Judith Lerner (who is played by the Franco-Israeli actress Sarah Adler) interviews Darwish in the lobby of the Holiday Inn, where he says:

Do you know why we Palestinians are famous? Because you are our enemy. The interest is in you, not in me. So we have the misfortune of having Israel as an enemy, because she has strong allies. So many we can’t even count them. And we have the good fortune of having Israel as our enemy. Because Jews are the center of interest of the world. That’s why you’ve brought us defeat and renown.

Speaking of Darwish’s on-screen remarks, Godard amplified the idea in a subsequent interview: “What does ‘the center of the world’ mean? I understand this. The Israelites”—here Godard revives an old word, one commonly used in France before World War II to designate Jews—“have something
very original, but in that thing that is ‘original’ they introduced the idea of ‘origin.’ The origin, meaning that one is the first. They had a theory about that, and so it is completely normal that what happened to them happened to them, and it’s because this happened to them that they were able to theorize it.”
¹⁶

In Godard’s shocking interpretation of Darwish’s remarks, he suggests that Jews saw themselves as the first people among the nations, the chosen people, and thus rendered themselves odious to the rest of the world; that if Jews are persecuted, they made themselves so, through their pride; that if they are hated, they incited that hatred—and then, thanks to their persecutors, they could be admired for their ability to “theorize” about persecution, as in the work of Hannah Arendt, which Godard cites in
Notre Musique
.

G
ODARD FILMED AT
the ruins of the Sarajevo library, where two million books had been destroyed in the bombing though the building’s stone shell remained standing. In an upstairs hall, converted into an improvised book exchange, two Native Americans in traditional dress appear and lament their historic losses in literary declamation (and reappear later in the film). The reference is not incidental: in the film’s credits, Godard lists the Palestinian writer Elias Sanbar, who had written about Native Americans in his own work, as the film’s “memory.”

Sanbar was born in Haifa in Palestine in 1947; Godard had met him in the Palestinian territories while filming there with Jean-Pierre Gorin in 1969–70.
¹⁷
In
Le Bien des absents
(The Absentees’ Goods), an autobiographical and historical work, Sanbar, a longtime activist in the Palestinian cause and a former negotiator for the PLO, discusses the alliance between Israel and the United States:

We had the habit of saying: “The Palestinians are the Israelis’ Jews.” But what if, in reality, they were their Redskins?

   This line of questioning rapidly turned into a path of research. It allowed me to approach the circumstances of the creation of Israel from the perspective of episodes from the birth of the United States, and I touched upon the profound connection that underlies the mirror-game between
Americanism
and Zionism.
¹⁸

Godard’s allusion in
Notre Musique
to Sanbar’s view suggests his endorsement of the idea that Israel and the United States, alone among nations, developed by conquest and forced displacements, and were thus fundamentally illegitimate and tainted. This rhetorical trick—of Sanbar, who wrote it, and of Godard, who filmed it—lent intellectual respectability
and a progressive profile to the conjunction of the ancient right-wing bug-bears of the European right: the United States and Jews.

In
Notre Musique
, Godard’s seminar at the Centre André-Malraux is based on the lectures that Godard in fact gave there during his earlier visits. In the second draft of his scenario, dated November 2002, Godard wrote a scene in which he engaged the students in a reflection on the shot and the countershot (as in the short film
Champ Contre Champ
that he had planned to make for the compilation film
Paris je t’aime
). Among the examples that he intended to use were: “A photo of Jewish refugees in 1948 on the beach in Tel Aviv, and the same photo but with Palestinian refugees the same year, on the beach at Haifa”; another pairing was “a Jewish cadaver dragged by the feet in Auschwitz, and to whom the German language gives the name of ‘Muslim.’” His idea was, as it had been in
Ici et ailleurs, JLG/JLG
, and elsewhere, to juxtapose the two pairs—German/Jew and Jew/Muslim—as if in the relation of shot and countershot. (Godard also planned to revive his former argument about Jews as the primal enemies of the visual, by referring to “Moses, who saw the bush in flames and who came down from the mountain and didn’t say, ‘This is what I saw,’ but ‘Here are the tablets of the law.’”)