Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (121 page)

In the film as he actually shot it in the spring of 2003, Godard’s seminar was indeed centered on the concept of shot and countershot: “The shot and the countershot are very well-known figures of cinema. But if you look attentively at these two photos from the Hawks film”—two stills from
His Girl Friday
, one showing Cary Grant, the other Rosalind Russell—“you’ll see that in fact it’s the same thing twice, because the director is incapable of seeing the difference between a man and a woman.” He adds, “The worst thing is when it’s a question of two similar things”—and then shows two images, one a news photo of refugees on the road, which he labels “Kosovo,” and the other, a painting of Mary and Joseph’s Flight to Egypt, labeled, “Egypt”:

Take, for example, two news photographs which show the same moment in history. One sees that in truth, truth has two faces. If you want my opinion, it’s because those who keep the books are only accountants. What’s more, Balzac talks in his book about the Great Ledger. The tables of the Law, the Holy Scriptures, the people of the book.

Here, Godard shows an image of an inmate in a concentration camp and labels it “Jew,” then (after a shot of a student’s hand and arm holding a photo) he shows another labeled “Muslim.” The commentary continues:

For example, in 1948, the Israelites walked in the water toward the Promised Land. The Palestinians walked in the water toward drowning. Shot and countershot. Shot and countershot. The Jewish people rejoined fiction. The Palestinian people, documentary. One says that the facts speak for themselves, but Céline said, “Alas, not for long.” He said that already in 1936. Because already the field [
champ
, also meaning “shot”] of text had covered up that of the image.

Godard once again dragged out the riff he had used in
Ici et ailleurs
and cited in person to Yasser Arafat in 1970, making much of the fact that Jews in Auschwitz referred to the near-dead as “Muselmen”—a word for Muslims. However, in interviews regarding
Notre Musique
, Godard took pains to distance himself from the implication in the film that Israel does to Palestinians what Germany did to Jews:

But look out: because of two photos, people have been suggesting that I wanted to say that Muslims are enduring the same thing as the Jews did sixty years ago. But I slipped a shot in between these two photos. One must not be over-hasty in making associations.
¹⁹

The shot that he “slipped in” (of a student’s arm and hand) does briefly separate the two images and does blur, in Godard’s stringently literal definition, the connection of the two as shot and countershot, or as “the same thing twice.” In another interview, Godard went even further to deny that he was making such “associations.”

I bring together two situations and they say: “Godard asserts that the Shoah that the Jews endured and the Nakba that the Palestinians endured are the same thing.” Of course not! That’s completely idiotic. The shot and the countershot do not signify any equivalence, any equality, they merely pose a question.
²⁰

In these interviews from 2004, Godard says exactly the opposite of what he says in the film to the students in Sarajevo. The idea that he might have seemed to equate Palestinian exile with the extermination of Jews was clearly troubling to Godard; yet in fact the rest of his remarks in the seminar is at least as inflammatory. The charge that “the people of the book” are “the accountants” whose insensitive and self-interested record of history causes it to be understood wrongly bears the unmistakable overtone of rhetoric against the Jewish demons of legend, one classic and the other modern: the Jewish usurer and the Jewish media.

A
S THE SECOND
part of the film progresses, Judith Lerner travels to Mostar to view the ruins of the bridge, the beginning of its reconstruction, and a
presentation by the French architect Gilles Pecqueux to a group of school-children on the history of the bridge and its rebuilding. There, she sees a group of Native Americans who stand sentinel at the banks of the Neretva River. She also takes note of another woman, whom she thinks she recognizes without ever having seen her before. This is a Jewish woman of Russian origin and French nationality named Olga (played by Nade Dieu), the niece of Godard’s translator, Ramos Garcia (Rony Kramer). She has arrived in Sara-jevo en route to Jerusalem and talks to her uncle of her plans for suicide.

Godard returns to Switzerland and is working in his garden when he receives a call from Ramos Garcia. He learns that in Jerusalem, a woman entered a movie theater with a backpack and gave the patrons five minutes to leave, but invited any who were willing “to die for peace” to stay with her. Garcia reported that the theater emptied out and Israeli sharpshooters gunned down the woman, whose backpack was found to contain only books. This woman, he was sure, was his niece, Olga, and the false bomb threat was her form of suicide.

Originally, Godard said, he had intended this deed to be done by Judith Lerner, the Israeli character, but the actress, Sarah Adler, refused. So Godard created a different character to do it and brought in another actress to play her.

The film’s third and concluding section, “Paradise,” features U.S. Marines guarding a fenced-in wooded area near the sea. Olga arrives, and a marine pretends to stamp the inside of her wrist, letting her pass through the gate. In this “paradise,” young people frolic in bathing suits and a young man reads a book by David Goodis,
Sans espoir de retour (Street of No Return;
literally, “without hope of return”). She finds another young man at the edge of the water. He is eating an apple and offers her a bite.

N
OTRE
M
USIQUE
is a film of prewar prejudices adorned with postwar resentments—and, like much else in the history of anti-Semitism, with personal frustrations. Godard attempted to explain his motives in making the film in the course of interviews he gave at the time of its Cannes screening in 2004.

I wanted the film to bear the trace of the Israel-Palestine conflict, a conflict I have felt close to for a long time, together with Anne-Marie Miéville… As marginals, expelled from our cinematographic garden by what is called the American cinema, I feel close to them, the Vietnamese, the Palestinians… As creators, we have become homeless. For a long time I said that I was on the margin, but that the margin is what holds the pages together. Today I have fallen from that margin, I feel that I’m between the pages.
²¹

As Godard suggested, Palestinian dispossession had personal symbolism for him. This is also true of Sarajevo, the importance of which lay, for him, in its burned-out library, its usefulness in representation, its symbolic significance as a victimized city. In the end, he sees nothing in Sarajevo, whereas the glimpse that he provides of himself cultivating his garden in Switzerland conveys the sense of relief at his restored distance from that fallen, chaotic, struggling world—from the torments of modernity. In
Eloge de l’amour
, Godard attempted to reconcile himself with the city, in which he had not filmed in decades; in
Notre Musique
, Godard returned to agrarian fantasy.

Godard attributed the triptych structure of
Notre Musique
to an inclination that he shared with Miéville, who was credited with the film’s “artistic direction,” and whose
Nous sommes tous encore ici
and
Après la réconciliation
were also in three parts. The film’s hectoring tone is itself réminiscent of the dogmatic partisanship of Miéville (such as she expressed in
Ici et ailleurs, France tour détour deux enfants
, and
Soft and Hard
).

Notre Musique
is a diatribe under the guise of a meditation, a work of vituperative prejudice disguised as calm reflection, a work of venom dressed up as a masque. After the rejection of his best, loftiest, most conciliatory work,
Eloge de l’amour
, Godard took his rejection out on the old targets, Jews. Following
Eloge de l’amour
, Godard was isolated; he needed to reconnect with a milieu of French intellectuals and French youths and he found a recognizable group of sympathizers at a time that paroxysms of anti-American and anti-Israeli rhetoric swept through France as the war in Iraq seemed inevitable. (Virtually all protests there were not only against war in Iraq but brought together Palestinian demands and the indemnity of Saddam Hussein, with whom Yasser Arafat had sided in the Gulf War.) The film, which identified Godard with that line, was successful. With its ethnic politics, unambiguous rhetoric, and intellectual demagogy,
Notre Musique
put Godard back in the limelight.

The film was invited to the Cannes festival in 2004. (In his press conference there, Godard criticized the festival for requiring the subtitling of films in English, and claimed that non-Francophones would only be able to grasp “five or six percent” of
Notre Musique
.) Although it did not win a prize at Cannes, the film was the subject of immediate, favorable attention, receiving reviews such as few works by Godard had won. It earned Godard a nomination for Best Screenplay and Sarah Adler one for Best Actress at the European Film Awards, and the film won the Grand Prix for Best Film of the Year from FIPRESCI, the international film critics’ circle.
Notre Musique
was warmly received at the 2004 New York Film Festival; Manohla Dargis of the
New York Times
simply denied its doctrinaire content:

Like a benevolent pedagogue, [Godard] draws dotted lines between his preoccupations, points in many directions, suggests various means of interpretation and delivers multiple references. But what he adamantly refuses to do, both in this film and elsewhere, is draw our conclusions for us, which may be the highest compliment a filmmaker can pay his audience.
²²

It was released theatrically in New York on November 24, 2004, to enthusiastic reviews. Andrew Sarris, however, writing in the
New York Observer
, criticized the film’s tendentious politics.

In
Notre Musique
, Mr. Godard talks about Jews as if they’d emerged triumphantly from the death camps to promptly drive the Palestinians out of their homeland… I am frankly surprised that most of my colleagues haven’t seen through Mr. Godard’s evasive paradoxes, the banal anti-“Zionist”/anti-American prejudices that he shares with his countrymen, whether French or Swiss.
²³

But Godard was, in his own way, again relaunched. He returned to Sarajevo, this time in the company of Sanbar, in September 2003. He joined Sanbar, at the writer’s request, at the opening of an exhibit of photographs of Palestine at a theater in Le Havre, where Godard also arranged screenings of several films of his choosing (including
Demi-Tarif
by Isild Le Besco,
The Brown Bunny
by Vincent Gallo,
Level Five
by Chris Marker,
Du Soleil pour les gueux
by Alain Guiraudie,
Saltimbank
by Jean-Claude Biette,
Les Naufragés de la D 17
by Luc Moullet, and three films by Jean-Pierre Gorin:
Poto and Cabengo, Routine Pleasures
, and
My Crasy Life
). Gorin (as well as Le Besco and Guiraudie) was present. Asked about the attacks of September 11 by a spectator who said that they were “staged by a demon,” Godard responded, “I don’t think anything about September 11. On the other hand, the word ‘demon’ makes me think of Maxwell’s equations.”

Prior to the release of
Notre Musique
, Godard had been widely—albeit wrongly—received as a filmmaker who was out of touch with the contemporary world. In 2001, Jean-Michel Frodon, former film critic at
Le Monde
and editor in chief of
Cahiers du cinéma
, considered Godard’s subject no longer to be “ici et ailleurs,” here and elsewhere, but merely “ici et ici,” here and here.
²⁴
But now Godard was hailed as an engaged artist, and he pursued that engagement, trotting himself out as a celebrity symbol of the Palestinian cause. Thus, unlike his militancy in the wake of 1968, when he sacrificed his public profile and his artistic activity to pursue with a Spartan self-denial his principles, he now enjoyed with his social activism a favorable and prominent
profile that he could no longer maintain through his best artwork alone. The fault was that of the times, which had grown blind and deaf to the deep and subtle virtues of that work; but Godard was no longer ready or able to endure the isolation that this obstinate artistic quest now cost.

W
HEN
N
OTRE
M
USIQUE
was released, Godard announced his next project: a museum collaboration with Beaubourg, to be called “Collages de France”—Collages of France, but also a pun on “Collège de France” (the research institution that had spurned him in the mid-1990s). He described the collaboration as “courses ‘exhibited’ by Jean-Luc Godard,” a nine-month series, intended to run from October 2005 through June 2006, to comprise Godard’s discussions with scientists, philosophers, artists. Each episode would also feature gallery installations of images and texts, together with videotapes made specifically for each monthly installation, as well as daily updates.

In his statement of purpose for the exhibit, he brought up what he called “a question” by the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas: “in the ‘I think, therefore I am,’ is the ‘I’ of ‘I am’ no longer the same as the ‘I’ of ‘I think,’ and why?” He then suggested, “The project Collages de France will seek to respond to this kind of question, more profoundly than the philosopher, in a sort of proof by nine courses.” The intellectual ambition and philosophical scope of the enterprise by which Godard intended “to show and to demonstrate several aspects that have made and unmade ‘la cinématographie’” was grand. Once again, what Godard conceived as the cinema’s privileged relation to both reality and the imaginary made it the subject of subjects, the means by which all things and all ideas could be considered in their entirety.