May 04, 2006
Notre Musique
We Are the Music Makers
A night or two ago, after an anti-racism forum, a few friends of mine went clubbing with a favorite professor, to forget the learning and the knowledge for a night and cut-loose. I stayed home, a little sad and introspective like I've been lately, and took in Jean-Luc Godard's Notre Musique [2004].
The above scenarios could just as well scenes from Godard's repertoire. Young leftist students party down, like Masculine-Feminine or La Chinoise; and another young, disillusioned — but recovering — ultra-leftist (anarchist, really) sits through a lecture from the Good Professor Godard himself, just like in, well, Notre Musique.
In the film, Godard actually gives a lecture. He's long ditched the trademark shades, but his lecture is still given in half-darkness. The occasion of his lecture is a European arts conference in Sarajevo, and the film has found Godard there by following the pursuits of its two female protagonists, Judith Lerner [Sarah Adler], a journalist from Tel Aviv; and Olga Brodsky [Nade Dieu], a French-speaking Jew of Russian descent. A lecture is not all that takes place in Sarajevo; there are visits to a bombed out library, the Mostar bridge under restoration, embassies, and interviews and dialogues with poets, translators and diplomats. In between, the camera tracks in beautiful color over cars and public transit.
All the above occurs in the second of three segments in the film — denoted with a title card, following Dante's Inferno, "Kindom 2: Purgatory." The opening segment, "Kingdom 1: Hell," is a montage of war footage throughout film history — both enacted and real. What lingers in my mind is Godard's infamous annoyance with Spielberg's Schindler's List. I gather that Godard offers Notre Musique as one alternative to Spielberg's cinema; by opening the film with this sequence, then following it with art and introspection, is like saying the recreation of history's wounds by Hollywood, to render them so straight-forwardly (like perhaps the latest United 93) does nothing to salve them. In behing set in Sarajevo, Godard casts art and introspection as what lingers after the action; it is the true occasion for the wounds of war to heal.
And yet action is what an audience feeds on; it keeps the blood-pumping. A French diplomat (I think) in the film ponders how a writer never knows what s/he's writing about, because s/he's removed from; yet the problem is that those caught in the action nary have second thoughts about what they are doing. Godard knows he hasn't the answer; during his lecture, the camera pans the tired faces of his audience. We can yawn along, but Professor Godard has his eye on you; as you doze, you are unaware that he's drawn the rest of the audience's attention toward you. You can feel ashamed, even stupid. Many will leave the film running. More will turn it off.
Me? I just felt stupid. My generation's MTV-adled upbringing is supposed to have saddled us with a penchant for cuts quicker than a Liz Taylor honeymoon. We're supposed to process information flows faster than the Flash, or hound down hyperlinks like Takeru Kobayashi after hotdogs. But no matter how many dumb pop-references I can muster, none of it has prepared me for the intertextual onslaught of Notre Musique. For this reason, I find it a struggle to write about Notre Musique. It's intimidating, and I have not the time or talent to author the likes of this infinitely illuminating (if fumblingly written) essay.
I gather that the film makes more sense the more knowledge we have of its constant references — to art, to war, to film, to colonialism. Sometimes its references seem too fast for depth, almost tucked away in a footnote, like the few American Indians in the film who appear like ghosts to give lectures of their own. Here Godard could have introduced us to, not a ghost, but a voice of someone living, like he does through an interview with the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.
Maybe Godard is in a hurry to let us not forget anything, and that America's genesis was, after all, in the minds of bloody Europeans. Every element is a reminder of something else, and there are enough elements to give any viewer a finger hold — struggling to grasp it leaves me breathless. In one instance, the story is told of a woman who enters a cinema in Jerusalem, a bag on her shoulder, and shouts a bomb threat; the audience is allowed to go she says, or they may stay with her. All choose to go, and the marksmen come and shoot her. When her bag is searched, there is no bomb — only books.
I won't say who the woman is, only because it's about the only true moment of cinematic surprise the film offers us; and while I know her name, I can hardly remember anything else. But the woman's story might illustrate the artists search for relevancy. Maybe the success of her plot hinged on the hope that someone would stay with her in the theater, someone to share ideas with; or perhaps she knew she would die all along.
Whatever we make of it, her plot had purpose. After a fashion, I wonder what my own purpose is. I am wondering whether my night would have been better spent with my friends and the professor out late clubbing; Notre Musique translates into English as "Our Music," after all and surely 80s Night captures the music of my generation more than a stuffy French flick. Which am I — a scenester or, huddled, home alone, a mise-en-scenester?
The film has its own ideas about the ends of purpose. We meet the woman one last time, in heaven, in paradise. Remember the green forest in Godard's Weekend had its young hippy guerillas eating the bourgeoisie to the beat of a funky drummer. Now, the forest in Notre Musique comes to us as "Kingdom 3: Paradise," and it is just as green. It even has its own prancing youth. But the action is now elsewhere, the youth are not political players, because this forest is also a secluded beach defended by young American soldiers. This paradise is privileged; the woman may have isolated herself until her purpose was extinguished.
Purpose, paradise, privilege - at last we're left to pick up the pieces, to wonder how the three come together. A night at an anti-racism forum; a night out on the town. A young American, but not a scenester; I stayed home. But a mise-en-scenester? I realize my mistake was in watching Notre Musique alone; like purpose, paradise, and privilege, it is a collective affair, and its greatest meanings would necessarily arise in whatever dialogues arise after watching it with others. Godard's last hope is that we can come together for more then just making war, or simply dancing for that matter; we have music yet to make together.
