Notre musique
Jean-Luc Godard has had a tendency to be combative and obscure. He’s a lot calmer and steadier in his latest feature, Notre musique, opening this week at the Music Box. He’s also been making an effort to express his intentions clearly and simply in interviews, including those with the mainstream American press. Yet some viewers will probably still feel excluded and puzzled by his methods as a filmmaker and his habits as a thinker, however beautiful and powerful the results.
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A similar tone of lament is apparent in some of the last published pieces of Susan Sontag, one of Godard’s earliest and staunchest American champions. Born only a couple years after Godard, she remained a tireless social and political activist, unlike him. (She was widely criticized for some of the forms her activism took, such as staging a production of Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo when the fighting was still going on–a gesture of solidarity that can best be judged by the people it was directed toward.) Yet what she called the “seriousness” of many of her late statements is as emotionally intractable as Godard’s pessimism. I usually sympathize with their compassion for the underdog in most wars, though each offers many ways to brood about the world and few strategies for doing much else.
Insofar as text and image can be distinguished from each other, Godard’s hell consists mostly of text (specifically documents or film clips) and his heaven consists mostly of image (specifically his own attractively framed images). The first ten-minute stretch of Notre musique is essentially a silent film, complete with piano accompaniment, and the images are all found footage of warfare. It’s here above all that Godard displays his remarkable gifts as an editor. Though 20th-century conflicts dominate, the wars shown represent all wars, and, in a radical tactic, he makes no distinction between fictional and documentary footage–just as in his purgatory and heaven he freely mixes actors with people playing themselves. His heaven consists of an idyllic green forest beside a lake in no specified country where people play games, wander, munch on an apple, or read (here we see this segment’s only visible text, a French translation of David Goodis’s Street of No Return). We also see marines carrying rifles and standing guard alongside chain-link fences. Unattributed citations form the bulk of what we hear during the film, as they do in most of his work; the Tribune’s Michael Wilmington pointed out to me that the last sentence uttered in the film is a paraphrase of the final line in Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely.
Godard is relatively reclusive today, so one can’t glean much that’s journalistic from Notre musique apart from the material relating to Sarajevo and the examination of various texts. Yet he still has things to teach us about the way our responses to image and text tend to be coded and predetermined–something that’s especially evident during his illustrated lecture. Holding up a photograph of charred ruins, he asks the students where it was taken, and they suggest sites in eastern Europe and Japan. “No,” he says. “Richmond, Virginia, 1865.” Our music has clearly been playing for centuries.
