Notre Musique Reviews

[Highly rated reviewer]

Can the little digital cameras save cinema?

A questionner asks the great director Godard at one point and he does not reply. This must be deliberate and it is almost as if cienema has died for Godard and he is all washed up with his art. If this reading is close to being correct he has left one of the most significant bodies of work in the (short) history of cinema from the 1950's on. The movie is divided into three based on Dante's Inferno: Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. The first part of the movie consists in a collage of various war images and situations accompanied by a musical score (Tchiakovsky and Sibelius). As usual with Godard the overall use of music is superb. The images are shocking but somehow muted and poor quality. Some sentences are said off screen. 'Death can be seen in two different ways: as the possible of the impossible or as the impossible of the possible'. Is this clever or dumb: I don't know but all this is certainly a bit difficult to follow. The second part shows us the crossed stories of various meetings in Sarajevo for the Book Week: Godard himself, a young Israeli journalist, a Palestinian and a Spanish poets, a young Hebrew girl, a Hebrew translator with Egyptian origins, some American natives, and various other people speak about their experiences, their hopes, war, peace, poetry, history, life, death, cinema, reconciliation. A rather disreputable looking Godard gives a lecture to some cinema students and shows them photographs from Howard Hawks 'His Girl Friday'. You may or may not have fun working out what all this is about. The third part takes place in a paradise and shows us a girl who has been killed in a cinema by Israeli snipers who suspected her of being a suicide bomber. She had a red bag with her and the soldier/police thought it contained a bomb. In fact there were just books in it. Shades of events at Stockwell tube circa July 2005. This version of paradise is fenced and guarded by US soldiers. Yes, just like the world is except this is not a paradise and for some may even be hell itself and the US may be the devil incarnate. So, provocative stuff from old Jean Luc. Needless to say I highly recommend a rental to all his fans with a severe health warning to all the rest of you - probably 99% of the cinema audience.

[Highly rated reviewer]

Our music is cinema

The great Jean-Luc continues with his relatively mellow final (presumably) phase, with this intense, profound, and only occasionally irritating meditation on the image, and its position in modern society.

In the first section, 'Hell', cinema in all its forms (fiction, documentary, newsreel) is implicated in the wars it records/imagines. We are all guilty and all are sucked into the images and their delusions.

The body of the film, 'Purgatory', takes place, appositely, in Sarajevo, a town recorded in all its ruinous majesty by Godard, who tells us of his own visit there, and intermingles various fictions - his 'lecture' to a group of film students; a Jewish girl with a camera; another trying to make sense of it all, and contemplating suicide as the ultimate political statement.

And here Godard muses, too, on the future of film, finding himself with no answer to the question of whether the democracy of the digital camera will bring benefits, or just more thoughtless imagery.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this film (Godard's oeuvre has become increasingly hard work) and was stimulated by it, but, as the other poster on this page says, most people just aren't going to get it. For those who do, it's a veritable treasure trove of ideas.

A trove of ideas, yes - but some are very dubious.

This is - as with most of Godard's work - a beauitfully made film with a great deal of interesting ideas. However, a great deal of these ideas are not fully-fleshed out here and, unfortunately, this leads Godard's anti-Zionism often into the more unsavoury world of plain anti-Semitism. At times it is as if he is suggesting that 'The Jew' came out of World War II victorious due to a romanticism associated with the defeated, which then allows Israel unlimited support for its own nefarious means against

'The Muslim'. Godard's shot counter shot lecture does raise the interesting opposition of what he calls 'the Jewish fiction' (i.e. The Land of Israel promised by God to descendents of Abraham and Jacob) and the reality of the Palestinians - fiction-certainty to documentary-uncertainty. However, as I have said above there is much that leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.

[Highly rated reviewer]

Can the little digital cameras save cinema?

A questionner asks the great director Godard at one point and he does not reply. This must be deliberate and it is almost as if cienema has died for Godard and he is all washed up with his art. If this reading is close to being correct he has left one of the most significant bodies of work in the (short) history of cinema from the 1950's on. The movie is divided into three based on Dante's Inferno: Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. The first part of the movie consists in a collage of various war images and situations accompanied by a musical score (Tchiakovsky and Sibelius). As usual with Godard the overall use of music is superb. The images are shocking but somehow muted and poor quality. Some sentences are said off screen. 'Death can be seen in two different ways: as the possible of the impossible or as the impossible of the possible'. Is this clever or dumb: I don't know but all this is certainly a bit difficult to follow. The second part shows us the crossed stories of various meetings in Sarajevo for the Book Week: Godard himself, a young Israeli journalist, a Palestinian and a Spanish poets, a young Hebrew girl, a Hebrew translator with Egyptian origins, some American natives, and various other people speak about their experiences, their hopes, war, peace, poetry, history, life, death, cinema, reconciliation. A rather disreputable looking Godard gives a lecture to some cinema students and shows them photographs from Howard Hawks 'His Girl Friday'. You may or may not have fun working out what all this is about. The third part takes place in a paradise and shows us a girl who has been killed in a cinema by Israeli snipers who suspected her of being a suicide bomber. She had a red bag with her and the soldier/police thought it contained a bomb. In fact there were just books in it. Shades of events at Stockwell tube circa July 2005. This version of paradise is fenced and guarded by US soldiers. Yes, just like the world is except this is not a paradise and for some may even be hell itself and the US may be the devil incarnate. So, provocative stuff from old Jean Luc. Needless to say I highly recommend a rental to all his fans with a severe health warning to all the rest of you - probably 99% of the cinema audience.

A trove of ideas, yes - but some are very dubious.

This is - as with most of Godard's work - a beauitfully made film with a great deal of interesting ideas. However, a great deal of these ideas are not fully-fleshed out here and, unfortunately, this leads Godard's anti-Zionism often into the more unsavoury world of plain anti-Semitism. At times it is as if he is suggesting that 'The Jew' came out of World War II victorious due to a romanticism associated with the defeated, which then allows Israel unlimited support for its own nefarious means against

'The Muslim'. Godard's shot counter shot lecture does raise the interesting opposition of what he calls 'the Jewish fiction' (i.e. The Land of Israel promised by God to descendents of Abraham and Jacob) and the reality of the Palestinians - fiction-certainty to documentary-uncertainty. However, as I have said above there is much that leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.