Grand Prix
Best Film of the Year 2004

Jean-Luc Godard's "Notre Musique"
By Ronald Bergan

Most passionate cinéphiles need only to see the initials JLG to recognise whose they are. Not many living film directors can claim such fame and familiarity. Jean Luc Godard has been intriguing, exciting and provoking critics and audiences for over 40 years, and every new film of this septuagenarian is still an event.

Godard is not only a part of cinema history (histoire du cinéma), he is also cinema's most important historian and critic through the language of film, just as Picasso was art's most important historian and critic through painting. Two or three things we know about Godard are that he has always striven to go beyond film, beyond the image into the other arts and into politics, and that he has always been concerned with the complexities of communication, thus formulating a genuine revolutionary language freed from the dominant bourgeois culture. His didactic aim is not only political but philosophical and social, a challenge to audiences to think and see differently.

"Notre Musique" (Our Music) is divided into three Dantesque cantos: Hell, Purgatory, Paradise. Hell is images of war, real and manufactured; Purgatory in represented by contemporary Sarajevo, and the reconstruction of the symbolic Mostar Bridge; Paradise is where a young woman finds peace, ironically, on a small beach fenced off and guarded by US marines. Like music, too, it is constructed like a three-part visual symphony with themes and variations, taking in Bosnia, the Middle East and the treatment of Native Americans.

Godard's inimitable voice is heard on the soundtrack, like in so many of his films, but he is also in attendance, acting (?) the role of a film director called Jean-Luc Godard on a visit to Sarajevo, where he gives a brilliant and witty lecture on cinema. Yet Godard's presence, whether he narrates and/or appears, like all real auteurs, is felt in every sequence in every film in his entire oeuvre, imitating the first syllable of his name.

What is astonishing is that Godard is both forever young (he is continuing to experiment with new techniques such as digital video) and never more mature (in the way he handles the material and in his recent preoccupation with themes of mortality).

The film is a poetic contemplative essay on serious contemporary issues (genocide, war and imperialism) and the eternal verities such as birth, love and death. Of course, as a true cinéphile/cinéaste, Godard reveals how these great issues have been presented in fiction films, especially the omnipresent Hollywood, also part of our collective consciousness. Each person's individual history is part of our collective history. His story (history) has become our story, his music is also our music.

Ronald Bergan
© FIPRESCI 2004

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