Notre Musique [DVD]

A meditation on war and violence. But still a beautiful film . Calls for peace between Israel and Palestinians.

His best in the 2000's era, and last film made with film before his switch to digital... maybe his last great film? Although "Goodbye To Language" is close... The question remains does Godard have another film in him? This is a must for all Godard enthusiasts and those studying Godard or contemporary film - especially relating to politics. It is a profound and beautiful film that should not be overlooked. It needs a full Blu-Ray treatment... hopefully in the near future.

The movie is awesome, really deep. The first time you watch is extremely challenging, complex, and interesting. The second time is fun. The third time it goes too fast and everything makes sense. I like the cd case for the Latin American market but the English subtitles are way better than the Spanish edition.

If you loved the 1960's Godard for his ultra-hip irreverence, you might find Godard's current work a bit dull. The 1960's Godard used cinema to show how we moderns use culture (novels, films, pop music) to define ourselves--in Godard's world you might say we are what cultural objects we identify with, or, more aptly, "we are what we consume". The 1960's Godard used the idioms of the Italian realist cinema (as well as American noir)in an ironic way to explore the nature of the modern. Godard's narratives tended to mimic (albeit in an ironic, detached way: the essence of hip and cool) those narrative forms that have become so ingrained in our culture as to become cliches (the gangster picture, the heist picture). Godard's characters, however, consume this stuff without the ironic detachment that wpould allow them some kind of self-awareness, and as uncritical consumers they often begin to resemble the B-literatures and B-movies that they spend so much time consuming. The result is that their lives became reproductions of the very B-literature and B-movies that they spend so much time amusing themselves with. If there is a sense of tragedy in the 1960's Godard films (Breathless, Band of Outsiders, My Life to Live...to name a few) it is due to the fact that characters in Godard films are unable to see that even the form their rebellion takes is borrowed from B-movie heroes... Though there are moments of beautiful spontaneity in some of Godard's 1960's films, these moments stand out precisely because they are so rare. Nonetheless these are the moments that make these films memorable.There are no moments of spontaneity in the late phase of Godard's career. Films like In Praise of Love and Notre Musique are less films than essays on topics that obsess a Godard who no longer believes in irreverence as a form of rebellion. The early Godard had his characters rush through the Louvre in a moment of liberatory irreverence ; the late Godard has his characters meditate on world culture as though their lives depended on it (and perhaps they do). The obsession of Godard's late phase is how humanity has failed to liberate itself from its chronic failings. This new obsession is perhaps just the continuation nof an old one. In one of his most interesting 1960's films, Pierrot Le Fou, Godard showed how obsessively man tries to liberate himself from himself by reading everything. But only in death does man achieve the ability to stand outside of himself. In Notre Musique, however, not even death offers any sort of liberation for even Heaven is a kind of a militarized zone. What Godard seems to be saying is that we cannot imagine an outside (like Heaven) from which to examine our cultural formations(those things that form us), and that even our imagination has been thoroughly colonized by culture. What the young Godard offered was a glimpse of the trap we are in and he directed us toward the few options we have left--spontaneous disruption, the beautiful gesture toward, if not the ultimate realization of, liberation. Godard's aesthetic (like the Italian neo-realists and American noirs he so loved) was always bleak but in the 1960's films there was an integer, an occasional flash, of hope. The older Godard simply shows us the trap.

It is difficult to see what makes this film great in the philosophic,it is great Godard nonetheless far more a technical master now interested in how events unfold seemlessly and at work in gradations of meanings (primarily,nouveau riche-middle class) but far from his early escapist anarchic days; the film utilizes Dante's :Divine Comedy: as a loose structural frame,movements; beginning with the "White noise"("Inferno" borrowed again) of gratuitous violence of the human spirit,the intellectual afraid of violence and all the instruments that mae it possible;bombers, F14 laying beautiful trails of red phosphorus gases,after-shocks is great visuals, although hundreds are killed in the process; we know violence is necessary,but actors here say it will remain corrosive,irreparable once begun, a permanent state of unhealing dimension no matter what place on the globe it is practiced, and it continues through today, what a legacy? simple violence from takes from Eisenstein's "Ivan the Terrible" to Vietnam, Chile circa 1973, WW2,lynchings,bodies flayed, and burnt,East Timor, Central America, you can choke on this list of places and images;but this is what preserves the neo-capitalist order,protection surveillance,information;the administered world; however the photography and textures are incredible and there is an irony there of presenting the grossest atrocities in beautiful/ugly visual takes,in short clipped bursts;moments of colorful richness, Godard might be saying "is this all that remains?", the aesthetic, well the academic Left have found the aesthetic a safe harbor to escape. But the philosophic backwardness of the globe is central to Godard's concerns for the human condition,people murdered with and without impunity,what has been torn and ruptured,the fragment, the breakable timbres of the West;and he gives an American Indian and a Spanish poet the space to further reveal what is wrong with the globe as he did 40 years ago, Nothing has changed. Here with the cab visits by a young Israeli journalist to war torn what was Yugoslavia, perhaps Tito the diplomat had something in bringing together these ethnic animosities in peace, at least to a point where one is not murdering the other in genocidic proportions.No writer in the Western press will ever admit that, and the West cannot even come near to resolving these post-Soviet problems,Gorbachev was depending upon the West for help while "perestroika" developed and only levels of opportunism resulted a rush by venture capital toward dispossessing the Eastern European masses; in fact it is better to keep divisions as they are,Neo-Cons will tell you as in the Israeli Palestinian conflict which is broached here in 'Purgatory'a transitional state to what? no one knows;more dispossessions and another dimension of backwardness one of the last Western vestiges of colonialism,where a Palestinian poet laments that the world is interested in the Jew, how they have survived, it is an enemy we cannot win against he claimed, as Israeli leaders still believe in the War of Independence, an unresolvable legacy left by the British. Too bad Israel remains simply an appendage to Washington's military establishment not concerned with its human rights abuses.Again something that interests Godard, the "wound" of the current state of the globe; yet he situates the Middle East in a distance as a metaphor in fragments for other places,and seems to want to expose what is wrong with the landscape of the West, and cannot see a way out of this impasse/ paradigm, except the final 'Paradise'a green field and forest, again the classical aesthetic at work with Washington as protectorate from evil.Here we see young teenagers throwing a ball around in bathing suits, an American soldier with a rifle sharing an apple, while the water slowly laps against the shore, beautifully,in peace in Paradise.

I have not watched it so i cannot say how good it is what do you think? yours truly Roderic