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Fifteen minutes into Jean-Luc Godard's Notre Musique, the great man is asked “Why aren't revolutions started by the most humane people?”, to which he replies “Because humane people don't start revolutions: they start libraries”, and his companion ruefully adds “And cemeteries”. Godard is in Sarajevo to deliver a lecture on “le texte et l'image”, during which he unpicks the principles governing the way cinema trivialises reality by packaging it into neatly digestible audience-friendly gobbets (satirised by a virtuoso ten-minute opening montage, which fuses genuine war footage with glossy Hollywood and Mosfilm reconstructions). And not just cinema: the ongoing reconstruction of the Mostar bridge raises similar issues (is it still the same bridge, or a memorial to its predecessor and the war that destroyed it?), as does the dilemma of an Israeli journalist contemplating suicide, a gesture that cannot help but be overloaded with symbolic implications. Crammed with far too many ideas to take in at one sitting (it arguably works better as a DVD), Notre Musique is unusually approachable for late Godard, perhaps because it deals with genuinely universal and all too topical themes.

 

Michael Brooke on 8th July 2005
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