Read Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard for Free Online

another actress to play her.
    The film’s third and concluding section, “Paradise,” features U.S. Marines guarding a fenced-in wooded area near the sea. Olga arrives, and a marine pretends to stamp the inside of her wrist, letting her pass through the gate. In this “paradise,” young people frolic in bathing suits and a young man reads a book by David Goodis, Sans espoir de retour (Street of No Return; literally, “without hope of return”). She finds another young man at the edge of the water. He is eating an apple and offers her a bite.
    N OTRE M USIQUE is a film of prewar prejudices adorned with postwar resentments—and, like much else in the history of anti-Semitism, with personal frustrations. Godard attempted to explain his motives in making the film in the course of interviews he gave at the time of its Cannes screening in 2004.
I wanted the film to bear the trace of the Israel-Palestine conflict, a conflict I have felt close to for a long time, together with Anne-Marie Miéville… As marginals, expelled from our cinematographic garden by what is called the American cinema, I feel close to them, the Vietnamese, the Palestinians… As creators, we have become homeless. For a long time I said that I was on the margin, but that the margin is what holds the pages together. Today I have fallen from that margin, I feel that I’m between the pages. 21
    As Godard suggested, Palestinian dispossession had personal symbolism for him. This is also true of Sarajevo, the importance of which lay, for him, in its burned-out library, its usefulness in representation, its symbolic significance as a victimized city. In the end, he sees nothing in Sarajevo, whereas the glimpse that he provides of himself cultivating his garden in Switzerland conveys the sense of relief at his restored distance from that fallen, chaotic, struggling world—from the torments of modernity. In Eloge de l’amour , Godard attempted to reconcile himself with the city, in which he had not filmed in decades; in Notre Musique , Godard returned to agrarian fantasy.
    Godard attributed the triptych structure of Notre Musique to an inclination that he shared with Miéville, who was credited with the film’s “artistic direction,” and whose Nous sommes tous encore ici and Après la réconciliation were also in three parts. The film’s hectoring tone is itself réminiscent of the dogmatic partisanship of Miéville (such as she expressed in Ici et ailleurs, France tour détour deux enfants , and Soft and Hard ).
    Notre Musique is a diatribe under the guise of a meditation, a work of vituperative prejudice disguised as calm reflection, a work of venom dressed up as a masque. After the rejection of his best, loftiest, most conciliatory work, Eloge de l’amour , Godard took his rejection out on the old targets, Jews. Following Eloge de l’amour , Godard was isolated; he needed to reconnect with a milieu of French intellectuals and French youths and he found a recognizable group of sympathizers at a time that paroxysms of anti-American and anti-Israeli rhetoric swept through France as the war in Iraq seemed inevitable. (Virtually all protests there were not only against war in Iraq but brought together Palestinian demands and the indemnity of Saddam Hussein, with whom Yasser Arafat had sided in the Gulf War.) The film, which identified Godard with that line, was successful. With its ethnic politics, unambiguous rhetoric, and intellectual demagogy, Notre Musique put Godard back in the limelight.
    The film was invited to the Cannes festival in 2004. (In his press conference there, Godard criticized the festival for requiring the subtitling of films in English, and claimed that non-Francophones would only be able to grasp “five or six percent” of Notre Musique .) Although it did not win a prize at Cannes, the film was the subject of immediate, favorable attention, receiving reviews such as few works by Godard had won. It earned Godard a nomination for