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

Best Screenplay and Sarah Adler one for Best Actress at the European Film Awards, and the film won the Grand Prix for Best Film of the Year from FIPRESCI, the international film critics’ circle. Notre Musique was warmly received at the 2004 New York Film Festival; Manohla Dargis of the New York Times simply denied its doctrinaire content:
Like a benevolent pedagogue, [Godard] draws dotted lines between his preoccupations, points in many directions, suggests various means of interpretation and delivers multiple references. But what he adamantly refuses to do, both in this film and elsewhere, is draw our conclusions for us, which may be the highest compliment a filmmaker can pay his audience. 22
    It was released theatrically in New York on November 24, 2004, to enthusiastic reviews. Andrew Sarris, however, writing in the New York Observer , criticized the film’s tendentious politics.
In Notre Musique , Mr. Godard talks about Jews as if they’d emerged triumphantly from the death camps to promptly drive the Palestinians out of their homeland… I am frankly surprised that most of my colleagues haven’t seen through Mr. Godard’s evasive paradoxes, the banal anti-“Zionist”/anti-American prejudices that he shares with his countrymen, whether French or Swiss. 23
    But Godard was, in his own way, again relaunched. He returned to Sarajevo, this time in the company of Sanbar, in September 2003. He joined Sanbar, at the writer’s request, at the opening of an exhibit of photographs of Palestine at a theater in Le Havre, where Godard also arranged screenings of several films of his choosing (including Demi-Tarif by Isild Le Besco, The Brown Bunny by Vincent Gallo, Level Five by Chris Marker, Du Soleil pour les gueux by Alain Guiraudie, Saltimbank by Jean-Claude Biette, Les Naufragés de la D 17 by Luc Moullet, and three films by Jean-Pierre Gorin: Poto and Cabengo, Routine Pleasures , and My Crasy Life ). Gorin (as well as Le Besco and Guiraudie) was present. Asked about the attacks of September 11 by a spectator who said that they were “staged by a demon,” Godard responded, “I don’t think anything about September 11. On the other hand, the word ‘demon’ makes me think of Maxwell’s equations.”
    Prior to the release of Notre Musique , Godard had been widely—albeit wrongly—received as a filmmaker who was out of touch with the contemporary world. In 2001, Jean-Michel Frodon, former film critic at Le Monde and editor in chief of Cahiers du cinéma , considered Godard’s subject no longer to be “ici et ailleurs,” here and elsewhere, but merely “ici et ici,” here and here. 24 But now Godard was hailed as an engaged artist, and he pursued that engagement, trotting himself out as a celebrity symbol of the Palestinian cause. Thus, unlike his militancy in the wake of 1968, when he sacrificed his public profile and his artistic activity to pursue with a Spartan self-denial his principles, he now enjoyed with his social activism a favorable and prominentprofile that he could no longer maintain through his best artwork alone. The fault was that of the times, which had grown blind and deaf to the deep and subtle virtues of that work; but Godard was no longer ready or able to endure the isolation that this obstinate artistic quest now cost.
    W HEN N OTRE M USIQUE was released, Godard announced his next project: a museum collaboration with Beaubourg, to be called “Collages de France”—Collages of France, but also a pun on “Collège de France” (the research institution that had spurned him in the mid-1990s). He described the collaboration as “courses ‘exhibited’ by Jean-Luc Godard,” a nine-month series, intended to run from October 2005 through June 2006, to comprise Godard’s discussions with scientists, philosophers, artists. Each episode would also feature gallery installations of images and texts, together with videotapes made specifically for each monthly installation, as well as daily