| | Notre Musique (12A)
Tuesday 6th - Thursday 8th September | | | Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. France 2005.
1hr 19mins. French with English subtitles.
The enfant-terrible of the French New Wave returns to the big screen with none of his desire for pushing cinematic boundaries diminished. This experimental mixture of documentary footage and fiction challenges the human race's capacity for war and destruction. Godard uses his uncanny abilities to produce a carefully orchestrated masterpiece that includes in its highlights a devastating but beautifully collected montage of war imagery and a fascinating sequence of Godard himself in Sarajevo.
BBFC Guidance: Contains moderate images of war, injury and death. |
PREVIOUSLY ON PLANET J.L.G: ... Eloge d'amour (2001)
Laugh-out-loud funny, blindingly beautiful and punk as f*ck, Eloge is, in its own way, as spectacular as Lord of the Rings and, probably, just as meaningless. Bravo, all the same.
... and NOW, OUR MUSIC
Fatuous, interminable, verbose, brazen, meretricious sub-Dante triptych
. . .* GODARD'S "MUSIC" HITS BUM NOTE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . * AUDS HIT BY NEW WAVE ... OF TORPOR. . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . * WELCOME TO OMEGAVILLE! . . .
meretricious sub-Dante triptych:
virtuoso/crass KINGDOM 1 HELL : 10mins approx
nice editing, but boils down to "war, war is stupid!, and people are stupid!" http://www.lyricsfreak.com/c/culture-club/34615.html
BBFC Guidance: Contains moderate images of war, injury and death. :/
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radical/tedious KINGDOM 2 PURGATORY : 60mins approx
Sarajevo* this, Palestine* that, Mostar* the other, etc http://www.olympic.org/uk/games/past/index_uk.asp?OLGT=2&OLGY=1984
embarrassingly clunky "use" of Native Americans reps a Sacheen Littlefeather state of mind
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040703/PEOPLE/407030301&template=printart
> > > hasn't SARAJEVO suffered ENOUGH? Visits of intellectuals like JLG proves only marginally less deleterious than attentions of KARAZDIC et al... :(
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bucolic/bathetic KINGDOM 3 HEAVEN : 6mins approx
"Now every tree bore twelve harvests each year, and they had various and diverse fruits, and I saw the fashion of that place and all the work of God, and I saw there palm-trees of twenty cubits and others of ten cubits, and the land was seven times brighter than silver".
http://www.steliart.com/angelology_7_heavens.html :\
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"j'ai l'oeil Americain"
("I see everything")
from the poison-pen letters in H-GC's Le corbeau (1943)
# "stari, stari most..." #
* le giveaway: 70-80% of the French is subtitled /// 50% of the Arabic and of the Hebrew /// none of the Spanish, none of the Bosnian (QUESTION RAISED: how much did they pay the aged concierge-ish Bosnian woman who scuttles on, places one of the film's many books atop a table in a ruined room, rapidly exits??) /// BUT all of Godard's OWN gnomic/sub-Chomsky pronouncements are carefully subtitled. on this evidence, he may retain some talent as a lecturer. (he's not without wit). but as a film-maker, he is pretty much kaput/finito/consummatum-est, etc.
Notre Musique : winner, Fipresci prize for best film 2003/4
http://www.fipresci.org/awards/special_awards/special_awards_2004.htm
Neil Young
6th/7th/8th September, 2005
NOTRE MUSIQUE : [4/10] : aka Our Music : France 2004 : Jean-Luc GODARD : 79 mins
seen at the Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (UK), 6th September 2005 - public show
itten and directed by Jean Luc Godard, Notre Musique, a film in three parts, contemplates the themes of Dante's Divine Comedy: Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. Godard has always delighted in breaking rules and this blend of fiction, abstraction, and documentary, proves that he still delights in challenging his audience. This is a formally experimental piece, closer to conceptual art than conventional narrative film, probing humanity's urge to destroy and rebuild, and the complex relationships between image and text. Throughout, Godard pursues his unique cinematic idiom, fusing fragments of text and celluloid, fact and fiction. The result is baffling and illuminating in roughly equal measures.
"Notre Musique represents that most unfashionable and vulnerable of things: the cinema of ideas "
PETER BRADSHAW, THE GUARDIAN
... the narrator, Criswell, a forecaster who defies us to "prove this story didn't already happen" and simultaneously insists it will happen in the future (which makes about as much sense as anything else in this picture."
Danny Peary on Plan 9 From Outer Space
(Guide for the Film Fanatic, p334)
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