TamTam Books News

Sunday, November 21, 2004:

In today's New York Times there is an interview with Jean-Luc Godard. Manohla Dargis interviewed him in Cannes this year - and basically they sort of discuss his new film "Norte Musique." Below is the link to the piece - and then the article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/movies/21darg.html?oref=login&oref=login&pagewanted=print&position=

November 21, 2004


Godard's Metaphysics of the Movies
By MANOHLA DARGIS





T the Cannes Film Festival in May, I received an unexpected invitation to interview Jean-Luc Godard, whose new feature, "Notre Musique," had recently screened there. Divided into three chapters or kingdoms, after Dante's "Divine Comedy," the film principally centers on two Jewish women. One has traveled from Israel to Sarajevo in order to witness reconciliation. The other, a Russian Jew engulfed in grief, sacrifices herself in the name of peace. This leads her into paradise, which is guarded by American Marines.


Mr. Godard rarely grants audiences with the press and I was given just 30 minutes. During our discussion, he occasionally puffed a cigar and was charming, combative and elusive. A translator was present, but Mr. Godard, 73, answered some questions in English; he reverted to French only when embarking on a tirade, drastically abbreviated here, on the origins of the word American. Because Mr. Godard's answers can, like his films, seem cryptic, I have annotated a few. "Notre Musique" opens Wednesday in New York.


MANOHLA DARGIS Why did you set the film in Sarajevo?


JEAN-LUC GODARD I felt like going to see places that had been injured to see how they were recovering rather than going there while the injuries were being inflicted. I'd tried to go there when I was making "For Ever Mozart," but had not succeeded. I went three times.


Q The number three seems special in the film.


A Yes.


Q Could you talk about it a little bit?


A Americans are terrible. They ask a question like: "What do you think of mathematics?" They don't want to do the work.


Q Well, the film has three chapters and two women who together create a third meaning.


A Yes, in the movies you have one image, then another, then another and then another and finally there's a past, present and future. It's a metaphor for some profound things in the history of humanity. You have production, economically and sociologically, then you have distribution, and then there is exploitation, this terrible word.


Q Can we talk about the concept of the survivor, because it's important in the movie.


A Well, they are living people who are coming from the kingdom of death, but living people. To live is to survive.


Q There are different types of survival, don't you think? There are people who survive with fury and people who survive with peace.A Oh, yes. The president of Miramax [the co-chairman Harvey Weinstein], he's a survivor.Q A survivor of a type. He's a businessman and he survives with lots of money.


A Yes, but it's difficult to survive with a lot of money.


Q Honestly, I wouldn't know.


A I don't know, either.


Q I am interested in this idea of whether, through surviving, the survivor becomes someone different from before.


A It's a little muddy, this discussion. It'd be better to come back to the film. Then we can speak in precise terms. Americans are so perfectly ...I would really like to find another word for "American." When someone says "American" they mean someone who lives between New York and Los Angeles, and not someone who lives between Montevideo and Santiago. It's because Americans have no past. The Indians who had a past had to be destroyed. So, you must find me a word for "American."


Q I call myself an Angeleno.


A She's not understanding.


Q: It may be characteristic of an American to not understand. I don't know what to do - it says America on my passport. Well, can we talk about digital video? In the film, someone asks you if the little digital camera is the savior of cinema. The remark made me think of an Abbas Kiarostami work here, "10 on Ten," in which he talks about video as the savior of his cinema.


A He made a magnificent film called "And Life Goes On.'' Afterward he lost his way. And the West did not help him survive with lots of money or, rather, lots of glory. When you say this they say that you're disparaging Kiarostami. Not at all. I'm not saying anything bad about him. I'm merely critiquing his films. During the New Wave we always spoke of the politique des auteurs. What we were interested in was this word politique, not in the political sense. What ended up enduring is the word auteur.


In 1954, François Truffaut published the article "A Certain Tendency in French Cinema" in Cahiers du Cinéma, where Godard also wrote. . In this benchmark article, Truffaut introduced the idea of "la politique des auteurs,"a doctrine that advocates a film's director as an author, but one whose world view is expressed through the mise-en-scène rather than the story.


And I find this very literary. It's almost as if [Kiarostami's] making films without a camera. If he were using the camera, he would not know what he was going to do - the camera would help him discover it. In the camera, the light is in front. In a projector, the light comes from behind. Whereas here, the light that is his intelligence comes before everything. It is not the light of the thing, like when Cézanne paints an apple or a glass. When Cézanne paints an apple, he's not saying I am painting this apple. He says nothing. He paints it. Then afterward, when he's showing it, he might say I painted an apple. So, now when I want to criticize a film I say, "It was made without a camera."


An important influence on Mr. Godard is the French critic André Bazin's 1945 essay "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," which, it's worth noting, ends with a discussion of Cézanne. For Bazin, realism in the arts resembles the Egyptian practice of embalming the dead in that each represents a struggle against death. With photography, wrote Bazin, "for the first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man. The personality of the photographer enters the proceedings only in the selection of the object to be photographed and by way of the purpose he has in mind." In this sense, all filmed images are filmed reality, which helps explain why Mr. Godard freely juxtaposes nonfiction and fiction in his films, including "Notre Musique."


Mr. Godard seems to suggest that in Mr. Kiarostami's recent work, meaning doesn't emanate from the image, the filmed reality, but from the Iranian filmmaker's status and even sense of himself as an auteur. Hence, Mr. Godard's remark that "I find this very literary" and, by implication, not cinematic.


Q Are you still passionate about movies?


A Yes, but it's difficult because one can't see many.


Q Because they're not being made or you don't have the time?


A Because generally they're all American films.


Q I understand. I'm a movie critic.


A Americans don't have critics. For me, there are only two, James Agee and Manny Farber. The rest are reviewers.


Q O.K., I am a reviewer, that's fine. I'm at the end of my time, thank you.


A So, think of the word [for American].


Q I will, though I think it will be difficult. You know, we can just have a baptism and rename the country. Will you come?


A Ah, oui.

Tosh // 6:33 PM
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