Notre Musique
01.21.08 (4:49 am) [edit]I had a chance to revisit the movie Notre Musique (Jean-Luc Godard 2004) thanx to Netflix. This time the movie hit me so close to home for the dead on theme that I could not find anywhere but in this film maker's work.
The movie is set in Sarajevo and about an Israeli journalist who visits the war-torn zone, where became the recently produced ruins of of two major ideologies; one was the former Yugoslavia where the ideology of Eutopia was magically materialized and vanished. Another was the miraculous harmony in the community where constituted of the people from different backgrounds regarding the ethnicities and the religous creeds. (Well, this description sounds somehow redundant given the ideology of Communism was supposed to represent all of them after all.)
The frightening look at the scars of the city of Sarajevo brought tears to my eyes for the beauty it marvelously maintained. The structure of the movie could be divided into three parts as the semi-titles imply. But I took another take; the two women, an Israeli jornalist and Olga, the participant of the forum where Godard lectured on what images could mean to human psyche, seem to be rather important and pivotal to the narrative structure. These two women's physical resemblence brought a suspicion if the maker intentionally employed the two to show the alter-egos of each women, who were from the similar backgrounds, and would take the total different paths after the stay in Sarajevo. One was maintaining rahter an individualized view on the conflict Jewish people got involved in and responsible as well in the history, which almost looked as if she was slightly indifferent. (There was a scene where it was implied that she was not familiar with Hanna Arendt. I know I should knock just because she was void of the essential vocabulary in the Jewish journalism tradition. But I believed the maker intetionally added this tirivial info into the sequence of plots and it might infer some significance.) The latter ended up involving herself in a suicide demonstration that was obviously inspired by the lecture and the knowledge she gained, which ultimately brought her pain and sympathy based on the insight 'truth has double sides.'
The interview the first woman conducted with Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian poet, was so lucid and insightful that I took it as one of the maker's stands on the world famous comflict. "I want to speak in the name of the absentee (of the history)." It sounds so familiar that I had to question where I heard such familiar discourse. The answer was Edward Said, who so influenced me for the unconpromising life as well as his ultimate courage to say it to the world. It is no surprising to hear it coming from another Palestinian voice that apparently influenced Said, and myself
l'intervention devine
01.20.08 (11:04 am) [edit]Where is my discipline these days? Initially, I had felt inihibited to put down on what were going on in my life, given all the unlawful materials and where I was situated in the map of the criminality. The next thing that I knew was that I lead a life of autism; I was literally dysfunctional due to all the drugs that I professionally took regularly, or what is commonly called addiction? I was in the market knowing that could kill anybody who got involved and I was not an exception: I found myself not being able to leave. Typical effect of c---k c---ine. Funny creatures we are.
Anyway, I have been seeing Palestinian movies of late as many as possible and I cannot get enough of them. I am planning to review those here for two reasons;
1) to promote the view of the politically opressed side of the area. Yeah, I am the advocate of their rights in the area. I never granted Isreal.
2) to discipline myself once again and to rehabilitate, I need a subject that I feel passionate about.
A while back, I found some intriguing fragments that I seemed to have jotted down in my jornal book. That obviously was from sometime that I could no longer articulate, so it felt like I was on some sort of recovering process in an old ruin. The note was on a Palestinian movie titled Rana's Wedding. The movie captured this modern woman who had to manage to get married in rush to her boyfriend, as oppsed to someone, or anyone from a list of men her father selected for her, matteroffactly, in order to get married just to keep her residentrial right in Ramallah. Because the depiction of the process including all the trouble and pain she went through was very dry and unsentimental and her attitude towards the marriage was rather up to date than traditional, timid or wailing, all the more, the last scene where they managed to get the wedding completed on time (note that this was the crucial part. The whole marriage process was on this clockwork and it would burst---she had to leave with her father---) and finally smashed a dish on the land of Ramallah made me break down for the pain, thrill and joy they must feel just to survive day by day there. The reality that the movie captured in the land, just living there and maintaining one's become such a challenge when none of their rights were protected never left me, and I surely remember that. What I hurriedly jotted down seemed to be about it. How horrible it must feel to have to make one's home when those houses were perpetually demolished one after another for no reason. The dignity that I saw in the people's life there literally touched me. I never forgot this movie and how I felt. But I completely forgot that I had writted something on it. Reading this small note made me think how touched I was to jot it down so that I would not let the feeling go away. This somehow encourages and ignites the fire in me to write. It feels like I got a letter from someone who has seen the unforgettale movie, and that was from myself. This answers the very fundamental question: why we write. We write to resist oblivion. All the more, the poem of Mahmoud Darwish that closed the whole movie was unforgettable. The words of his summarized and even surpassed all the visual endeavor the movie made. This might sound ironical, but what can we say when certain words incorporate and trancend human condition just as his words did?
So I want to keep on writing on what I see in movies from the region and how I think of the situation. This will be Palestinian Film Fest presented by Chym-a.