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