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WSWS : Arts Review : Film Reviews

Those who "play at life and death":
Jean-Luc Godard's For Ever Mozart

By David Walsh
2 December 1996

Jean-Luc Godard is one of the major figures of the international postwar cinema. Born in 1930, he spent nearly a decade as a film critic in Paris before making his first feature film, Breathless, in 1959. Godard and a number of his fellow critics-turned-directors became identified as the New Wave of French filmmakers.

By the mid-1960s events had radicalized Godard and put an end to the relative lyricism of his early films, with their glowing tributes to romantic love. Following the mass revolt of the French working class in 1968, the filmmaker concluded that language and cinema were entirely bound up with the conditioning of bourgeois society and that the task was to "go back to zero," to deconstruct the film image.

Godard did away altogether with plot, suppressed his emotional inclinations and made "revolutionary" films, most of which are unwatchable, from 1968 to 1972. The failure of these works to reach a wide audience obliged Godard to change course once again. In the mid-1970s he moved to Grenoble and made videos with his third wife, Anne-Marie Miéville.

He returned to filmmaking in the early 1980s, living by this time in his native Switzerland, and gained a certain notoriety once again in 1985 with Hail Mary, a retelling of the story of Joseph and Mary set in modern times. Godard has continued to make films, but has found it increasingly difficult to find funding and support for his projects. As the filmmaker explained at his Toronto press conference, "I do what I'm ordered to do. I never choose, never." If the money is there, Godard explained, "I'll say yes. Then I'll ask you what it is about."

The filmmaker divides his elliptical new work, For Ever Mozart, into four films "which don't necessarily make one." In the first part, an aging Director, whose role unifies the film, is apparently auditioning actors for a film. They march through, one after the other, like lambs to the slaughter. The metaphor is appropriate. Someone says, "War is easy, it's sticking a piece of metal in a piece of flesh."

The most substantial section of the film concerns an effort by a group of actors, at first assisted by the Director, to reach Sarajevo in war-torn Bosnia to stage a version of Alfred de Musset's 1834 drama, Don't play with love. In Musset's work the manipulative efforts of Perdican, the son of a wealthy baron, to win the affections of his cousin Camille bring about the suicide of the latter's foster-sister, Rosette, a naive village girl with whose affections Perdican has trifled. In his final speech Perdican declares, "We are two foolish children, and we have been playing at life and death." The selfishness, dilettantism and blindness of a certain social type is a central theme of Godard's "Yugoslav" film.

Camille--fancifully described as "[existentialist author Albert] Camus' grand-daughter"--and Jerome [Perdican], two ineffectual French intellectuals, head off for Bosnia. They have Camille's "sister" Rosette--a young woman, apparently Turkish, who seems to work as the family's maid--in tow. At his press conference, Godard stated that Camille "wants to do something for herself, not for the Bosnians, she doesn't even know where Sarajevo is."

Whether in reaction to Camille's apparent indifference, or simply as a product of his own irresponsibility, Jerome pursues a relationship with Rosette. The three travel by train, and then by foot, on their vague and futile journey in the direction of the Bosnian capital. They are captured by a [presumably Serb] militia. Rosette, as a Moslem, is raped and, one assumes, murdered. Jerome and Camille literally dig their own grave and they too are executed.

In the third section of For Ever Mozart, the unhappy-looking Director is trying to make his film in the face of the stupidity and greed of his producer. Godard's picture of the film industry is devastating. The production company, called the Great European Film Corporation, seems to be owned by a baron [Camille's uncle] who operates out of a gambling casino. At one table in the casino a girl transcribes pornography. The baron counts the receipts at another. A voice cries, "Don't forget the pay-checks!" Someone suggests, "The girl should die in a tornado" (à la Twister). Yet another gloats, "We found cheap actors." When the Director begins, "In my opinion--," he is greeted by a chorus of voices: "We don't care!"

At one point, the thug-like producer mutters with deep conviction: "There's money in the sea." In a subsequent scene, that only Godard could shoot, the producer, with his back to the camera, stands on the shore staring out at the sea and intones: "It's not natural," and adds, "There's not enough water!" Later the Director struggles to get an actress, in Spanish costume, to say the single word, "Yes." In an unforgettable image, the Director and crew film the actress, battered by the wind, through frost-covered glass.

The final sequence takes place in a concert hall like a mausoleum. We overhear a conversation about the relative merits of Mozart and Wagner. The former is gentle and light, one concert-goer suggests. "That's what people think," someone else responds. The Director is climbing the stairs to the hall. We see hands on a piano keyboard. The Director sits down on the top step, utterly worn out. The last shot is of the piano score.

Hopefully this synopsis indicates the magnitude of the issues raised by Godard's film. In criticizing Camille and Jerome, he is demanding seriousness in all things. In response to a question at his press conference, Godard asserted, in his inimitable fashion, that the film "has nothing to do with the Bosnian war." He went on, "One should not play with love in Sarajevo. One should not play with love in New York either, in my opinion; or in Toronto." Nor should one play with art or politics.

For Ever Mozart conveys a series of painful questions the filmmaker poses to himself. Why aren't people more faithful to each other, to ideas, to life? Why are so many satisfied to accept the least line of resistance? Why does almost no one respond to real art? Why do people put up with corruption and the power of money?

Despite its exquisite moments and its searching intelligence, one might be forgiven for dismissing For Ever Mozart as primarily a product of intellectual and moral exhaustion. Godard's film exudes disgust for humanity, self-disgust and disgust with the cinema. The world is populated, according to this work, by equal numbers of murderers, philistines and whores. When Godard declared, at his press conference, "It's over," and later, "There's less hope," he was clearly referring to more than the period in which it was possible to make a certain type of film.

During the press conference this reviewer asked Godard if he felt that the US and other Western governments had made use of images of genuine suffering in Bosnia to advance their own political and economic interests. In his reply, the filmmaker turned certain correct points into a further indictment of humanity.

"Yes, of course," he said. "They are not innocent people." The aim of using terrible pictures, he went on, is to make the viewer unable to look at them any more. "You don't even look, unless it's your cousin or your mother. Then you say, 'Oh God, it's my mother.' But even if it's the mother of your girlfriend, it's okay.

"We made images in the movies, when we began, in order to remember. TV is made to forget. We see Sarajevo, okay, we forget in two seconds. At the same moment that we are looking, we forget. It has no meaning at all, even what we are thinking has no meaning. And this is the way we want it, in fact. I can't quit smoking; a lot of people can't quit looking at TV."

The questions his film raises, in other words, are legitimate, but Godard finds himself unable to provide any serious response. In large part this is explained by the political history of postwar Europe and the ideological conditions which helped to shape his generation of intellectuals.

What proved so crucial in the evolution of this sizable and influential layer was its acceptance of Soviet and Western European Stalinism as either a progressive social force or at least one whose grip over the workers movement could never be shattered. With few exceptions even those who professed a hostility to bureaucracy, such as Godard, absorbed the skepticism about the revolutionary potential of the working class promoted by the Stalinists and those in their immediate orbit.

The impact of the 1968 upheaval on the French intellectuals is a subject which merits detailed study. This much can be said. Nourished on the meager offerings of Stalinized "Marxism," existentialism, structuralism, the Frankfurt school and all the other precursors of Postmodernism, the artists and writers were thoroughly unprepared for the events of May and June.

Conventional wisdom, for example, has it that Godard's La Chinoise (1967), about a cell of Parisian Maoists, demonstrated the filmmaker's extraordinary political prescience. No doubt his antennae were attuned to changes taking place within the middle class. However, while La Chinoise treated its subjects' radical activity sympathetically, the film expressed with every image the deepest skepticism about the possibilities of a working class revolt in France.

The strike by 10 million workers in 1968 broke over the heads of the film artists as a complete and disconcerting surprise. What does it say about this generally "leftist" milieu that French cinema largely dropped off the map as a serious force soon after 1968 and has not recovered to this day?

Godard made perhaps the most serious effort to deal with the implications of the events. He came into contact with the British Trotskyists of the Socialist Labour League in 1968-69, reflected in the film British Sounds. But this was only a brief detour on a course which led him to fall under the baleful influence of Maoism, feminism, "third world" nationalism and the entire menu of radical disorders. It was in these years that he made his immortal pronouncement: "There is only one way to be an intellectual revolutionary, and that is to give up being an intellectual." Godard was nearly destroyed by these trends.

Nearly, but not quite. The relationship between art and social life is complex. As a political being, Godard belongs to the brotherhood of petty-bourgeois ex-radicals that is not much use for anything. As an extraordinary artist he continues to come upon truths and report them in the form of images which sear into the brain. The relative liveliness of For Ever Mozart, in contrast to his films of the 1980s, demonstrates too that the change in the situation, manifested in the French strike movement of a year ago, is having its impact.

Godard is right, of course, that the period in which the New Wave came to prominence, along with its set of political relations and intellectual environment, is "over." But the cinema is not finished, neither is history. This is nonsense, which he ought to be ashamed of repeating. Against the Godard of 1996 one is here obliged to cite the Godard of 1965: "The cinema is optimistic because everything is always possible, nothing is ever prohibited; all you need is to be in touch with life."