Four films which don't necessarily make one, like the four walls of a house. Theatre. One Mustn't Play At Love in Sarajevo. The Film of Intranquility. For Ever Mozart. From one film to another, we only come across the director or rather: the author of the exploits, or the exploited one.
War the theatre of the operations follows theatre. And cinema follows war. In both instances, actors are gotten cheap and will have to pay for it dearly.
What remains is music.
And for that, you have to know how to turn the pages of the score. And to give the tempo.'
Jean-Luc Godard's typically hermetic 'director's statement' (quoted above) doesn't do much to elucidate his new film, even if his gnomic style has now become the industry norm among a certain type of European filmmaker. Godard's goal in For Ever Mozart, he has claimed, is 'not to make a film within a film along the lines of La nuite Americaine, or even Le mépris, but to show the processes of cinema in action'. He posits the director as a sort of midwife, 'assisting at the birth of the movie'. In other words, this is another of Godard's self-reflexive essays in which the camera's eye is turned back in on itself.
A US$5 million French/Swiss/ German co-production, its origins are rather more conventional than those of his 1985 effort, King Lear, for which the director and Cannon chairman Menahem Golan improvised a contract on a table napkin. For Ever Mozart was premiered earlier this summer in Sarajevo, but was screened in a print without subtitles: local audiences were reportedly somewhat baffled.
Godard now occupies a position in European cinema akin to that of the holy fool. Recently commissioned to make the French strand in the British Film Institute's 'Century Of Cinema' series, he responded, in 2 x 50: 100 Years of French Cinema by inviting Michel Piccoli to join him at a hotel, and then bombarding the increasingly bewildered-looking actor with questions about how the French were celebrating the centenary. Why, he wondered, was the birth of cinema always dated to the Lumière Brothers' first public exhibition the first commercial exploitation of the medium? When Godard suggested that young people had no interest in film history, Piccoli took his own straw poll, wandering round the hotel asking bar staff and chambermaids if they'd ever heard of Renoir, Ophuls etc. (No, was the inevitable answer.) One likely lad, quizzed by Piccoli about Jacques Becker, advanced the opinion that he was a German tennis player. Every so often, the logo, 'No Copyright' flashed up on screen.
Equally eccentric was Godard's 1991 documentary for French TV on 'The History Of Cinema', in which the director sat by his Steenbeck, showing clips and mumbling sententious platitudes: 'All the histories there are. All the histories there have been. All the histories there might have been.'
Of course, there is much more to Godard's work than situationist gestures and occasional solipsistic film essays. With Truffaut dead and the rest of the New Wave directors making increasingly conventional movies, he is the last great iconoclast.
Given that one of the key strands of this year's Venice Film Festival is 'Cinema In The Third Millenium', the presence of For Ever Mozart is all the more appropriate. Here is one director who has never been frightened of new visual media or the challenges of the digital era. Geoffrey Macnab
Prod cos: Avventura Films, Peripheria, Paris, Vega Film, Zurich, ECM Records
Prod: Alain Sarde
Dir: Jean-Luc Godard
Cast: Madeleine Assas, Gmalya Lacroix, Berangere Accaux, Vicky Messica, Frédéric Pierrot
Running time: 85 mins
Int sales: Films du Losange
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