The Hell of all wars

In Hell’s vortex of Thanatos, Godard presents an effective montage of layered newsreel and fictional images of warfare in black and white, technicolor, and in blue and red tones that seep across the screen. The director pays respect to Bruce Conner and Chris Marker (A Grin without a Cat —1977), and cites the final shots of Robert Aldrich’s striking noir Kiss Me Deadly in a powerful staccato final sequence of images of human and material destruction. The tempo and rhythm of shots are visually affecting even if many of the images are well-known and their juxtapositions perhaps unsurprising. The Hell sequence is reminiscent of Godard’s homage to film art, Histoire(s) du cinéma. Daring and thought-provoking, many of the Histoire(s) du cinéma’s visual philosophy lectures on the nature of the gaze have the sharpness of contrast and the clarity of contradiction that are lacking in the first part of Notre musique. But then we are after all in Hell: men carry arms, children play war games, women turn into ruthless soldiers and helpless victims. The narrator reads, “They are horrible here with their obsession for cutting off heads. It’s amazing that anyone’s survived.” (Indeed, "the miracle of survival."[88]) [open notes in new window] The photographs and documentary footage of war-torn Bosnia end with a ghastly still of a pastoral landscape in which several onlookers observe the body of a hanged woman. The pace of Godard’s montage slows at this disturbing sight. Three women, perhaps Bosnian, faces in close up, shun the intruding camera before the sequence ends with a black screen.

Sontag writes, "we can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is" and further, "[t]o designate a hell is not, of course, to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell's flames."[89] Thus, in the ten-minute Hell sequence that smoothly crosses from documentary to fictional realm, Godard presents images that in their juxtapositions, rhythm, and slow-motion have a seamless if flattening flow. Reality and fiction become two sides of the same coin of death and destruction: the “possible of the impossible” (reality) and the “impossible of the possible” (fiction). It is as Agamben writes:

"Auschwitz represents the historical point in which these processes collapse, the devastating experience in which the impossible is forced into the real. Auschwitz is the existence of the impossible, the most radical negation of continency; it is, therefore, absolute necessity. The Muselmann produced by Auschwitz is the catastrophe of the subjects that then follows, the subject's effacement as the place of contingency and its maintenance as existence of the impossible. Here Goebbel's definition of politics 'the art of making what seems impossible possible' acquires its full weight."[90]

Through this seemingly effortless high-modernist montage, Godard acknowledges the complicity of representations in producing and reproducing the horror of the real, seemingly also suggesting, as Sontag notes "that modern life consists of a menu of horrors by which we are corrupted and to which we gradually become habituated."[91] The sequence explicitly equates the horrific consequences of war: documentary and fictional warfare, just and unjust wars, civil disturbances and foreign occupations. All are different yet the face of horror remains the same. Godard endorses the thesis of the absurdity of war expressed in Les Carabiniers, yet here he does so in an alternate way, simultaneously critiquing and conceding to the spectacular and dialectical powers of montage.

However he also inserts and holds a black frame for several seconds between images or sequences, emphasizing the separation of images and hinting at the notion that connections between them might not be inevitable or simply apparent. This represents, as Deleuze has noted, a vision of the frame as “an opaque surface of information.”[92] The opaque and the saturated images are connected in an associative montage that complicates rather than forces meanings. Although, as theorists have argued, for Godard “montage is something cinema never achieved,”[93] the Hell sequence strides towards and also contemplates the possibility of that achievement. Here, Godard uncovers another dimension of war itself—as a spectacular display (of military powers, in particular). As Paul Virilio has argued in an analysis that focused on the use of perceptual (including cinematic) mechanisms for military purposes, the war machine can be seen as tied to the watching machine; both being susceptible to spectacle production (e.g. in particular in the cases of psychological warfare).[94] In a related metonymy of Godard’s own, war and theater become interchangeable:

“War—the theater of operations—follows theater. And cinema follows war. In both instances, actors are gotten cheap and will have to pay for it.” [95]

In Notre musique, however, Godard’s cinema attempts forgiveness and overcoming, working through an Eisensteinian rhythmic and intellectual montage ("in which meaning emerges not in any shot but in the conflict between shots")[96] of visuals in Hell, then reaching beyond the language of the spectacle in Purgatory. But the emphasis on spectacle is rendered inevitable in Hell—violence simply has to be displayed because the Hell of war is for Godard represented by the innocent victims.

Godard’s heroine asks in voiceover in Hell for these trespasses to be forgiven. In a possible interpretation, the notion of trespass (which also evokes the concept of property) here goes beyond the meaning in Christian prayer to refer not merely refer to the active sins of warriors but also of the sins of omission of the twentieth century perceptual machine—the cinema. The eyes of victims shun the camera, which cannot, morally and technically, become a genuine witness. As Giorgio Agamben has written of testimonies of Auschwitz survivors,

"At a certain point, it became clear that testimony contained at its core an essential lacuna: in other words, the survivors bore witness to something it is impossible to bear witness to."[97]

Godard’s quest for pure images reaches its maximum in “Hell” at the cost of obviousness—if nothing can be “mirrored” all can still be shown. But this vision also questions Deleuze’s notion of the frame—it does not represent data in an abstract sense. It cannot be pure image because it is not the violence of warfare that cannot be represented but the sense of victimhood. "The authority of witness consists in his capacity to speak solely in the name of an incapacity to speak—that is, in his or her being a subject."[98] In Sontag's terms, these images are thus suggestive of what exceeds the ability of words to describe or in Henry James' phrase, exceed the endurance of thoughts.[99] We return to the images of women silently turning their eyes away from the camera. Godard seems to ask, "What does it mean to protest suffering, as distinct from acknowledging it?"[100]

Trespassing in Purgatory:
cinema of border crossings

Godard leaves “pure images” safely confined to the Hell sequence. These images or, more broadly, relations between the documentary and fictional representations of war from Hell, take us to the Bosnian and Israeli-Palestinian Purgatory. The Bosnia of Notre musique is a post-war landscape in which several real and fictional characters seek to overcome divisions, including Israeli-Palestinian. Purgatory returns to narrative that is thus spatially bound in a “dynamic physical sense.”[101]

Themes of borders, boundaries, and crossings are central to Purgatory from the very first set of shots that take place at the airport and in the passport control area. Virtually all the “characters” real or fictional cross actual or symbolic boundaries—Judith Lerner as a fictional Israeli journalist who searches for the meaning of reconciliation in Bosnia; the real-life poet Darwich whom she interviews; and the Spanish novelist Goytisolo who traverses the landscapes of conquest in Sarajevo. Of course, Godard himself appears in the film as the invitee to a literary conference in Sarajevo, and it is perhaps no accident that the film includes two translators as well—a Bosnian woman and a French-Israeli man. The latter translator offers an autobiographical account of his uneasy belonging to two countries with which Purgatory begins; in it, he underscores the reconciliatory potential of crossings, biographical and linguistic. The critical trope here is that of linguistic translation that can connect and prevail over divisions (even if not perhaps to form a union). Godard (who is Swiss by origin) seems to hope for a Babel that would be bound and not sundered by diversity. As he has stated of himself, “A language is obviously made to cross borders. I’m someone whose real country is language, and whose territory is movies.”[102]

According to Rashid Khalidi, the quintessential Palestinian experience takes place at a border, an airport, a checkpoint—the places where "the six million Palestinians are signed out for 'special treatment' ... forcibly reminded of their identity."[103] The chief form of implementing forms of state control over territory involves control over its people through the formal markers of citizenship and belonging, such as the use of permits, registries, and identity cards. All Palestinians are issued an identity number by the Israel Ministry of the Interior, whose even lowest-ranking officers have access to personal information about residents of the territory not available to anyone else. Permits are needed for movement outside of the West Bank and Gaza, applications are necessary for family reunification and visa permits are required for travel; failure to present an ID to a soldier on duty is “punishable with up to one year’s imprisonment;”[104] these strategies are explained by a former member of the Israeli Army as strategies of containment rather than control of the Palestinian people.[105] Nadia Abu-Zahra, based on her seven-year participant-observation and in-depth interviewing concludes that “ID cards have become a principal tool of coercion at the individual level, resulting in mass dispossession at the collective level.”[106] The point here is that military control operates not only through the visible presence of military control or specific interventions in land use, but also through the forms of administrative and police control, including the population census, personal ID cards, and various permits that limit population movement and have the consequence of infringing upon or denying basic civil or social rights.

The possible effect of these tactics evokes Steven Lukes’ discussion of the third dimension of power according to which citizens can be disenfranchised to such as extent that they perceive even the powers that they do have as unattainable or impossible to transfer into social action.[107] The notion of asymmetric warfare[108] is important in understanding the shift from ground to air and “invisible occupation”[109] that followed the evacuation from the Gaza Strip on September 13, 2005. The spatial optic is crucial in that allows a replication of an extreme form of a modernist gaze over a clear territory, devoid of human life. The visual and other new technologies that allow for the new levels of military precision become a convenient tool for desensitization to violence on the part of the public. The war technologies are in this sense possibly dangerous tools for the legitimating of frequent use of military action on behalf of the state and political leadership.

Importantly, Godard films are preceded by a visa number. As in his For Ever Mozart, for example, the “trespass” in Notre musique is acknowledged by a numeric stamp on a cinematic passport over the black screen that precedes the film’s title. A visa demarcates an outsider, sets limits to entry, to the purpose and the duration of visit. A film is an imaginary voyage, and Godard seeks a permit to guide the audience along many of its possible paths and trespasses. Or perhaps we can interpret this differently—a trespass is only a trespass and not merely a crossing because someone arbitrarily placed a fence, demarcated a territory, and placed an “entry forbidden” sign. As the director claimed at the Cannes press conference for the film, and as he also noted in an interview over twenty years ago, while he does understand frontiers, he doesn’t approve of customs officers.[110]

Transferring this metaphor to the context of film art, “visa de censure” marks film as a “product” that conforms to prescribed norms set by the state (censorship rules and subsidies) and the market (art becomes commerce). Audiences are thus conditioned to a set of narrative and visual conventions that the filmmaker may be pressed to accommodate but that s/he needn’t blindly follow. Certainly Godard’s entire opus presents strong challenges to cinematic conventions, and in this way Godard’s “form that thinks” has strived for a liberty not easily achieved. An ironic “footnote” after the visa number that begins Godard’s film Nouvelle vague (1990), for example, includes a voiceover that states, “And I really meant it to be a narrative.”

Godard redefined cinema in the 1960s by exaggerating his critical defect, his inability tell a story, his conscious and unconscious rebellion against the narrative. But in his more recent works, as he acknowledged in conversation with Wim Wenders, Godard claims to have rediscovered “the charm of a conventional, linear narrative,”[111] although Nouvelle vague hardly conforms to narrative linearity and rather represents a contemplation of narrative genre possibilities. In Notre musique, the director quickly dispels the visa number mundanity with a dramatically high piano note that sounds an instant later, before the images of the Hell sequence overwhelm. As discussed, the horrors of warfare need to be represented as “pure images” inasmuch as this quest is ultimately implausible, but searches for reconciliation across state, cultural, and linguistic boundaries have to be narrated.

Narratives of the conquered and the conquerors commonly reveal the impossibility of union or of reconciliation. I take pause here to hint at anthropological evidence, given the not so well-known fact that Godard’s own university degree was in ethnography. As Frederick Barth has written, an “ethnic boundary defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses” and that these deeper boundaries “can persist despite inter-ethnic contact and interdependence.”[112] In cinematic terms, the emphasis on boundaries thus reveals the entrapment of otherness and difference: “a dichotomization of others as strangers, as members of another ethnic group, implies a recognition of limitations on shared understandings.”[113]

Matthew Longo writes, "The border is a definitive marker of the political, defining in and out, friend and enemy, us and them"[114] but the border should instead be the site that allows us to challenge these dichotomies. The border is a site of purging, a place where one must prove one's worth to enter; at the border "we also encounter our own foreignness."[115] Not mere "line[s] of jurisdiction," borders are institutions, sites of state authority and control, sites of politics, of state violence.[116] Borders are loci of power but also places "where states lose definition."[117]

Cinema departs from these social and cultural realities yet it offers resembling realities of its own making. Godard’s reply seems to be that to attempt reconciliation, the “I” first needs to understand the wounds of the “other.” Postulating such a process is problematic in itself as the “I” and the “other” are positioned as opposing, radically different categories. Second, a meaningful encounter of the “I” with the “other” depends upon the ability to understand the self from the other’s perspective. Such a stance allows for the possibility of connection. As Godard explains in his lecture within this film, relationships imply equality and reciprocity but not the identical image of the self reflected in the other, not the Howard Hawksian shot-reverse shot. Godard thus endorses an element of difference. A key point here is that although the relationship between the self and the other does not entail a mirror image, it nevertheless does not exclude commonality. Godard underscores this point with documentary images of war. He shows a black and white photograph of a ruined city and asks the Bosnian audience to identify the place. Berlin and Belfast are among the answers, yet the city turns out to be Richmond, Virginia, after the Civil War. In a similar take, photographs of the victims of the concentration camps labeled “Muselmann” and “Jewish,” seem to suggest that the Jew and the Muslim become one and the same casualties. (Godard puns on the word Muselmann used to describe a ruined concentration camp victim).