It would thus be rather surprising that Godard would seek hopefulness in Purgatory in the wounded cities of Sarajevo and Mostar, yet in several sequences Godard presents multiple juxtapositions in which amidst the ruins and the rubble of war, shelled buildings and skeleton ghost of the national library, Sarajevans are yearning to overcome. The film abounds with images of Sarajevo, its trams, streets, markets, and commercial billboards advertising western imports and domestic products. In many of the sequences, in particular the repeated establishing shot of a commercial street at night, Sarajevo is not immediately definable except by signs in Bosnian. This kind of imagery represents the notion of the “deterritorialization” of the image in Deleuze’s terms, presenting urban post-war ethnic conflict zones as a part of the global universe.
In the introductory sequences in Purgatory, Goytisolo, Godard, and their fellow travelers stress that the scars of war never go away, that the survivor’s identity is irrevocably altered by war (“Violence leaves a deep scar... The trust in the world that terror destroys in irretrievable.”). At the same time, the Bosnian interpreter and the crew’s driver speak in un-translated Bosnian about their evening plans. The two simultaneous truths reveal the ambiguous meanings of Purgatory through these juxtapositions. The city is wounded but the people are looking to move on; neither reality appears complete without the other. In this saturated frame, the urban ruin in the background is always at the same time a part of the foreground. Further, the visual saturation overwhelms the exchange in multiple languages shot in medium close-up in a moving car, suggesting that boundaries are in the process of being crossed. In For Ever Mozart, similarly, the cityscape observed from the moving train at dusk during rain links to the narrative of warfare and loss. As Sontag has observed, "sheared-off building are almost as eloquent as body parts—Look, ... this is what war does ... War ruins"[152] [open endnotes in new page] The landscape that Godard records takes on a narrative burden and is coded as “history.”
 |
 |
| The bridge leitmotif, most closely associated with the literary opus of the Nobel prizewinner of the former Yugoslavia, Ivo Andrić, is a dominant, recurrent metaphor in Balkan literature and film. Bosnian bridges symbolize the crossroads of the Orient and the Occident; the destruction of the Mostar bridge denotes the impossibility of coexistence in the Balkans. | The meaning of the bridge, however, is perhaps recaptured through history lessons and songs that children in local schools are studying. |
 |
 |
| In Notre musique, we watch the painstaking efforts by the real-life French architect in charge of the rebuilding, Gilles Pecqueux, to recreate... | ...stone after stone, the old bridge. |
In Mostar, Godard’s camera shoots a beautiful sequence of the rebuilt sixteenth-century bridge over the river Neretva, destroyed by Croatian forces in 1993, and reconstructed in 2004. The bridge leitmotif, most closely associated with the literary opus of the former Yugoslavian Nobel prizewinner Ivo Andrić, is a dominant, recurrent metaphor in Balkan literature and film. Bosnian bridges symbolize the crossroads of the Orient and the Occident; the destruction of the Mostar bridge denotes the impossibility of coexistence in the Balkans. In Notre musique, we watch the painstaking efforts by the real-life French architect in charge of the rebuilding, Gilles Pecqueux, to recreate, stone after stone, the old bridge. Absent from view is the city of Mostar itself, whose neighborhoods are not the subject of such painstaking reconstruction since resources and foreign aid have been poured mostly into the reconstruction of the symbolic bridge to the neglect of the rest of the city. The meaning of the bridge, however, is perhaps recaptured through history lessons and songs that children in local schools are studying. Godard’s camera, in a modest low angle, manages to record with minimal intrusion. Here, again the visual frame delivers one story, while the linguistic translation motif probes possibilities for reconciliation.
In an insensitive and offensive European stereotyping that goes back to the noble savage fantasy of Rousseau (also a Swiss intellectual), fictional Native Americans stand by watching too, as the camera retreats behind them, perhaps to reflect further. At one point, Native Americans spontaneously jump on a pickup truck and leave the screen.[153] Stuart Klawans argued that this was deliberate:
"their estrangement from the proceedings of the [Sarajevo] conference is precisely the justification for their presence in the film. They offer a true (rather than ostensible) opposite in the montage—or, if you prefer, the dialectic.. [I]f you’re going to have U.S. Navy sailors in the “Heaven” section, you really ought to have Native Americans in “Purgatory.”[154]
Brody finds that Godard credits "the Palestinian writer [and a negotiator for PLO] Elias Sanbar, who had written about Native Americans in his own work, as the film's ‘memory’... Godard's allusion in Notre musique to Sanbar's view suggests his endorsement of the idea that Israel and the United States, among other nations, developed by conquest and forced displacement, and were thus fundamentally illegitimate and tainted."[155] Nevertheless, the deeply flawed presence of Native American appears as an obtrusive, gratuitous, and insensitive cultural appropriation.
Wars are fought over territory; the belligerent, imposing, and arrogant conquerors claiming they are entitled to demolish the conquered physical structure and to erase civilization, as much as to oppress or exterminate the population: so many bridges were destroyed and so many bridges were not built. The Mostar bridge in Notre musique is also, as J. Hoberman pointed out, a metaphor for [a form of] montage and in a sense for Godard’s cinema.[156] Godard applies the term montage "not only to the relationships internal to cinema, but also to a far broader set of social, political, and even existential relations that are established and revealed through cinema."[157] Cinema is thus the bridge, the invisible connection, between the two, a juxtaposition, between the documentary and the fictional. As Klawans has written, “The great trial of this ‘Purgatory,’ then, is to recognize the other person and not just oneself; [...] to locate the opposite riverbank so we can begin rebuilding the bridge.”[158-159]
Godard spoke in an interview on Notre musique in such a lamenting tone that he revealed his own yearning for bridges through his mediated connection to wounded cities, exiles places, and post-war zones:
“Places like Sarajevo, Bosnia, or Palestine are also a little bit of a metaphor for what the cinema has become for me, French cinema at least: a country still heavily dependent on subsidies, that can't survive by itself, that is under attack by the various forms of organized crime, that is drifting into prostitution. Cinema is an occupied country with a governor [...] Palestine, Sarajevo, the current cinema, these are all places of exile-which is good for me because I've always felt profoundly exiled [...] So I like going where no one else does. Before '68, everyone went to Cuba. But I went much later, when nobody was interested in it anymore.”[160]
According to Koch, Kracauer, "an extraterritorial observer"[161] has linked the figure of the historiographer with that of an exile:
"The impossibility of reconstructing history as that logical discourse of chronological time that can be subsumed under a general principle that engenders the image of a discontinuous world of ruptures and rejections, whose chronicler can only be a survivor who has passed through the cataracts of time unscathed."[162]
As Godard can perhaps be reminded, Kracauer's reference is to the historical figure of Ahaseurus, the Wandering Jew.[163] Godard endorses also a view of cinema of the margins, of homelessness:
"I wanted the film to bear the trace of the Israel-Palestine conflict, a conflict I have felt close to for a long time, together with Anne-Marie Miéville... As marginals, expelled from our cinematic garden by what is called the American cinema, I feel close to them, the Vietnamese, the Palestinians... As creators, we have become homeless. For a long time I said that I was on the margin, but that the margin is what holds the pages together. Today I have fallen from that margin, I feel that I'm in between the pages."[164]
According to Michael Witt, his togetherness with Anne-Marie Miéville should be seen as a genuine collaboration, especially given the absolute centrality of her role in Godard's work since the 1970s.[165]
Although Godard in a lecture that he delivers in the film pays an unspoken homage to Kracauer’s quest for redemption of physical realty, he nevertheless challenges Kracauer’s focus on the material by tying the redemptive capacity to the sublime. More significantly, through complex metaphors of border-crossings, multiple attempts at dialogue among his real and fictional protagonists, and using several different languages within speech, Godard seeks transformative pathways within the historical engagement. The cities of Sarajevo and Mostar represent the critical arena in which Godard explores transformative trajectories of the cinematic engagement with history and history of representation. Bosnian cities become complex settings for visions of border crossings, attempts—failed and successful—for dialogue among strangers, foreigners, and local residents. The sequences set in the Sarajevo library ("where two million books had been destroyed in the bombing though the building's stone shell remained standing"[166]) present, as a protagonist utters in For Ever Mozart, “the defeat of intelligence,” that is, the difficulty of dialogue. Godard frames a gray pillar on which children’s shaky handwriting has noted Bosnian names in white chalk, perhaps to compensate for the absence of books, to underscore the need for learning. The narrative struggles here as the setting entombs the protagonists in a cinematic uncanny. In contrast, in the outdoor sequences, Sarajevo and Mostar become arenas of a global cinema that at once seeks to learn the lessons from the Balkans and also, by relating other contexts of conflict (Israel and Palestine in particular), engages in the process of de-particularization of the conflict.
 |
 |
| Native American Indians condemn the white scholar in the empty shell of the Sarajevo national library. | "The White Man Will Never Understand the Ancient Words Here in Spirits Roaming Free Between the Sky and the Trees." |
 |
 |
| A Bosnian woman returning a book to the empty library. | Cinema and library as sources of light. |
The out-of-field space and the Heavenly protectorate
But Godard does not leave us there, too optimistic or too lulled in hopefulness. Indeed, in response to Godard’s evocation of libraries, Goytisolo remarks that humane people also create cemeteries. The act of creation, ironic juxtapositions notwithstanding, is too often in Godard’s visions construed as heroic (hence the occasional aloof pre-eminence of his oeuvre), and as has been noted, war narratives crave heroes. Perhaps one of the greatest oversimplifications of war narratives is the reduction of war victory to heroism as Godard’s Les Carabiniers has shown.
 |
 |
| The absurdness of Olga’s death, her indifference to human casualties as she simply enacted "suicide by police" in which she was the only casualty... | ...seems to undermine the redemptive thread of the film. |
 |
 |
| Olga staged a suicide mission in a Jerusalem cinema, in which she asked at least one fellow Jew to sacrifice their life for peace. No one volunteered; she was killed by the police. | Yet Olga's call was a rhetorical bluff. She said she had a bomb in her bag; in truth, she only had books. |
In the universe of Notre musique, we find an unusual, beautiful yet unsettling heroine in Olga, who is also Judith’s metaphorical double. As her uncle recounts to Godard in a phone conversation at the end of Purgatory, Olga staged a suicide mission in a Jerusalem cinema, in which she asked at least one fellow Jew to sacrifice their life for peace. No one volunteered; she was killed by the police. Yet her call was a rhetorical bluff. She said she had a bomb in her bag; in truth, she only had books. Godard’s montage presents stills from a fictional “documentary” news report. Her ultimate heroism becomes an opposition to the nationalism and blindness of one’s own group and in this we can find an affirmative moral stand. Susan Sontag asserts,
"The destructiveness of war—short of total destruction, which is not war but suicide—is not in itself an argument against waging war unless one thinks (as few people actually do think) that violence is always unjustifiable, that force is always and in all circumstances wrong—wrong because, as Simone Weil affirms in her sublime essay on war, 'The Iliad, or The Poem of Force' (1940), violence turns anybody subjected to it into a thing. No, retort those who in a given situation see no alternative to armed struggle, violence can exalt someone subjected to it into a martyr or a hero.”[167]
Where other filmic war narratives would forge heroism through displays of masculinity, Godard assigns agency to a female martyr, with whom he identifies. The female experience and understanding of war represent an important part of the film, underscored by Judith’s and Olga’s stories in Purgatory, and by the endings of all three parts. In Hell, sequences with women soldiers and victims follow after we have seen all unimaginable and imagined cruelties (Godard thus does not identify women in simplistic terms only as victims as a typical war film would). The close-up of women’s faces avoiding the camera appears at the very end of Hell. In Purgatory, the last image we see is of a dead female body, presumably that of Olga, and final section of the film, Heaven, ends with a close-up of her face. If Godard’s cinema is a cinema of resistance, Judith’s and in part Olga’s characters bring it to life, even if Olga has to die. A close up of her face ends the film. She closes her eyes, reminding us again of the void, silence, and black frames between images—the moments in which motion pictures create meanings or in Godard’s cinema resist the inevitability of meanings. Godard seems to wish that the viewer would make this connection, perhaps an example of the Deleuzian “out of frame.” As Deleuze notes, out-of-field contains two different aspects:
“a relative aspect by which a closed system refers in space to a set which is not seen, and which can in turn be seen, even if this gives rise to a new unseen set, on to infinity; and an absolute aspect by which the closed system opens onto a duration which is immanent to the whole universe, which is no longer a set and does not belong to the order of the visible.”[168]
Perhaps the simplest explanation is that this image, anticipated at the end, is a mental image—our imagination of what Olga might be visualizing with her eyes closed. Cinema thus returns to the viewer, and Notre musique as a war film poses questions to the audience to “try to see” and “try to imagine” peace and reconciliation via Olga's and Judith's quests, as Godard persistently uses the symbolic images of women posited against and placed amidst warfare. Sontag asks, "Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more likely to pose than a man? (Probably yes.)"[169]
As powerful as this notion is, it also signifies lament in Notre musique. Godard’s siding with Olga’s mission provides for a touching cinematic and personal resonance. Nade Dieu’s resemblance to the Anna Karina of Bande à part (1964) is thus not really physical but rather lies in the spirit of Godard’s filmmaking: as his camera tracks Olga running through Sarajevo, or when he shoots in close-up her ironic justifications: “Someone actually understood me? Perhaps it was because I wasn’t clear,” Olga declares. It is no accident that Olga’s sacrifice mission occurs in a cinema and that she is abandoned and killed there. Having abandoned the quest for the “visible,” having sacrificed Olga at the film’s end, and closed her eyes in the last shot, cinema has ceased to represent a revolutionary space and today has no movement comparable to nouvelle vague’s revolutionizing of film. Fictional Olga leaves behind a digital film labeled “Notre musique,” bequeathed to the real Godard in Sarajevo. In one possible interpretation, Godard’s film is her film. Perhaps this is Godard’s response to the digital challenge (even if this is beyond the scope of this essay—this subject is tackled, however, by Niels Niessen who argues that "Notre musique seems to suggest that the only way the question of cinema's future can be addressed is through cinema itself."[170]) In Doane’s theoretical terms,
“cinephilia could not be revived at this conjuncture were the cinema not threatened by the accelerating development of new electronic and digital forms of media.”[171]
But also Godard has always endorsed multi-dimensional and hybrid forms, and that many of his films are complex collages of art forms.[172] In another possible interpretation in the context of Notre musique’s narrative, this vision of cinema as the “forgotten” revolutionary space gives up on the promise of the cinematic bridges of Purgatory. Godard provides an ironic response in Heaven to which Olga is sentenced.
 |
 |
| The Heaven in which Olga finds herself is a deliberately nonsensical yet not completely absurd U.S. protectorate of cinema. | Martyred Olga is saved and walking around in a wooded island in springtime guarded by U.S. Navy (the soundtrack at one point includes part of the "Marine's Hymn"). |
 |
 |
| In the last sequence a U.S. Navy sailor literally stamps Olga’s arm with a virtual seal of approval as if to acknowledge her final redemptive journey into a protectorate or a rather unusual Heaven. The edenic wooded paradisiacal island, a place of nostalgia and not a social space, is a landscape in which leaves the audience puzzled and unsettled. | Having abandoned the quest for the “visible,” having sacrificed Olga at the film’s end, and closed her eyes in the last shot, cinema has ceased to represent a revolutionary space and today has no movement comparable to nouvelle vague’s revolutionizing of film. |
The Heaven in which Olga finds herself is a deliberately nonsensical yet not completely absurd U.S. protectorate of cinema—"supreme aspiration and an impossibility, a repository of history and intimate memory in an age of celebrity and forgetting."[173] The edenic wooded paradisiacal island, a place of nostalgia and not a social space, is a landscape in which Godard leaves the audience puzzled and unsettled. Olga seems free and redeemed, yet the absence of project or purpose renders the fictional reality untenable. The ending makes no sense, perhaps as much as Heaven makes little sense to Sarajevans who have survived Hell.[174]
But Godard still searches for a "political hope" in film, a cinema of political engagement and commitment. As Morgan puts it:
 |
 |
| Yet the defeat in poetry is the only real defeat, Darwich tells to Lerner’s journalist. | Darwich tells Judith Lerner, “we are fortunate to have Israel as an enemy.... the world is interested in you, not in us.” |
In his narratives and visuals of crossings and trespasses, Godard’s funerary art of mourning and of struggle against historical amnesia—cinema of constant reinvention—seeks reconciliation and the overcoming of devastation, but it falters in stark juxtapositions of the “I” and “the other” and arbitrariness of too many flattening comparisons. As Matthew Longo reminds us in The Politics of Borders, "Rather than take as assumption any us/them dichotomy proffered by borders, we should question the internal homogeneity of these categories."[176]
But the meanings of Notre musique thrive in their complexities and overcome some of the simplistic symmetries. The West has yet to come to terms with the scale of destruction it caused, as can be seen in the film in Goytisolo’s accounts and in the Palestinian poet’s interview. The defeat in poetry is the only real defeat, Darwich tells to Lerner’s journalist. Godard seeks the role of artistic creation in recovery and healing, but he is also weary of the fact that this might mean the endorsement of ethno- or euro-centricity—e.g. in the way that he has Native American Indians condemn the white scholar in the empty shell of the Sarajevo national library. In a way, Godard, the expert on reversals, subverts himself yet again by both endorsing the act of creation and condemning its arrogance. In this context, his choice (as a “Western-European artist”) of post-war Bosnia as a setting for this quest of reconciliation and redemption is at once both humble and daring.
While Godard undertakes the project of confronting historical narrative in his other films as well, in Notre musique, he does so by taking the cinematic quest to conquer history differently. Godard is no longer simply interested in rewriting history from the point of view of film, as in Historie de Cinema. He no longer examines merely the multiplicities of history within the multiplicities of narrative. He is not concerned with what cannot be narrated as in Prénom Carmen or Nouvelle Vague. Rather, he is seeking the transformative potential that can stem from the interaction between cinematic engagement with the histories of ethnic conflict as well as the histories of their representation. The transformative capacities of both cinema and life in post-conflict zones can be discerned in Godard's framing and juxtaposing history of the present-time lived experience with representations of warfare. Cinema and representations of war possess a dual connectivity of spectacle forged also through trespasses onto illicit territories. In the strongest sequences of Purgatory, Godard completes the trajectory of his visual and narrative engagement with war in film and leaves enough hope for bridges within a future cinema of reconciliation.
