Je vous salue Sarajevo, 1993
At the start of the 1990s, among other projects, Jean-Luc Godard worked on his Histoire(s) du cinema. With these, he created a poetic cinema, in which the assembly of film images and contemporary material, music, and superimposed, repeated, slowed-down, faded-out or inlaid texts on video, presented the throng of individuals and of the world for the eye and ear, which the editing organised into histoire(s) – story/stories or history/histories. Je vous salue Sarajevo, produced in 1993, stems from both these collage-poems and from the “politically shot”[1] films that Jean-Luc Godard had been creating collectively in 1968 alongside the Ciné-tracts activists, then from 1969 to 1972 as part of the Dziga Vertov group founded with Jean-Pierre Gorin. Je vous salue Sarajevo was devised from a photograph by Ron Haviv, taken in Sarajevo during the siege of the capital of the inchoate Bosnia-Herzegovina by the Serbian army. The film denounces the act of war, which, along with torture and resistance, has haunted or even incited the work of Jean-Luc Godard from Le Petit Soldat (1960) and The Carabineers (1963), through to Film Socialism (2010), by way of British Sounds (1969), Pravda (1969), East Wind (1970), Tout va bien (1972) and Here and Elsewhere (1974), among others. The photograph is reframed and detailed in nineteen fragments filmed in fixed, extreme close-ups, revealing its cold cruelty, piece by piece, until it is exposed in all its horror: a soldier, wearing sunglasses on his head and with a cigarette in hand, presses the barrel of his weapon against the head of a woman lying on the ground between two people. He is preparing to kick her, while two other soldiers, standing to the left, look elsewhere. Both analytical and dramatic, the movement ranging from the decomposition to the recomposition of this image is accompanied by music by Arvo Pärt[2] and a text read in a low voice by Jean-Luc Godard. The core of the text, which we were to hear again in the filmmaker's self portrait
JLG/JLG (1995) and which expresses that the dominant culture opposes minority art[3], is preceded by a citation from George Bernanos about fear[4] and followed by a quatrain about death taken from Louis Aragon[5]. The anonymous invocation of these two authors gives the film its full meaning. Bernanos and Aragon were both inveterate resistants, fiercely opposed to the Munich Agreement (1938) whereby France and England were to abandon the Sudetes to Hitler's Germany and, along with this province, all of the Czechoslovakian Republic, in the mad and vain hope of preserving peace. Through this reference, the filmmaker denotes the inaction of the European Union, which abandoned in its turn Sarajevo and the Bosnians to Serbian nationalism. He would not cease to come back to this in later films – For Ever Mozart (1996), In Praise of Love (2001) and Our Music (2004) – which all refer to Sarajevo or take place there in part. Unlike the Ciné-tracts (1968), Letter to Jane (1972) or How Is It Going? (1976) in which Jean-Luc Godard engaged in purely political analysis based on still images, Je vous salue Sarajevo – which is not so much based on pamphlet or manifesto forms as it is on that of the oration or prayer that its title evokes – replays the confrontation of culture to art within its very core, from the abject image to the compassionate music and text. Here, but only here, the second triumphs over the first, disavowing it.
Judith Revault d'Allonnes
Translated by Anna Knight
[1] During a screening of Pravda at the Musée d'Art Moderne in 1970, Jean-Luc Godard, attacking his own film, concluded that the Dziga Vertov group “had shot a political film instead of shoo film politically”. This phrase became the group's watchword.
[2] Silouans Song (1991), a composition in one movement dedicated to Saint Silouan the Athonite.
[3] “For there's a rule and an exception. Culture is the rule, and art is the exception. Everybody speaks the rule: cigarette, computer, t-shirt, television, tourism, war. Nobody speaks the exception. It isn't spoken, it's written: Flaubert, Dostoyevsky. It's composed: Gershwin, Mozart. It's painted: Cezanne, Vermeer. It's filmed: Antonioni, Vigo. Or it's lived, and then it's the art of living: Srebenica, Mostar, Sarajevo. The rule is to want the death of the exception. So the rule for Cultural Europe is to organize the death of the art of living, which still flourishes.” [Existing translation].
[4] “In a sense, fear is the daughter of God, redeemed on Good Friday night. She's not beautiful, mocked, cursed and disowned by all. But don't get it wrong: she watches over all mortal agony, she intercedes for mankind.” Citation from a passage of La Joie (1929), entitled La Sainte agonie du Christ, which the author later used as the epigraph to Dialogues des Carmélites (1948). [Existing translation].
[5] “When it's time to close the book, I'll have no regrets. I've seen so many people live so badly, and so many die so well.” Citation from Crève-cœur (1941). [Existing translation].
