For ever Mozart.

Lynch, David Thomas

PERHAPS JEAN-LUC GADARD FELT THAT HIS PRESENCE AT the 1996 Toronto International Film Festival overshadowed the ostensible reason for his visit: his new feature, For Ever Mozart (1996). At the film's press conference, he noted that while he is "more interested in pictures than in directors, . . . people today praise the man more than the work"...While the director seems more interested in the substance of his picture than in his public persona, I think his public comments are both helpful in understanding the new film, and interesting in their own right. Godard's press notes call For Ever Mozart "Four films which don't necessarily make one" (Although the film is not made of four discrete narratives): theatre, war, cinema, and music.

During the Bosnian conflict, a group of actors travels to Sarajevo to perform Musset's One Must Not Play at Love; on the way there, they are captured by soldiers and end up in a mass grave. It is Godard's change of approach to his film actors, however, which reveals more of his current thoughts about performance than this plot. Asked how his filmmaking practice has changed over the years, he suggested that now he pays attention to casting, giving the film a unity and the potential to be interesting as a whole, not merely in parts. For Ever Mozart's cast of (to me) unknowns melds into an actual ensemble; there are no leads cast for their iconic presence, or stars in "anti-star" performances. Instead, the performers act with a certain emotional resonance that derives its power from the way the characters refract the concerns of the film as a whole. Usually a Godard film has had certain characters who serve this function, while other roles were caricatures, or were cast symbolically or iconically. The emotional eveness provided by the film's ensemble work is perhaps the most notable element that For Ever Mozart adds to Godard's body of work.

In contrast to this innovation, Godard's treatment of warfare has strong parallels to the action in Les Carabiniers (1963), Weekend (1967) and the video Le Francais entendu par JLG (1988). The appearance of mass violence, war machines and explosions in these films and For Ever Mozart exerts a certain fascination that is more spectacular and visceral than the attention usually demanded by Godard's movies. A comparison between the execution of the woman reciting Mayakovsky in Les Carabiniers and the mass murder of the actors in the new film shows how the director has become more open to displays of compassion, but in the end the increased intensity of the action is not meant to raise our outrage against the war by exciting us emotionally. Talking about war coverage on the TV news, Godard said: "We see Sarajevo; two seconds later, we forget". This is less a comment on the concerns of the TV audience than a critique of the inability of images of suffering to communicate that to the viewers.

Like Angelopoulos's Ulysses' Gaze (1995), For Ever Mozart uses the Bosnian war as a backdrop for the examination of today's cinema. The former film depicted war as the ultimate enemy of art, and film in particular; both Angelopoulos and his director-protagonist lost their way when confronted with it. Godard does justice to the war, but in this latest trip to the self-reflexive well he comes up dry. Watching First Name: Carmen (1983), all we learned was that Godard, at that point, felt sick of moviemaking--but at least that feeling was communicated. Godard's treatment of the film-within-For Ever Mozart is emotionally blank; he's interested, but he doesn't care about this movie, whose production takes up most of the second half of his own film. Despite the best efforts of the cast, this makes the latter part of the film drag (even compared to other Godard films). Perhaps he is saving up his insights into film for the next installment of Histories du Cinema, his semi-documentry video series.

If film is slighted in For Ever Mozart, music becomes more of a concern. The title of the film plays on, "il faut rever Mozart," and Godard spoke of music as "a companion" at the press conference. I asked him how his use of music differed when he used popular (e.g. Soigne ta Droite (1987)) and classical music; he replied that Mozart's music was part of the film from its conception and that the music had helped him to write a film. Godard had also been invited to show a favorite film as part of the "Dialogues" series at the Festival; he chose Rob Tregenza's Talking to Strangers (1987), an American movie made up of nine long takes which Godard described as a film about "Listening to pictures". Il faut rever . . . perhaps music allows more room for dreaming than cinema does, or did. The performance of Mozart at the film's conclusion also allows Godard to use the flipping of sheet music as a metaphor for changes in life. It's our duty to turn the pages in our own lives, Godard explained; "sometimes it's nice, sometimes it's painful".

For Ever Mozart is a sometimes nice, sometimes painful page in Godard's career as a whole. In responce to an overly abstract question at the press conference, Godard shrugged and said, "I'd like to speak of what I have in my hands". I'm reminded of Woody Allen putting strips of 35mm film together with a needle and thread at the end of King Lear (1987). Godard would like to craft a film that could pass from his hands to the audience's, a film that is useful to them; but if the film isn't useful, it just becomes "a Godard film". This is the struggle behind For Ever Mozart.