Je vous salue, Sarajevo

Je vous salue, Sarajevo (1993)

*** (out of 4)

Interesting two-minute short from the famous director actually says a lot more than some of his feature length films. The entire film has one photo being shown with voice over narration. At the start of the film we only see a few fragments of the photo but over time more parts of the photo are revealed until we see soldiers with guns standing above some people lying on the ground. The narration tries to link the real world with art and the written narration is pretty strong and gets its point across without having to be preachy. What works so well here is the way Godard edited the film and how the single photo can have so many different meanings when viewed differently. There's nothing groundbreaking here but the film certainly is an interesting one and one worth viewing for fans of the director.

Godard is a curious and highly talented filmmaker, yet uneasy to get, arrogant and autistic in so many times. This ruins much of what he makes, but we're still left with some pearls.

This is one of them. A simple exercise of visual manipulation, minimal in its resources and time extension but which becomes magnificent in its visual power. This short is 2 minutes of multiple framings of one single photography. Every framing will give us a particular reality within, and make us comprehend different worlds within the world which, as the short goes along, we understand to be a single image. These two minutes in Godard are more analytic and meaningful than many of Wenders films which address directly what it means to look for the hidden visual meanings of images. Why couldn't he be so clear headed in the 20 years preceding this film?

Here, as in a few other Godard films, i was so impressed with how he manipulated me, that i forgave his usually speech, one of underneath political stubbornness and egotism, disguised as a pure humanitarian. I do not reject his intentions, only his attitude.

Also, a question arises here, and in the work of Godard throughout the 90'. More than testing the limits of cinema, here he questions its own definitions. I believe (based on his "history of cinema" episodes) that he pushes his own definitions of cinema to the fields of painting. Yet, i think he becomes more of an image maker and manipulator. Painting, in its cinematic sense, has two ways to be understood: one is with lighting/color/composition, the other is as visual communication/manipulation. Welles/Toland, Conrad Hall, Gordon Willis. Those were painters. Here Godard attempts at manipulating, and wanders in not so explored fields of cinematic narrative.

My opinion: 4/5 watch this.

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"In a sense, fear is the daughter of God, redeemed on Good Friday. She is not beautiful, mocked, cursed or disowned by all. But don't be mistaken, she watches over all mortal agony, she intercedes for mankind; for there is 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 is written; Flaubert, Dostoyevsky. It is composed; Gershwin, Mozart. It is painted; Cézanne, Vermeer. It is filmed; Antonioni, Vigo. Or it is lived, then it is the art of living; Srebrenica, Mostar, Sarajevo. The rule is to want the death of the exception. So the rule for cultural Europe is to organise the death of the art of living, which still flourishes" – Jean Luc Godard, "Je Vous Salue, Sarajevo" (1993).

The film in question is a short, two-minute rumination on the once volatile situation during the period of the Bosnian War, presented in the form of a photo-montage with accompanying text. In the film, Godard takes a single photograph and shows us a series of close-up segments that conspire to abstract the overall meaning of the picture, turning the individual elements into mere symbols that are there to be deciphered. The ultimate point that the director is trying to make is heartfelt and honest, though he is intelligent enough not to preach to his audience; instead, allowing room for further thought and deeper interpretation. By taking the original image, zooming in on it and showing it to the viewer piece by piece, Godard allows each symbol to take on various roles and characteristics; from the gun, which becomes a symbol of violence, protection and power, to the cigarette, with all its quietly mocking reminders of society in even the most barbaric and brutal of contexts.

The use of narration expresses Godard's genuine sadness at the state of the world in the latter half of the twentieth-century, contrasting the ideas of art and atrocity as the presentation of the image becomes known. The film also touches on the importance of art and how it is needed as an egalitarian comment on society. With this in mind, the final image becomes a work of art itself; which - simply as a result of being - expresses something that otherwise would never have been said. As the film progresses, more and more of the image is presented to the audience until the final shot, in which the full scenario of the picture and its depiction of militant abuse, becomes clear. Here, Godard brings his narration to a close and forces the viewer for the first time to look at and contemplate the image that he has previously dissected so skilfully, so that we can take into account the crux of his argument and see the ultimate depiction of what Elvis Costello once referred to as "the sad burlesque".

Even at this incredibly brief running time, Je Vous Salue, Sarajevo is a bold, heartfelt and moving critique from Godard - the most talented and revolutionary filmmaker of the twentieth century - with the implication of the title combined with his heartrending and reasoned narration seeming to underline the entirely personal nature of the film. "I Salute Thee, Sarajevo!" / "Hail, Sarajevo!" is the message that Godard relates as he offers this quiet and dignified polemic about political censorship, freedom of speech, art and atrocity, life and death and the state of the world in the year nineteen-ninety-three. As the poignant music of Arvo Pärt swells on the soundtrack, Godard makes his intentions clear with a final, heartfelt lament; "when it's time to close the book, I have no regrets. I've seen so many people live so badly, and so many die so well".

The ending of this is what makes this feel more special than some minor tossed-off shard of another project; he makes the case of what role someone has when the proverbial book is closed on a life of pain. It's rather poignant for that crusty lump of Swiss-French bread M. Godard as he ties together what we are seeing in this picture of pathetic and vicious bit kf military violence, and this idea of seeing agony all his life - or at least in the images and representations fragmented and in this poetic reinterpretation as filtered through this abstract cinema - is melancholic.

Hail, Sarajevo is basically a short poem on film, and I enjoyed the syntax and flow of the words and images even as I'm still not totally sure what all happened in the Sarajevo conflicts (EDIT) I read up a little on what the photograph is, a soldier kicking a Bosnian civilian. Damn. I like this more after it ends; maybe if Godard had transitioned more to short-form content in his latter years I would've responded more favorably. Oh, well.