Notre Musique

Between hell, purgatory and paradise: Jean-Luc Godard’s 2004 Notre Musique is an intellectual and poetic meditation on war. Taking the Bosnian War as its point of departure, the film attempts to sift through the traces of history, the rubble in Sarajevo: Europe watched as it was destroyed and Godard watches as Europe rebuilds it. The filmmaker structured the chapters of the plot analogously to the three realms of the afterlife in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Montages of fictional and documentary war images, doctrines of film theory and explanatory aphorisms pose questions of responsibility and guilt. The war in Bosnia began in April 1992. The relevance of this film today, in the era of a new war in Europe, could not be more brutal.

HKW will show the digitally restored version of Notre Musique, which had its world premiere at the Berlinale in February 2022, with an introduction by Fabrice Aragno, curator of the exhibition Sentiments, Signes, Passions and long-time confidant of Godard.