The Cinematheque

New Restoration

“Beautiful and powerful … [Godard] still has things to teach us about the way our responses to image and text tend to be coded and predetermined.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Three Dante-inspired chapters—“Hell,” ​“Purgatory,” and ​“Paradise”—divide Godard’s scathing portrait of the 20th century afire in this woefully underseen 2004 masterwork, screening here in the restoration that debuted at Berlinale 2022. War, political violence, and cinema’s role in relation to them have preoccupied Godard throughout his career. In the searing Notre musique, the auteur provides perhaps his most honest and profound articulation of these ideas, using a montage of war footage and a narrative about a Sarajevo symposium (with Godard himself as one of the speakers) to address the occupation of Palestine, the genocide of European Jews, the long arm of colonialism, and the state of American imperialism, all within the context of film art. Its relevance at this moment is staggering.

In French, Arabic, English, Hebrew, Serbo-Croatian, and Spanish with English subtitles

“Notre musique represents that most unfashionable and vulnerable of things: the cinema of ideas.”

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“A marvel of lucidity and wit.”

John Powers, LA Weekly