In Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, Gloria Swanson utters the famous line, "I am big. It's the pictures that got small."

Jean-Luc Godard may as well be saying that to film critics. For example, in a review from Variety of Godard's melancholy meditation on film and history, Forever Mozart, both the film and Godard are discarded and brushed off like a dead fireflies: "The man who revolutionized the cinema in 1960 with Breathless is now firmly relegated to the margins." But Godard is not marginalized. He has always been there, composing complex film essays, political jeremiads and intricate ideas all through the '80s, '90s, and up through 2004's Notre Musique. If anything, it is the movie audiences that have been marginalized into digesting mass-marketed, big-budget junk food movies. Short on originality and long on banality, these films treat their audiences like rhesus monkeys as the crowd goes along with the relentless synchronistic promotion and marketing.

In an atmosphere like this, it is almost a miracle that Godard is still out there cranking out intelligent films that assumes that an audience can still read books. And Forever Mozart is another film in Godard's moving and primal philosophical examination of the nature of cinema and art. This love of cinema is laid bare. As one character says in the film, "It's what I like in cinema: a saturation of glorious signs bathing in the light of their absent explanation."

The presiding consciousness in Forever Mozart is an aging director (Vicky Messica) in an Eddie Constantine get-up, accompanied by an aging writer (Harry Cleven). Together they struggle to put together a film called The Fatal Bolero. Their efforts link together four sections made up of a casting call where the director in a variation of a Jerry Lewis gag constantly utters "No" to the acting hopefuls before they can even get out their names; a trip to war-torn Sarajevo with the director's politically correct daughter Camille (Madeleine Assas), her husband Jerome (Frederic Pierrot), and their Muslim maid Dzamila (Ghalia Lacroix), who end up captured by Serbian soldiers, summarily raped, forced to dig their own graves and executed; a French resort town premiering The Fatal Bolero where the film flops; and a Mozart recital where the Director slowly ascends the stairway to the concert, sits on a landing, and smokes a cigarette.

Here, as elsewhere, Godard takes on crassness in all its forms -- insensitive film investors, chic and ineffective PC liberals, and cretinous movie audiences, while, at the same time, investigating the validity of art and culture in an age of terror and genocide.

The block-headed movie audiences also come in for some of Godard's wrath. When The Fatal Bolero is finally ready for a preview, the waiting filmgoers become violent when they find out the film is not what they have been expecting. Members of the movie line shout out, "If its poetry. I'll walk out," "I hope it's not in black and white," and "Are there any boobs?" The boobs turn out to be the audience as they storm away from the theater, screaming, "Let's go see Terminator 4."

Amidst all this cynicism about the state of the art, Godard weaves a sad and mournful contemplation on cinema and its inability to affect changes in history (which is quite an admission coming from an intensely political filmmaker who once abandoned features entirely to head The Dziga Vertov Film Collective). He uses the civil war in Bosnia to signify the distance between cinema and reality. And this gap between movies and life, Godard concludes, can never be fulfilled. Life and history happen with or without film. As he remarks in the film, "Knowledge of the possibility of representation consoles us for being enslaved to life. Knowledge of life consoles us for the fact that representation is but shadows."

Godard is denying himself and his power in Forever Mozart and the intense emotion behind what he says is unbearably sad, even blended into the Godardian mosaic. Here at last is one filmmaker who is truly and deeply examining his life and his art. As the Director says at one point, "I knew it would end like this. Not knowing where to put the camera."

Aka For Ever Mozart.



Rock me Amadeus.