STP 2014 / Oana Ghera - The Bridge of Sighs
French New Wave veteran Jean-Luc Godard was one of the thirteen filmmakers who were invited to participate in the making of BRIDGES OF SARAJEVO / LES PONTS DE SARAJEVO (2014), an omnibus centered around the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand that led to the outbreak of the World War I.
Godard had already tangoed with the cultural identity of Sarajevo when approaching the Bosnian War in his I SALUTE THEE, SARAJEVO! / JE VOUS SALUE, SARAJEVO! (1993),a two-and-a-half minute photomontage of a single color image – shot in 1992, in the Eastern Bosnian town of Bijeljina, by the American photographer Ron Haviv – which depicts three soldiers of the Arkan paramilitary Serbian troups with their guns pointed towards three dead corpses laying on the ground.
THE BRIDGE OF SIGHS, Godard’s section of the BRIDGES OF SARAJEVO omnibus, is more than an autonomous work and comes as an attempt to shed new light on the problems proposed by I SALUTE THEE, SARAJEVO! in 1993. “There is a rule and an exception,” Godard states once more. “Culture is the rule and art is the exception.”
In his piece BRIDGES OF SARAJEVO he incorporates parts of I SALUTE THEE, SARAJEVO! into a typical Godard-collage, combining archive material, photographs, paintings, his already classic abundance of jeux de mots, and countless cultural quotes and references; a polyphonic construction that makes more than a few faux pas, yet manages to remain one of the boldest in the omnibus with its discourse on a simulacrum of reality residing in war photographs that he calls playfully faux-to-graphs.
The constructed artificial views of terror spread throughout popular culture (like the Pulitzer winning photograph of a boy on the verge of being eaten by a vulture), terror that art must exonerate, is exactly what Godard addresses critically in his film.
And however purist it may seem, even though it is not even by far Godard’s toughest work, THE BRIDGE OF SIGHS remains one of the most accomplished pieces in the omnibus.
