Released on: 2002-08-01
Liberté et Patrie
The title of this twenty-minute video by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie MiĂ©ville, âFreedom and Fatherland,â is the official slogan of the Canton de Vaud, in Switzerland, where the filmmakers live and grew up. To fulfill their commission from a Swiss cultural festival, they adapted a great Swiss novel, âAimĂ© Pache, Painter from the Vaud,â by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, from 1911 (about a local artist who goes to Paris for his education and then returns home) and extruded its autobiographical analogies to Godardâs own life and work. Using a choice set of clips from Godardâs films to coincide with events from the painterâs life, verbal references to modern times and to Godardâs ownâSartre, the late nineteen-sixties, the cinemaâand images of the Swiss terrain, which plays a decisive role in the work of Pache, Godard, and MiĂ©ville (an important filmmaker in her own right), they produce the effect of mirrors within mirrors.
