Voyage(s) to Sarajevo: Godard and the War of Images

Abstract

Des O’Rawe’s chapter examines Jean-Luc Godard’s responses to representations of the Bosnian War, especially those associated with Sarajevo. For Godard, the reluctance of Europe’s advanced liberal democracies to intervene meaningfully in Bosnia—their insistence that humanitarian aid rather than protective military intervention was the order of the day—was tantamount to supporting Serbian fascism: a fortiori, a policy of appeasement reminiscent of the days of the Munich Agreement in 1938. Although Godard’s support for intervention placed him against some of his compatriots on the left, it is unwise to make simplistic assumptions about his politics. It is in his filmmaking, in his vision of cinema, and how it relates to other histories of the image, that Godard’s sensibility can be most keenly felt and understood. O’Rawe argues how Godard, even in his recent contribution to the compilation film Les Ponts de Sarajevo/Bridges of Sarajevo (2014, 114 min.), persists in posing questions about how the past continues to shape the present and how Sarajevo and its history still delineates the identity of contemporary Europe.