Liberty and Homeland
2002 · 21 MIN · IMDB 6.6 · 229 VOTES · DIR. Jean-Luc Godard, Anne-Marie Miéville
Overview
The title of this twenty-minute video by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, “Freedom and Fatherland,” 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, “Aimé Pache, Painter from the Vaud,” 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 Godard’s own life and work. Using a choice set of clips from Godard’s films to coincide with events from the painter’s life, verbal references to modern times and to Godard’s own—Sartre, the late nineteen-sixties, the cinema—and images of the Swiss terrain, which plays a decisive role in the work of Pache, Godard, and Miéville (an important filmmaker in her own right), they produce the effect of mirrors within mirrors.
Dialogue Timeline — 270 lines
A SAMPLE ACROSS THE RUNTIME — EVERY LINE IS SEARCHABLE
00:00:15 When did he get the commission?
00:00:53 The eyes are where the expression seems concentrated.
00:01:34 Trying to see something.
00:02:19 a harmonious, complete whole.
00:03:20 You mustn't forget that the French were the liberators.
00:05:06 Why Aimé Pache
00:06:17 In those days
00:07:08 and married the daughter of a railroad man. A girl from Savoy.
00:08:38 As an old revolutionary, the father didn't believe in the power of images
00:09:25 say goodbye, that all's well. - So write, "I have to finish up
00:10:03 then there's hope.
00:10:47 of Abraham Jean Daniel Davel.
00:11:32 then another spot beside it.
00:12:16 And a little farther down:
00:13:42 And then he comes back: Fatherland.
00:14:24 He goes to all the exhibitions.
00:15:04 He asks very simple questions:
00:15:44 Aimé Pache finds himself in the prehistory of the visible.
00:16:53 A girl with a boy.
00:18:12 who Pache often paints as an infanta.
00:18:50 Finally at the water's edge, at a pastor's house.
00:21:03 In a sense, fear is the daughter of God
00:21:40 It's composed: Gershwin, Mozart.
00:22:47 and so many die so well.