“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 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 produce the effect of mirrors within mirrors.” (Richard Brody)
French spoken
