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Hail, Sarajevo
Je vous salue, Sarajevo
A static photograph is revisited once and again. It’s grainy, rough. We see two soldiers, weapons in one hand, cigarettes in the other. They are walking among the victims of war. A soldier points his rifle at a woman’s head and is about to kick her, getting ready for the final blow. There’s no narrative line, no change of scenery, just a fixated image decomposed into a series of fragments that together depict a terrible truth.
Hail, Sarajevo is a morsel of history in and of itself. Made in 1993, when the Bosnian War was at its apex, it compresses untold hours of action into two minutes. Arvo Pärt’s “Silhouans Song” lends it urgency, a feeling of searching and never finding a way to uncover the heart of atrocity.
“In a sense, fear is the daughter of God,” says Godard, “redeemed on Good Friday.” With that theme, he personifies fear as an intercessor between reality and fantasy.
Bio Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022) was a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter, and film critic. He rose to prominence as a pioneer of the 1960s New Wave and was arguably the most influential French filmmaker of the post-war era. He is considered one of our greatest lyricists, whose work touches on historical trauma, religion, and the legacy of cinema.
In a sense, fear is the daughter of God, redeemed on Good Friday. She is not beautiful, mocked, cursed, or disowned by all. But don’t be mistaken, she watches over all mortal agony, she intercedes for mankind; for there is a rule and an exception. Culture is the rule, and art is the exception. Everybody speaks the rule: cigarette, computer, t-shirt, television, tourism, war. Nobody speaks of the exception. It isn’t spoken, it is written; Flaubert, Dostoyevsky. It is composed by Gershwin and Mozart. It is painted; Cézanne, Vermeer. It is filmed; Antonioni, Vigo. Or it is lived, then it is the art of living; Srebrenica, Mostar, Sarajevo. The rule is to want the death of the exception. So the rule for cultural Europe is to organize the death of the art of living, which still flourishes. When it’s time to close the book, I have no regrets. I’ve seen so many people live so badly, and so many die so well.
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- This film was #62 in the “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025