Four Short Films collects four video works by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville made between 1993 and 2002. Released in April 2006, it was the first DVD issued by ECM and opened the label's ECM Cinema series. The films are essays in sound and image, built from archive footage, quotations and music, many of the recordings drawn from the ECM catalogue.
The connection with ECM was already old. Godard had been offered free use of the label's music for his films, and Manfred Eicher had issued the soundtracks of Nouvelle Vague and Histoire(s) du cinéma in the New Series. Godard and Miéville produced the four pieces, and Eicher edited the release. The DVD comes as a small book in English, French and German. It holds stills from the films, the complete texts of their commentaries and an introductory essay by the German film critic Michael Althen.
Je vous salue, Sarajevo (1993) lasts about two minutes. It takes apart a single photograph from the Bosnian war, detail by detail, over Arvo Pärt's Silouans Song. De l'origine du XXIe siècle was made for the opening of the Cannes festival in 2000. It moves through the twentieth century with its dates written on screen, setting fragments of Bergman, Rossellini and Ophüls against newsreels of war, with Górecki and Hans Otte on the soundtrack. The Old Place, commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is a meditation on art, value and ethics built mostly from still images. Liberté et patrie, named after the motto of the canton of Vaud, was made for the Swiss national exhibition Expo.02. It freely adapts C. F. Ramuz's novel Aimé Pache, peintre vaudois into a reflection on painting and on the region where both filmmakers grew up.
In Time Out, Geoff Andrew called the Cannes film "one of Godard's finest and most succinct recent efforts". Sukhdev Sandhu wrote in The Daily Telegraph that the films, taken together, "have a meditative intensity that is quite beguiling". German critics welcomed the edition itself. The Stuttgarter Zeitung praised its bibliophile design, while Die Zeit noted how the DVD makes Godard's on-screen typography readable and repeatable.
DVD-5 (NTSC, 4:3, Dolby Digital 5.1, all regions), German and English subtitles, total running time 86 minutes, with the trilingual book. First released in 2006 as ECM Cinema 5001.
