Liberty and Homeland

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. Commissioned by a Swiss cultural festival, they adapted the 1911 Swiss novel *Aimé Pache, Painter from the Vaud* by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, which tells the story of a local artist who goes to Paris for his education and then returns home. The film draws out its autobiographical parallels to Godard’s own life and work. Using selected clips from Godard’s films to align with events in the painter’s life, verbal references to modern times and to Godard’s own—such as Sartre, the late nineteen-sixties, and cinema—and images of the Swiss terrain, which plays a central role in the work of Pache, Godard, and Miéville (an important filmmaker in her own right), they create the effect of mirrors within mirrors.