Fabrice Aragno

In Le Livre d’Image, Jean-Luc Godard recycles existing images (films, documentaries, paintings, television archives, etc.), quotes excerpts from books, uses fragments of music. The driving force is poetic rhyme, the association or opposition of ideas, the aesthetic spark through editing, the keystone. The author performs the work of a sculptor. The hand, for this, is essential. He praises it at the start. “There are the five fingers. The five senses. The five parts of the world (…). The true condition of man is to think with his hands. Jean-Luc Godard composes a dazzling syncopation of sequences, the surge of which evokes the violence of the flows of our contemporary screens, taken to a level of incandescence rarely achieved. Crowned at Cannes, the last Godard is a shock film, with twilight beauty.

Mika, heiress to a Swiss chocolate company, is married to celebrated pianist André and stepmother to his son, Guillaume, whose mother died in a car wreck on his tenth birthday. Their lives are interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Jeanne, a young woman who has learned she was almost switched with Guillaume at birth.

Shot entirely from a boat on a lake, this evocative film confronts the viewer resolutely with his or her sensitivity for the moment. Surrounded by sounds of animal life, both from the lake and the neighbouring forests, this film takes us through the seasons. Sounds of water, the wind and a human presence.

With everything they've got, a couple throws themselves into a sailing race lasting several days and nights on a large lake.

"The idea is simple / A married woman and a single man meet / They love, they argue, fists fly / A dog strays between town and country / The seasons pass / The man and woman meet again / The dog finds itself between them / The other is in one, / the one is in the other / and they are three / The former husband shatters everything / A second film begins: / the same as the first, / and yet not / From the human race we pass to metaphor / This ends in barking / and a baby's cries / In the meantime, we will have seen people talking of the demise of the dollar, of truth in mathematics and of the death of a robin." -JLG

In French, "scénario" is cinema's name for how it tells stories. This is the title Jean-Luc Godard chose for his final film, which was literally completed the day before his self-death. The two segments of this film open with a series of identical sequences. The second segment then diverges and ends on a self-portrait of Jean-Luc Godard -his last images- sitting on his bed, bare-chested, he hides none of the wear on his body in the manner of Pigalle's sculpted portrait of Voltaire. "Scénarios" ends as it began, with a repetition, the figure of eternal return, the moment where time, which has been the great -if not unique- question of cinema, will have ceased to flow.

A symphony in three movements. Things such as a Mediterranean cruise, numerous conversations, in numerous languages, between the passengers, almost all of whom are on holiday... Our Europe. At night, a sister and her younger brother have summoned their parents to appear before the court of their childhood. The children demand serious explanations of the themes of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Our humanities. Visits to six sites of true or false myths: Egypt, Palestine, Odessa, Hellas, Naples and Barcelona.

A three-chapter (Hell, Purgatory and Paradise) meditation on the city of Sarajevo in the wake of the Bosnian war, on Palestine and Israel, and on war itself.