Écran noir productions

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.

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.

"We should start with a correspondence, maybe we will not correspond to one another. Ebrahim can send me a letter this Friday, and I'll answer him next Friday. So, see you Friday, Robinson!" And so, Jean-Luc Godard stages himself in his daily thought, wisely desperate, and sends images and words from Switzerland to the other side of the Channel. In his mansion in Sussex, Ebrahim Golestan tries to decode these UFO-messages and skilfully seeks to bring them back to the appearance of reason. And so on, until the day a veil falls over the two Gods on the run. Does the existence of poets still have any meaning in these times of distress?