From the first, Godard’s movies have been informed by his belief in film as the medium in which the history of the 20th century is written. His collage films, beginning with the epic Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998), describe how the medium in which this history of the world is inscribed shifts from celluloid, which is projected to a collective audience in theaters, to videotape, the Internet, and discs, all available for personal viewing; and how these works also could be used to “write” image histories as personal as literary histories always have been. To these mediums has been added, in the 21st century, digital cinema. Godard’s collage films, then, are about the inscription of the world in moving images and the re-inscription upon re-inscription of that history in keeping with the transformation of the moving image medium itself.

From the January-February 2019 Issue Also in this issue The Hand of Time By Amy Taubin Climbing Higher Mountains By Andrew Chan The Big Screen: Birds of Passage By Manu Yáñez Murillo Subscribe to the magazine Fabrice Aragno is credited as the cinematographer, co-editor, and co-producer of Jean-Luc Godard’s The Image Book—both the most abstract and the most nakedly personal of the collage films that have spun off from Histoire(s) du Cinema. In making The Image Book, Godard used the same analog recoding equipment that he used for the previous collage films, handing his edit over to Aragno for digital re-inscription, with instructions to preserve the expressive qualities and signs of the analog inscription, while adding elements unique to the digital medium. As Aragno makes clear, Godard’s hands may be too shaky to push the buttons for the digital programs, but the choices Aragno makes have to meet with his approval. And he doesn’t always approve. Since Godard no longer travels, Aragno introduced the film at the New York Film Festival in the autumn of 2018. He refuses to speak for Godard, but he is more than happy to describe their work process over the past 16 years. He is also tasked with making sure that the film’s elaborate surround sound design is balanced in each venue, although the impact of the speakers varies depending on where you sit. “If you are in the middle with speakers on both sides of you,” he explains, “it is like Jean-Luc is speaking directly into your brain in stereo.” But he also likes being in the back of the theater with the image quite small and the sound coming from all over. Even better would be a situation in which the audience is free to move about during the film—as they would in an installation. The first of these installations took place in the Théâtre de Vidy in Lausanne during the last two weeks of November. Godard has also been exploring Virtual Reality technology, Aragno explains, but so far they haven’t seen any interesting VR work. He speculates that Godard might use the virtual to define the concrete, just as he used 3-D to define 2-D. “We would undo VR. And then in the end we might show the VR equipment destroyed.”

Could you describe how you worked with Godard on The Image Book? Jean-Luc does the edit on videotape and then I redo everything on computers. I used Final Cut for Goodbye to Language, including the 3-D; then I redid the 3-D on DaVinci. And for this film, I stayed with DaVinci. It’s cheap. The editing in The Image Book is somewhat different from Godard’s previous collage films, even though some of the images here are ones he’s used before. Rather than images colliding at the edit point, they often seem to stutter into place. I think that’s the effect of there being a fraction of a second of black between many images. Does the black occur because of the primitive analog technology that Godard uses to download the images? There are different reasons for the black frames between shots, but all of them are intentional. Or something might have been a mistake, but then he decides to keep it. For example, the sequence of three shots from Johnny Guitar. He’s used that “Tell me you’ve always loved me” sequence between Joan Crawford and Sterling Hayden so often that my immediate reaction was “Oh no, not again.” But it was different here. He took the image of the woman, then the man, and then the woman, and he kept all the sound, but he replaced the image of the man with just black, which is silence. A Palestinian friend of Jean-Luc wrote to him that the way of learning the Koran is with silence. But more generally, just because the technology is primitive doesn’t mean that he doesn’t get exactly what he wants. It’s like a painter wanting to keep the evidence of the brush stroke. Sometimes it’s a mistake but that’s okay. I think it’s important to have that in the film. But Jean-Paul Battaggia, who also works with Jean-Luc—it’s the three of us—hates these “mistakes.” We’ve worked together 16 years, and it’s more than working. Jean-Luc’s body is getting old, and although he isn’t old in his mind, there is an awareness of time in all of us. Maybe The Image Book is his love letter to cinema. He is reflecting on his whole life.