88-year-old Jean-Luc Godard has revealed that he is working on a new movie. This all confirms what I have long suspected, that his latest feature “The Image Book” was not going to be his swan song. Of course not, the guy lives to make films, why would he just quit like that? If anything, the creative process is giving him meaning and purpose in his twilight years, much like Woody Allen, actually.
Godard confirmed his new project when asked by Les Inrockuptibles: “Yes. It will tell the story of a Yellow Vest woman who breaks up with her boyfriend. The theme is inspired by Racine’s Bérénice. The character brings to mind Bérénice when Titus comes back to the State.”
He continues, “It won’t be made just of what you call archival images. There will also be a shoot. I don’t know whether I’ll find what one calls actors. I’d like to film the people one sees on news channels but plunging them into a situation where documentary and fiction blend. I don’t know whether they’ll agree to be filmed in relation to themselves, both in their professional situation and in invented situations. In any case, I have a list. For instance, there’s Natacha Polony [French journalist]. She’s good. But I’d only be interested in filming her if she’d agree to be seen in a moment of fiction.”
It’s been a long time since making traditional or even vaguely conventional “movies” has interested Godard. If anything, the director’s movies over the last 20 or so years have been experiential audio/visual collages more interested in pictures, sounds, cuts, and de-saturation; a maddening barrage of dadaist statements. One yearns to be transported by his sonic and tactile experiments–after all, his last film, before “The Image Book,” “Goodbye to Language,” was an unequivocally gorgeous amalgam, in 3D no less, and represented his best work in years. “The Image Book” was sadly the opposite, sometimes too impenetrable, other times maddening but fascinating.