"The fraternity of metaphors". Jean-Luc Godard at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge

Jean-Luc Godard (Paris, 1930 - Rolle, Switzerland, 2022) occupies a central place in the history of cinema and in debates on contemporary art and visual thought. With a catalogue of at least two hundred film and video pieces, as well as abundant writings, interviews, and visual works, his production is one of the most impressive and decisive of the past hundred years.

Godard has shown us that images can be tools for openness and connection, for comparison and analysis; that ideas, in cinema, work better as a point of arrival rather than departure, and that films should not become channels to travel along with, but projections that allow us to think them through. Any practice or reflection on the form, uses, and scope of images today must pass through him.

Among the filmmakers of his generation, he is surely the one who looked at the recent past with the greatest tenacity. The traumas of the Second World War and extermination camps, and the realization of humanity threatened on an unprecedented scale by war violence, mark his filmography from his first short film, Opération 'béton' (1954-55), to his last completed work in life, Film annonce du film "Drôles de guerres" (1er tournage) (2022).

When he recalled what it meant for him to see images of the Spanish Civil War on a cinema screen in France at the beginning of the 1950s, still shaken by the horrors of the previous decade and bled dry by colonial wars, Godard spoke of a "fraternity of metaphors". In his conception of the role images are called to play, they relate to each other as thinking forms and have the capacity to rebel against oppression. "The text makes the law. Today it is by no means the images that make the laws, you can place any commentary over them: they are docile, they are kind [...] It is through discourses that tyrants continue to defile and exploit people."

Hence, by unusually associating fragments of images and sounds, he set out to intervene-almost always polemically-in the conflicts of his time: Algeria, Vietnam, Palestine, Yugoslavia. "A film is a theoretical rifle and a rifle is a practical film. Luckily, I don't carry a rifle because I am so short-sighted that I would shoot my friends; with a film, I feel less short-sighted."

Insoumis in two countries due to his double refusal to serve in the French army and do military service in Switzerland, knowing war only indirectly did not prevent him from reflecting on it as perhaps no other filmmaker did. His great meditation on the history of the twentieth century and the historiographical capacity of films, Histoire(s) du cinéma (1987-1998), poses an equation whose unknowns are war and cinema. That monumental work led him to conclude that "from the point of view of art history, the twentieth century is the hundred years' war."

Until the very end, when he called to "stop trusting in the billions of diktats of the alphabet and return their freedom to the incessant metamorphoses and metaphors of a necessary and true language", he considered that the critical production of new images demanded a radical refoundation which, for lack of another name, he called montage. "An image-even an icon-does not wage war. It is, above all, a relationship towards the other."

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