"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 contemporary debates on art and visual thought. With a catalogue of at least two hundred film and video pieces, as well as abundant writings, interviews, and plastic artworks, his output 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 in cinema, ideas work better as a point of arrival than as a starting point, and that films should not become channels through which we simply travel, but instead should act as projections that allow us to reflect on them. Any practice or reflection on the form, use, and scope of images today must go through him.

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

When he recalled what it meant to him to see images of the Spanish Civil War on a cinema screen in early 1950s France, 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 fulfill, they relate to one another as thinking forms and have the capacity to rebel against oppression. "The text lays down the law. Today, images in no way make the laws; any commentary can be superimposed upon them: they are docile, they are kind [...] It is through discourses that tyrants continue to pollute and take advantage of people."

Hence, it is by unconventionally associating fragments of images and sounds that 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. Fortunately, I do not carry a rifle because I am so nearsighted I would shoot my friends; with a film I have the impression of being less nearsighted."

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

Until the very end, when he called for "ceasing to trust in the billions of diktats of the alphabet and returning their freedom to the incessant metamorphoses and metaphors of a necessary and truthful language," he maintained that the critical production of new images required a radical refoundation which, for lack of a better term, he called montage. "An image-even an icon-does not wage war. It is, above all, a relationship towards the other."