This letter, addressed to Freddy Buache, was created on the occasion of the fifth centenary of the city of Lausanne. This is the city where Buache directs the cinematheque that has a large number of Godard's films. It's in the context of this intimacy and a common point of view on the decline of the cinema (it's urgent, he says, the cinema will die soon) that Godard sets out in search of his subject, a truth about the city, about the image.
His search is for a centre, between the water and the sky, which will define Lausanne's specific nature, tracking a movement which will make the link between these anchorages, these extremes ("Lausanne is three shots: a blue shot, a green shot and the way it passes from blue to green"). On the way, he allows a few approximations, drafts and shaky sketches in contemplation of a landscape, a face taken in slow motion, in the thin rustling of light-soaked leaves, in the dormant moods of the water and in the somnambulistic movement of the crowd.
He also allows a few detours into painting (impressionist writing) and the documentary, in order to come back, all the better, to the centre. A centre where he can find, in the crowd's movement, the beginnings of fiction and dream of charting an ideal film course, from Robert Flaherty to Ernst Lubitsch, to whom this letter is dedicated.

Stéphanie Moisdon