Following the death of Michel Berger, France Gall decided to release an album with several compositions by her former partner. Among others, she reinterpreted Plus Haut, a song written for her in 1980. This track is the first on the album, and its lyrics seem premonitory [1]. France Gall wished to entrust the direction of the clip to Jean-Luc Godard; Warner Music agreed; Godard accepted. An appointment was made in Rolle, at the filmmaker's home, on March 28th 1996.

Godard, who was deep in his Histoire(s) du cinéma, in memory work, preserving the memory of the past century and of cinema, and who had very often created out of love for women who were themselves actresses or filmmakers – Anna Karina, Anne Wiazemsky, Anne-Marie Miéville – thus held a long interview with the singer, in whom he recognised something of his own past, whether it was in the Gall-Berger artist couple or in this album conceived out of love, in memory of a loved one. This proximity allowed him to fully appropriate the clip, which became an extension of his work in progress.

The film is a short essay on the metamorphosis that art, beauty, love or cinema accomplishes [2]. It edits and blends together a recurrent image from a short film by Godard in which we see a cameraman and a director on a back-lit crane in front of a white screen [3], numerous reproductions, including works by Manet, Vinci and Goya, photos of Marlene Dietrich and Charlie Chaplin and, above all, film extracts, They Live by Night by Nicholas Ray, Disney's Snow White or Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast – all are variations on the myth of Orpheus and love defying death, which the song lyrics evoke. Between or over these images, close-ups of the mouth, eye and blurred face of France Gall watch and seem to sing for them or with them, not “plus haut” (higher) but “plus! oh!” (more! oh!), like an endless encore.

Judith Revault d'Allonnes

[1] Plus Haut / Celui que j'aime vit dans un monde / Plus Haut / Bien au-dessus du niveau de l'eau / Plus haut que le vol des oiseaux… [Higher / The one I love lives in a world that is / Higher / Well above the surface of the water / Higher than the flight of birds…­]
[2] Including these four phrases inscribed on the screen: “L'art ne voit pas, il metamorphose” [Art doesn't see, it metamorphoses], “La beauté n'écoute pas, elle métamorphose” [Beauty doesn't listen, it metamorphoses], “L'amour ne pense pas, elle métamorphose” [Love doesn't think, it metamorphoses], “Le cinéma ne parle pas, il métamorphose” [Cinema doesn't speak, it metamorphoses].
[3] Une bonne à tout faire, shot in the United States at the start of the 1980s in Francis Ford Coppola's studios.