Vrai Faux Passeport, 2006
Betacam numérique PAL / Don de la production
As part of the exhibition “Collage(s) de France”, which eventually became “Voyage(s) en utopie, 1946-2006” and which Jean-Luc Godard presented at the Pompidou Centre from 11th May to 14th August 2006, the filmmaker committed to producing seven films. Anne-Marie Miéville created several of the videos that were delivered (Dans le temps, Ce que je n’ai pas su dire, Souvenir d’utopie) and two were older works by Godard, recycled for the occasion (Une bonne à tout faire and Je vous salue Sarajevo). Vrai faux passeport is the only new and very Godardian production of the ensemble. Vrai faux passeport draws together film extracts, television programmes and texts inscribed on the screen or, more rarely, spoken. It is in the style of the filmmaker’s “lastest period” –practised for a quarter century – and his Histoire(s) du cinéma. What is new here is the film’s ostentatious and provocative approach: that of a moral and aesthetic trial of images, which are stamped with “bonus” or “malus” by Godard, their self-appointed supreme judge. These are “twenty-nine summonses to appear for judgement” and as many extracts, organised by themes (The Gods, History, Torture, Freedom, Childhood etc.), marked successively with the seals of happiness and infamy. Hence, a sequence from Divine Intervention by Elia Suleiman, in which a ninja Palestinian terrorist throws her arrows at Israeli soldiers is hit with a “malus”, whereas an extract of Here and Elsewhere, by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, in which a young girl reads a poem by Mahmoud Darwich about resistance in a ruined Palestinian camp is marked with a “bonus”. From the East by Chantal Akerman and its long travelling shot in the streets of the former USSR is also criticised, while a documentary on Russian beggars that reinvents the world in their image receives praise. Among the “bonus”, we unsurprisingly find the likes of Rossellini, Cocteau, Mankiewicz, Dreyer, Bresson, Fellini, Hitchcock, Samira Makhmalbaf, Gallo and Watkins. The “malus” are more revealing about the filmmaker: the joys of winning as expressed by a tennis player and her trainer, Malraux’s discourse pronounced for Jean Moulin’s entombment in the Pantheon, scenes of violence in Quentin Tarantino and Amos Gitaï. While the author’s arbitrary distribution of good and bad points may be irritating, it also awakens the spectators’ critical spirit, confronting them with their own likes and dislikes, as they occupy the dual roles of lawyer and prosecutor. Fortunately, the Manichean mechanism invented by Godard wears itself (or the filmmaker) down, leaving more room for cinema: little by little, the enumeration of themes winds up, passing from 15 to 38 then to 153; the extracts are no longer marked with seals, several “bonus” follow in succession without negative counterpoints; Godard “forgets” to cut the extracts that he loves so much, presenting a super bonus several times, for the fatal beauty of Ava Gardner as the barefoot contessa… “Whosoever decides to go just a little beyond irritation, that is, by simply walking slowly beside him, will find just the contrary of the bitter, retrograde gesture this at first appears to be. They will find an exaltation of the art of love, which is absolutely engaging.”[1]
Judith Revault d’Allonnes Translated by Anna Knight
[1] Jean-Michel Frodon, “Critique de la critique”, Cahiers du cinéma, n° 611, April 2006.
