I was getting up early on one of the last days of a shoot in September. I’d been in Italy for the better part of a week desperately trying to get footage for an essay film I’d committed a lot (for me) of time and money to over the last year. An old friend helped me a little along his way to visit family in the old country. Fate had us reuniting that day, on the start of our voyage back, and he cared more about Godard than anyone else I’ve ever known.
Maybe Godard was innovative to a fault. But if he was someone interested in a traditional career, he never would’ve been Jean-Luc Godard. At every step when he could’ve been comfortable, he burned the bridges again just to see if there were a new ways to build them. He was a soldier for cinema until the end, an end that goes beyond his bodily demise. If last year’s teasers are true, two films are near (or maybe now, at) completion—and his return to photochemical film, no less.
We were drunk at a tiki bar somewhere in northern Italy, drinking tall negronis, I don’t know how many cigarettes in, and we’d finished the cigars we got in honor of the man. Where Godard lived and died was more than a stone’s throw away, but maybe if you threw a few in succession you could land one in Lac Léman. Godard was gone, but he felt close.
After we stumbled back to the hotel, I tried to fall asleep immediately—exhausted from work, travel, and a night of drinking and high emotion. My friend violently shook me awake. He’d tuned the TV to Rai 3, what might as well be the Italian equivalent to NBC: they were playing The Image Book.