第61回ニューヨーク映画祭のエイミー・トービン

When he began making movies, Godard had a day job cutting trailers, and we can see in them some of his editing tropes in embryo. Over the past two decades, his movies were accompanied by limited-edition books that combined fragments of text with collages of film stills and drawings. Among the projects he had been working on toward the end of his life was an adaptation of False Passports, a novel by Charles Plisnier about Trotskyite activists in the 1920s. When he realized he no longer had the strength to make a feature, Godard gave the materials he had assembled—alongside precise instructions about the placement and length of time for each image, each voice-over and musical excerpt—to his assistant Fabrice Aragno, who turned this notebook into a trailer for a film that would never be made. It would have been, or rather, it is, albeit condensed, a compendium of women radicals fighting in struggles from the Spanish Civil War, to the Resistance movements of World War II, to Algeria, to Sarajevo. There is a poignant voice-over where Godard describes the film he wants to make to someone from Yves Saint Laurent, which funded the trailer, explaining that "Plisnier was more like a painter than a writer. He painted people's faces." Bits of sound from earlier films float in and out like memory: "Her friend Gershom Scholem said that Hannah Arendt was like twelve synagogues." "As for Algerian immigration, we no longer talk of it." "The most ephemeral moments possess an illustrious past." "Why come to Sarajevo." "Because of Palestine. I wanted to see a place where reconciliation is possible." (It's worth noting that Bosnia-Herzegovina has seen creeping instability due to the war in Ukraine.) So yes, against all odds, as in Green Border, Godard in the end has hope, however fragile.Trailer for a Film that Will Never Exist: Phony Wars is not a Rosetta Stone. It is simply as a film "comme les autres," except it is the last.