The Brooklyn Rail

Near the back of the exhibition compound at the Fondazione Prada in Milan, a low-rise stucco building houses Le Studio d’Orphée, an exact reproduction of the home editing suite of the late Jean-Luc Godard (1930–2022). Familiar-looking hats and scarves adorn a coat rack near the entrance, as though the director just stepped in from the cold. His only Golden Lion, awarded by the jury of the Venice Film Festival for First Name: Carmen in 1983, serves as a bookend on a small shelf near the window. Black paint strokes somewhat distressingly imply that someone has been clawing at the ceiling. The centerpiece of the space is a three-monitor editing suite on which Godard’s final feature, The Image Book (2018), plays on a loop alongside nine shorts he made between 1988 and 2008. The films screen in completed form on the main monitor, while two adjoining displays reveal the guts of Godard’s montage in action: sound and video clips stacked like strata in Final Cut Pro. Offering a unique glimpse at every step of Godard’s creative process, the studio also feels decidedly haunted, like a player piano kept on after all the guests have left.

Along with Godard’s demanding, ambiguous video work Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–99), the films in this orphic studio comprise what we might call the director’s “late period.” Though he continued to make films involving sets, scripts, and actors well into his eighties, Godard’s practice had shifted to primarily working with pre-recorded footage by the time he began making Histoire(s), when he was fifty-eight years old. In situating a film practice primarily in montage, and especially in the appropriation of well-known historical imagery and classic film sequences, including his own work from earlier eras, the director began working toward a highly provisional and deconstructive form of filmmaking that sometimes seems charged by a dual imperative to both frustrate and educate his audience. Histoire(s) du cinéma, the production of which spanned the centenary of the invention of the cinematograph, was a lesson in the history of film. But it has also been described as a “metacinematic” investigation of self-perception on a civilizational scale, and a critique of the medium we most closely associate with reality.

Multiple critics, like Dave Kehr writing for the New York Times, have compared Histoire(s) de Cinéma to Finnegans Wake in describing a monumental project whose depths of meaning can sometimes seem bottomless, at other times, merely nonsensical. Both Godard and James Joyce do similar things with language, for instance, mangling and manipulating it almost beyond recognition in pursuit of the many entendres beneath the simplest phrase. This gives Finnegans Wake its protean power, and it seems as though, on a visual level, a similar plasticity with meaning animates Godard’s late cinema also. Scenes from classic Hollywood genre flicks like Scarface (1932) or Rear Window (1954) enact cultural tropes familiar to any viewer (the masculine bully, the paranoid voyeur) even if the viewer hasn’t seen the whole film themselves. Run them together with other found footage, and you can tell a metanarrative (about modern masculinity, say) of entirely pre-recorded gestures.

Such pastiche creates a dual engagement with the material as both original document and counter-programmed message (détournement). If certain scenes and sequences have grown in cultural recognition to the point of ubiquity, then they make up a shared lexicon through which we know the world. But such images, unlike words, are also indexical. Instead of fruiting from ancient, tangled etymological roots, they derive from a single instance, one historical moment of emulsion’s exposure to light. A cinematic lexicon is therefore also an engagement with recent history, and with the inherited notion that document equals truth.

When Godard began making his tetchy, deconstructive film essays, they were considered something of a cinematic anomaly. Until recently, it seemed possible that a practice devoted to manipulating pre-recorded images—one whose production rested entirely on postproduction—would live and die largely with him. But two years after his death, the impulse seemed to be spreading. At 2024’s New York Film Festival, four films by aging male directors used the manipulation of familiar images to point to the unreliability of historical and personal narratives. New films by Leos Carax and Jia Zhangke literally incorporated pieces of films these directors had previously made, acknowledging their place in a broader cinematic lexicon, while features by Paul Schrader and David Cronenberg employed metafictional framing devices, with stories about analogous protagonists crafted to strategically plumb the directors’ own ambivalences about their influence as image-makers.

Of these, Carax’s short film C'est Pas Moi [It’s Not Me] (2024) presented itself as the direct descendent of Godard’s metacinematic essays, combining French history, famous films, and personal narrative in a meandering, free-associative onslaught. As an antically cryptic self-tribute, it faced much of the same criticism Godard’s experiments once received. Carax, whose chosen name is an anagrammatic pseudonym and who (like Godard) only appears publicly in sunglasses, is clearly skeptical of personal identity as anything but a social construct, and his films often celebrate artificiality and disguise. It’s Not Me is at its core an attempt at autobiography, but it’s remarkable how frustrated and self-defeating this quest became. Beyond a sense of psychic trouble at having grown up in the shadow of World War II (Carax was born outside Paris in 1960), we learn nothing about the author of this film, except what we already know: that he also made Boy Meets Girl (1984), Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991), Pola X (1999), and Holy Motors (2012). Footage from these films, all of which were shot in Paris, careen together in It's Not Me to form a kind of psychogeography, until tonal commonalities unite the disparate projects into a coherent sense of place. We might regard this liminal, trans-cinematic zone as the only self-portrait Carax is capable of.

In the same program, Jia Zhangke presented Caught by the Tides (2024), a film in which newly produced footage was masterfully intercut with several of his older works, including unrealized projects from his youth. Jia’s films have long been regarded for their up-to-the-minute engagement with China’s modernizing character, and this film is no different; its final scenes take place during COVID, and Jia claims he turned to preexisting footage because he was impacted by the same lockdowns he depicts. Because many of his films star the same actors, the possibility of a metanarrative in which two age naturally over the course of several productions was readily available. But the project feels looser and more roving than his previous work, with certain scenes standing alone as parts of a broader historical mosaic. In an early scene, a local Chinese business owner speaks directly to the camera, clearly talking to a younger version of Jia as part of some half-forgotten documentary. By appropriating from his own work, he too begins to assemble what could be described as a self-effacing autobiography.

Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada (2024) starred an aged-up Richard Gere as Leonard Fife, a successful documentary director who gradually unspools his secrets as the subject of a film made by his protégé (Michael Imperioli). The film includes selective use of archival and documentary footage, ostensibly shot by Gere’s character, to illustrate flashback scenes for memories that turn out to be false. In one extended departure into memory, Fife recalls teaching a class of young filmmakers On Photography, in which Susan Sontag writes extensively about how ambiguous images are manipulated into objects of evidence in the popular imagination. While the film contains no direct instances of footage Schrader previously shot, Gere’s presence in the film is itself a nod to their work together on American Gigolo (1980), and the sartorial choices and makeup given to mar the handsomely aging actor inevitably call Schrader’s own visage to mind. Winking self-referentiality is nothing new in cinema, but the choice to make Fife’s character a creator of iconic images, and then to challenge his credibility in this process, feels unique. Rather than engaging directly with preexisting footage, Oh, Canada excavates the problems of image-making from a personal and moral perspective.

This same moral self-interrogation is only heightened in David Cronenberg’s latest film The Shrouds (2024), in which Karsh (Vincent Cassel), a character very much resembling the director, has invented a shroud that can capture live, high-definition imagery of a loved one’s decaying corpse. Karsh is his own first customer, founding a boutique cemetery outside Toronto with video monitors in the headstones, where he pays regular visits to his wife. (Cronenberg’s own wife passed away from cancer in 2017.) While this protagonist is not a filmmaker in the usual sense—his shrouds produce something more akin to spatial imaging—he gets at the heart of a certain skepticism that seems to pervade all these recent projects: that to record something is to preserve its empirical reality. Karsh takes immense relief in watching his wife’s remains rot, as though by noticing up-to-the-moment changes in her decomposition he is extending her presence in the world. But his dependence on this livestream is almost immediately frustrated when the graveyard gets desecrated in an early scene. Karsh never gets the feed up and running again. Instead, he is forced to spend the rest of the film contending with simulacra of the person he misses, including her identical twin (Diane Kruger), and a Memoji-like AI-powered avatar. Putting his car on autopilot on his drives to the cemetery, he ignores the world outside the car in favor of his console’s navigation display. By the end of this orphic fable, the message is obvious: even the most high-definition livestream can’t bring his wife back. The seductions of remembrance and resemblance only serve to protect him from admitting she’s gone.

Like so much art made in the twenty-first century, these late-career films display elements of autofiction. But, as opposed to literary autofiction, the reflexive element of these postproductions is more formal than thematic. It draws out the recursive element of self-referentiality, celebrating the alienated distance between the author as person-in-the-world versus the character-in-the-text. This may be the reason why the postproduction film only inflicts itself in practice as a late career phenomenon—it only affects artists who have had an “early career” to begin with, and have, to some extent, seen their work enter the cinematic lexicon. As opposed to the autofictional character who foreshadows their future as the text’s author (like Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), we witness a kind of reverse in these late-period postproduction films: the author inserting themselves latently as a character within their own oeuvre, just another one of fortune’s fools in the long march of history. They have witnessed their own lives become the material of a reality they retrospectively critique.

I recently saw a fascinating example of the form at the Museum of Modern Art, where it was featured in the “To Save and Project” film series highlighting recently restored archival projects. Although a new film, the director digitized hours of footage that otherwise would have been lost in order to create this cinematic entry. Called Et j'aime à la fureur [Flickering Ghosts of Loves Gone By] (2021), the project was by André Bonzel, a filmmaker best known for his collaboration as co-director of Man Bites Dog (1992). Since the cult success of that film, Bonzel has largely spent his time collecting and assembling home videos made on 16mm and Super 8 film cameras by ordinary people, mostly French and Belgian, in the mid-twentieth century. In Et j'aime, he uses their footage, as well as a trove of material left behind by his relatives, to tell the story of his life, a tale of tragedy that reads in sharp contrast to the often serene family footage that comprises the film. It includes footage from Man Bites Dog, but only as a synecdoche for the role the film has played in his life, standing in for the time he spent making the film or traveling to Cannes for its premiere. Intercut with this, representing Cannes, is 1940s-era footage of families dining in resort hotels and frolicking on the beach, over which Bonzel reads the only letter his father ever wrote to him. The contrast between each individual image segment and the larger narrative is often devastating in this way. Though the footage included here was almost entirely created by strangers as home videos meant only for private consumption, Bonzel nevertheless manages to détourn these works as though they were the gigantic commercial successes of the day, feeding messages of conformity that must be counterprogrammed. Perhaps they are, and Bonzel’s sad reality is a corrective to all stories about all happy families or the idea of happiness in general.

What unites the five films above, to very different effect, is an interest in personal history and the unreliability of the image. The fact that so many films made by (and about) well-respected filmmakers express a dissatisfaction or sense of doubt about the implicit authority of their output is remarkable. None of these recent postproductions play politely with the specter of truth. Instead, imagery is turned against itself, manipulated and ruptured to identify the artificiality of its assurances. Narrative motion picture becomes the tool for its own deconstruction.

“I, too, had believed for a moment that the cinema authorized Orpheus to look back without causing Euridyce’s death,” Godard wrote a few years before his own death. “I was wrong. Orpheus will have to pay.” This idea, based in the Orphic myth in which seeing another leads to their oblivion, continues to unfold its interpretive power. While it’s easy to dismiss it as another purposefully cryptic statement by Godard, seeking to frustrate and challenge his audience, I interpret it as a warning about history, image-making, and the archive, which many great directors now reaching the ends of their careers have begun to reckon with. Make history, and you will eventually become part of it. The lives of so many now exist only in the afterlife of the image, their being endlessly reanimated by the retrospective gaze.