Jean-Luc Godard, the famed figurehead of 1960s New Wave cinema, conducted one of the more unusual press conferences seen at the Cannes film festival by answering questions via FaceTime.
The 87-year old French-Swiss director, best known for films such as Pierrot le Fou and Week End, was widely expected to skip the scheduled press conference, held for his latest video essay The Image Book, after having missed the Cannes red carpet premiere for the film the day before.
Yet shortly before the start of the press conference it was announced that Godard would be appearing after all, albeit on an iPhone held up by his cinematographer Fabrice Aragno. “It’s a bit like machine gun fire,” he quipped as journalists stepped up to a microphone to ask him questions.
Journalists from around the world took turns standing in front of a mobile phone screen in the press conference room to interview Jean-Luc Godard! A rare moment in the Festival's history! #Cannes2018 #ImageBook pic.twitter.com/zATRlGYGx3
— Festival de Cannes (@Festival_Cannes) May 12, 2018
It is not the first time that Godard has taken an idiosyncratic approach to press duties. At a Cannes press conference for his 2005 film Notre Musique the director invited a representative from the French actors and technicians’ union to speak in his stead. Godard sat silently while the representative listed detailed complaints against the French government.
Godard is considered a major figure at Cannes, despite having an antagonistic relationship with the festival. The director played a major role in the cancellation of the 1968 edition of the festival, which he proposed in solidarity with the protests taking place across France at the time. His exalted status at Cannes is evidenced by the poster for this year’s festival, which features an image from Pierrot le Fou.
A mediation on the nature of images and the West’s relationship with the Arab world, The Image Book is a fragmentary series of images taken from a variety of sources, including 1950s and 60s cinema and Isis recruitment videos. The film has been received warmly by critics, with the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw praising its “unexpected urgency and visceral strangeness”.
Among the topics touched on by Godard during his unorthodox press conference were Russia, which he suggested “we have to be kind” to, and his fears for the future of cinema. “In the next 10 years, we think in a very few movie theatres, which are quite avant-garde, they will screen my films and films in general,” he said.
The film-maker was more optimistic about the future of his own career however. “Absolutely,” he said when asked whether he was planning on making another film. “It doesn’t depend on me. It depends on my legs, it depends a lot on my hands, and it depends a little bit on my eyes.”
