Nicole Brenez

For Jean-Luc Godard, with all the admiration and affection of Jacques Perconte and Nicole Brenez. December 3, 2020.

Jean-Luc Godard returns with a bracing, beautiful and confrontational essay film. Splicing together classic film clips and newsreel footage, often stretched, saturated and distorted almost beyond recognition, The Image Book interrogates our relationship with film, culture and global politics.

A delicate portrait of Mei Shigenobu, daughter of the founder of the Japanese Red Army in Beirut, Fusako Shigenobu.

An Irish filmmaker grapples with the legacy of his estranged father, the late documentarian Arthur MacCaig, through MacCaig's decades-spanning archive of the conflict in Northern Ireland. Drawing on over 30 years of unique and never-seen-before footage, 'The Image You Missed' is an experimental essay film that weaves together a history of the Northern Irish 'Troubles' with the story of a son's search for his father. In the process, the film creates a candid encounter between two filmmakers born into different political moments, revealing their contrasting experiences of Irish nationalism, the role of images in social struggle, and the competing claims of personal and political responsibility.

The documentary’s starting point is the discovery and restoration of a rare and unknown photography reel reproduced from a mutoscope film, made in 1901 in London, about Santos Dumont (1873 – 1932). The work approaches historic and artistic aspects from the beginning of Cinema (pre cinema, variety film) and a cinema that appropriates archive material (found footage, recycled films), through interviews, documents, visual metaphors and the articulation of a poetic essay.

Part of the collective film OUTRAGE & REBELLION & inspired by the police repression of a protest in Montreuil where Joachim Gatti lost one of his eyes. CIEL TERRE CIEL can be defined as the poetic identification of this loss.