If Thomas Imbach’s parents are to be believed, the Lucerne-born director was conceived during a screening of Breathless (A bout de souffle). Thus began a lifelong connection to the work of Jean-Luc Godard, who is at the center of Imbach’s new film Say God Bye, which premiered in Karlovy Vary’s Proxima competition. The trigger for the new documentary was one of Godard’s increasingly rare public appearances in 2021. “I saw him on a Zoom call with the Kerala Film Festival, and he looked so frail”, explains Imbach. “It felt like a wake-up call from my early days as a filmmaker, the last chance to meet him, so I set out on this pilgrimage.” Accompanied only by his frequent collaborator David Charap, the director determined he would walk from Zurich to Godard’s home in the Swiss town of Rolle, a journey on foot that took two weeks.
The endpoint was clear, but everything else was spontaneous – something that is pointed out in the film when, on multiple occasions, the travelers are told they can’t just show up unannounced due to Covid regulations. And even the ending, or rather the part of it that didn’t make it into the film, went off the beaten track. “The film was not meant as a goodbye, it’s a hello”, says Imbach. “The idea was to do a second trip later on. And then came the news that he had died.” What remains is this tribute, which combines footage of the pilgrimage with various Godard clips – film snippets and interviews alike – as well as material from Imbach’s own back catalogue.
Perhaps most poignantly, we see a clip from his 2013 film Mary, Queen of Scots, which sort of parallels the journey from Zurich to Rolle in that, much like with Godard, we’re never quite sure if Queen Elizabeth I will ever appear in the movie. Imbach recognizes the connection, with an anecdote: “There’s a scene I did not put in the documentary, where I wonder if Godard will be more gracious to me than Elizabeth was to Mary, who ended up decapitated.”
Besides the divine implications in the title, which are also a running joke in the film itself, the walk to Rolle also served a more cinephile purpose. “This was my way of making him Swiss,” Imbach explains. “When I first started out as a filmmaker, it was not considered a good thing to bring up Godard, because the consensus was he was not making interesting films anymore. And even though he grew up in Switzerland and came back repeatedly, eventually settling down there for good, the Swiss filmmaking community didn’t think of him as one of us. Whereas when I saw Every Man For Himself in the early ‘80s, I realized there was a different way to make Swiss films, closer to home, without having to go far away.”
And how would Godard feel about the current cinematic landscape? “I learned early on you can’t think that way. If you start trying to think about what he would do, you’re doomed. As far as my filmmaking is concerned, I had to ‘kill’ Godard to find my own path.” And now, at long last, the two paths have converged.
