The Authentic Trial of Carl Emmanuel Jung (1967)

"This trial is imaginary", these are the first words of the narrator, who continues by pointing to the figures, prosecutor, lawyers, journalist, faces on an abstract black background, concluding: "For lack of having been able to attend a trial of this kind, I imprison myself, and I let my imagination run wild." Hanoun immediately announces the project for this a-naturalist film, financed by Godard, in which Eustache makes an appearance. He establishes his own relationship to the truth, in a dialectic of known and seen. The trial of Carl-Emmanuel Jung, a Nazi war criminal, turns out to be that of a certain cinema. Based on historical accounts, it reverses the uses of testimony (voice shifts, always off, from one speaker to another) like the expectations of proof by image (refusal to show the announced visual proofs). A political film rooted in the present, it overlaps spaces on top of each other, from the courtroom to the outside, in a deceptive mode for the drive s copy of the voyeur spectator, giving pride of place to listening. Echoing Arendt's analyses, the bet, far from spectacular and from the usual dramaturgy of the courtroom exhibited in the cinema, is that of these "atonal words, without passion, to tell the immeasurable horror of the Nazi crime .""