Jean-Luc Godard: Scénarios

Presented by Mount Analogue ◦ Art + Cinema. The final works of Jean-Luc Godard, Scénarios (2024,18 min), completed a day before Godard’s passing, and originally to be his final feature film, is a condensed exploration of the relation between cinema and life. Exposé du film annonce du film Scénario (2024, 36 min), made one year earlier, is a portrait of the director as he narrates his ideas for Scénario through the presentation of his notebooks composed of collages, drawings, paintings and text, reflecting on the passage of time and the end of life. 

Scénarios was completed the day before Jean-Luc Godard’s passing in September of 2022. For the previous two years, Godard had been working on what would be his final feature-length film, Scénario, originally to be presented in six chapters, combining still and moving images, and existing halfway between reading and seeing. In his final days, Jean-Luc Godard shuffled the deck and gave instructions for the film to be completed in two segments. Scénarios (18 min), structured in two halves, titled DNA and MRI, is a composition of still images, fragments from other films, and music that explores the relation between cinema and life.

A year earlier, in October 2021, Godard explained the ideas for Scénario to his assistants, Jean-Paul Battaggia and Fabrice Aragno, leading to the film, Exposé pour un film annonce du film Scénario (36 min). What emerges is a portrait of Godard, narrating his ideas presented within his notebooks, consisting of paintings, collages, drawings, and text. These notebooks were not traditional drafts but rather "movies on paper", serving as his painterly method of thinking about the passage of time and the end of life.

“One of the primary tensions of Exposé pour un film annonce du film Scénario that runs through many of Godard’s films is the relationship between images, words, sounds and the expansive ideas they might represent. The notebook onscreen and Godard’s narration are a signifier of his signifier-heavy cinema. His narration of the book’s juxtaposition of ideas and audiovisual experiences becomes an example in itself of his films’ intellectual and sensual vitality.
Exposé's comparison between Godard’s body and mind, and its juxtaposition with his cinema, acts as a premature memorial. Even when he’s gone, Godard’s mind lives on, imprinted in the endlessly generative worlds of his films." — Eric Zhu, The Insert