The last image of Jean-Luc Godard’s last film Scénarios is one of the most heartbreaking in his long, storied, notorious, glorious, defining, essential career. It is of Godard sitting on his bed, his shirt open, taking notes on a film he will never make. “Okay,” says a woman off-screen — presumably Anne-Marie Miéville, Godard’s partner in love and cinema since the ‘70s — and that is the last we will ever see of Jean-Luc, the screen goes black, and the man who vigorously redefined the possibilities of cinema time and time again since 1960 is now dead. This image is more devastating than that of just seeing a monumental figure in his twilight as a man, but it’s also the way that it’s shot that tears one’s heart out: smoothly steadied by hand with a wide-open aperture, this is an image Godard would have never filmed himself.
Godard built and rebuilt a unique mise en scène for himself in the post-New Wave stages of his career, the decades that really mattered. In the ‘70s, it was video work, multi-screen scenes and images directly laid in contrast to each other. In the ‘80s, his camera locked down on a tripod, exposing as much depth of field as possible while filling modern hotels and old chateaus with natural light. Hybrid video became Godard’s masterworking in the ‘90s — not just the recollecting of images, but the reconquering of them, reframing to take on new worlds of meaning. In the 2000s, his digital took on a new light, most stunningly with his cut to color in In Praise of Love (2001), where the black-and-white world of film is suddenly dunked in sharp blues and oranges that bleed out their own details. He’d expand this digital texture even further into the 2010s, ripping apart the images with 3D in Goodbye to Language (2014) and making a final screed in The Image Book (2018). What little he left in the 2020s were not images themselves, but notes on images, paintings over them and diagrams of the future. Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: ‘Phony Wars’ (2023) is a collage film — not in the “conventional” avant-garde sense of images overlayed each other in motion, but a film made up of images of collages that Godard produced for the never-completed film Phony Wars. Godard’s voice in Trailer is confident, if physically failing in his frail old-age. In Scénarios, it feels like Godard can barely speak, the reach of his still-sharp mind exceeding the grasp of his body. Even more than Trailer, Scénarios is less a film made by Godard than one his collaborators are trying to finish for him.
Scénarios opens with an image scrolling right-left across the screen, a photograph painted over by Godard’s own hand — the quality of the image being conquered by the material overlay of the artist. That kind of reconfiguring is typical of Godard, whose truest, fullest masterpiece, Histoire(s) du cinema (1989-99), is chock-full of the pieces of cinema overlapping, digitally altered, re-graded for new effect, as if the images themselves that made up the 20th century were being filtered through the director’s emotional memory of them. In Scénarios, the images we see are crisp. When Godard constructs a sequence in the latter minutes of Scénarios — piecing together a woman getting killed in Jaws (1975), a roadside assassination in the Middle East, the mirror shootout in The Lady From Shanghai (1947), Bridgette Bardot’s body hanging out of a crashed, cherry-red sports car in Contempt (1963), the doomed flight at the start of Only Angels Have Wings (1939), bodies on the highway in Weekend (1967), and, of course, Anna Magnani in Rome, Open City (1945) — the pictures are almost always of the highest quality transfers available, which does not feel Godardian, especially not in his latter stages. But interestingly, this sequence concludes with what seems to be a photo of a dead child, printed for maximum contrast, where any grays fade into their respective blacks and whites. Perhaps this is the way Godard instructed the image to be shown, perhaps it was an image in this quality when he left it behind, and perhaps even Godard didn’t reconstitute the cinema images because he didn’t have the time or the energy before his death. Or maybe those working to finish the film to the best of Godard’s intent didn’t see themselves fit to attempt to do it themselves.
Regardless of its ultimate presentation, what is left behind are final thoughts, the things that peeked out of Godard’s memories in his last days. Sometimes they elude the viewer. Why is it that, of all of Godard’s films, the two he wishes to revisit at length in Scénarios are Germany Year Ninety-Nine Zero (1991) — the sequence when Eddie Constantine (reprising his Lemmy Caution role) and a policeman knock on a window of a group of women playing violins — and the final shootout in Band of Outsiders (1964), which Godard was known to cite as being one of his worst films? One can feel something he’s trying to dig at emotionally, although it’s tough to find the words for what exactly that is. Much clearer in reason, if unexpected, is Godard’s use of a specific quote: “In the bowels of a dead planet, an ancient mechanism quivers,” from the Canadian science fiction author A. E. van Vogt’s story “Defense” this writer is indebted to Raymond Bellour for pinpointing this obscure citation), and which Godard first used in The Power of Speech (1988). Importantly, this quote is a translation of a translation: van Vogt’s original reads, “In the bowels of the dead planet, tired old machinery stirred,” which is rather dry compared to the poetics of the French versions: “Dans les entrailles de la planète morte, un antique mécanisme fatigué frémit.” The first half is the same when brought back to English, but it is undeniable that “an ancient mechanism quivers” is more beautiful and evocative than “tired old machinery stirred.” This translation (and re-translation) evokes the quivering (or, more literally from “frémit,” “shuddering”) film running, be that through a camera or a projector, dancing through the reels. This plays twice, as well, complementing the opening R-L scroll, literally running the film back. Though darkness is setting in on the world, the movies still play, again and again, until there is not enough light left to expose an emulsion or all the projector bulbs have burned out.
So whirs the projector at the Walter Reade Theater after Godard has gone out for good. Where Trailer felt like a transmission from the dead, Scénarios and the behind-the-scenes type film Exposé du film annonce du film Scénario (and, no, the film in Exposé is not the film Scénarios we just saw, it is a different film entirely, one that will only exist in notes and remembrances of Jean-Luc’s explanations) are films that show us really just how long Godard has been dead. He passed just over a year before Israel began its genocide in Gaza, and knowing of the lifelong importance the liberation of Palestine was to Godard — he’s recounted before that it was the political cause that brought him and Miéville together — it’s unthinkable to imagine that this would be anything other than Godard’s chief contemporary concern. In 1968, he helped shut down Cannes because he thought the Revolution was here; in 2024, there were protests to boycott the New York Film Festival entirely due to some of Lincoln Center’s donors’ Zionist beliefs. What this writer felt in the room watching Scénarios was that Godard was indeed dead. I felt the “here” and “elsewhere” Godard and Miéville sharply dissected in 1976 with Ici et ailleurs. The “elsewhere” is a world of constant destruction, humiliation, genocidal fury, and death, while the “here” is one unending stream of those violent images, resonating throughout the years like seeing Anna Magnani getting gunned down by Nazis juxtaposed with contemporary strife. “Here” we’re in a dark room watching the shadows of ghosts dance along the walls. “Elsewhere” people are on the streets.
Published as part of NYFF 2024 — Dispatch 2.
