Before Jean-Luc Godard’s assisted suicide, on September 13, 2022—at his home in Rolle, Switzerland, where such a procedure is legal—the 91-year-old auteur had been in a remarkably prolific phase of his long career. “He was not sick, he was simply exhausted,” an unnamed family member said of his intention to end his life. “It was his decision and it was important for him that it be known.”
Godard entered the scene in the 1950s, writing about film for Cahiers du Cinéma, just like fellow French New Wave cinephilic iconoclasts François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette. With Breathless, his 1960 directorial feature debut, he drew a line of demarcation for moviemaking. Martin Scorsese: “From Breathless on, Godard redefined the very idea of what a movie was and where it could go. No one was as daring as Godard.” Paul Schrader: “In cinema, there was before Godard and after Godard.”
Having re-written the rules of film grammar on his first go (a well-known Godard-ism: “A film should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order”), his output in the 60s was explosive—boldly pulpy, formally audacious, and increasingly revolutionary.
Godard’s wonderful but maligned 1970s projects saw him experimenting with then novel video technology in challenging films that received little commercial distribution. These transgressive pictures were diary essays and leftist polemics in equal measure. In 1980, Godard released his “mainstream” comeback, the provocative Every Man for Himself, starring Jacques Dutronc and Isabelle Huppert. He promoted it as his “second first film.”
This renegade instinct to wipe the slate clean of his past work while forever pushing forward the medium’s expressive possibilities carried the director through his next 40-plus years of metamorphoses. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody declared 2001’s In Praise of Love “Godard’s third first film, thus something of a rebirth of cinema.”
Starting today, and on through December 22, London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (I.C.A.) presents “Jean-Luc Godard: Scénario(s),” an exhibition it describes as “a unique exploration of the final creative work of cinema’s great innovator.” Centered around the U.K. premiere of Godard’s last two filmic contributions—one of them being “Scénarios,” which was completed by Godard on the eve of his death—the exhibition will also feature page-by-page reproductions of his creative notebooks.
“These notebooks bear witness to the physical process of research, wherein, like a painter, Godard assembles and collages images, texts, ideas, and references,” says the Iranian filmmaker and curator Mitra Farahani, who became close with Godard in his final years and produced “Scénarios.” “In the face of imminent death and the frailty it brings, he continued to ‘think with his hands.’”
Accompanying the exhibition is a spectacularly curated selection of lesser-known, seldom-screened films that span Godard’s entire career. These include the hard-to-see Numéro Deux (1975), on the 17th, and his nearly five-hour opus Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1989), on the 21st and 22nd. Here is a rare opportunity to trace the evolution of one of the past century’s most tireless, visionary artists.
“Jean-Luc Godard: Scénario(s)” is on at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, in London, until December 22
Spike Carter is a writer and filmmaker
