Jean-Luc Godard: Scenario(s): Exhibition + FIlm

Instead, he developed ideas through notebooks, simple, store-bought books transformed with scissors, paint, glue, markers, photocopies, and typewritten fragments. Each page became a palimpsest: cut, erased, layered, and reassembled in a process as tactile as it was conceptual. The notebooks were not drafts in the traditional sense, but artworks in themselves, holding both their provisional status and the care of finished works.

Between May 2019 and October 2021, Godard created five such notebooks, each revisiting and revising a core project articulated around six parts. They bear witness to a physical, painterly method of thinking: assembling images, texts, and references into a plastic, almost geographical language. As Denis de Rougemont once wrote, “to think with your hands” is "the true condition of man"; this was precisely Godard’s method, even in the face of age and mortality.

In September 2022, just before choosing voluntary death, Godard completed Scénarios, an 18-minute film. The plural title marks a distance from the notebooks: while the notebooks remain preparatory, they are also “paper films,” plastic works comparable to those of Delacroix, Manet, or Klee. Freed from the technical apparatus of cinema, Godard edited them by displacement and repetition, counterpointing themes he had explored throughout his career. The film, brief and final, closes a life’s work of radical invention.

Mitra Farahani, president of Ecran Noir Productions, collaborated with Jean-Luc Godard as producer on several projects from 2015 until the end of his life. Farahani is the producer of Scénarios and co-producer of The Image Book (2018), as well as the director of See You Friday, Robinson (2022), a documentary on an epistolary and filmic relationship between Godard and Ebrahim Golestan that premiered at MoMA

In her words, she has long been drawn to "the late work of an artist—something produced when it is almost impossible, when the [physical] body itself is disintegrating.” With Godard, this is taking shape in her ongoing project Impossible Scenario - The Death of Virgil, a documentary which explores what she calls “the power of powerlessness.”

Reflecting on her collaboration with Godard, Farahani remarked - "We have known the work of Titian, but we have not known his era; we have known the work of Goya, but we have not known his era. We know the work of Godard—and we have lived his era.”