Upcoming Show
JEAN-LUC GODARD: SCENARIO(S)
Jean-Luc Godard’s last creative gesture
Exhibition + Film
October 11-November 15, 2025
Opening Reception | Saturday, October 11, 4-6pm
Jean-Luc Godard holding one of the Scenario notebooks, 2021
Pie Projects is thrilled to present the original last notebooks of legendary filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, alongside the screening of his final movie, the 18-minute film entitled Scénarios produced by Écran Noir Production (Paris, France.)
In early 2019, at nearly 90 years old, Jean-Luc Godard embarked on a project that he said would be the last and that he mischievously entitled Scénario. For him, the screenplay ("scénario" in French) is the cumbersome object of which, in 1978 in Montreal, he said:
“I don't do what's called ‘screenplays’, i.e. the film written in advance so that those who give the money can imagine the film depending on how it's written. So, I never knew... It's not even that I don't want to, it's that I don't know how to. And if I did, I don't think I'd want to make a film about it afterwards.”
Taking a tried-and-tested method from his previous projects, notably The Image Book (Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2018), the artist constructs his thoughts by shaping a commercially available blank notebook with pencils, brushes and acrylic paint, a pair of scissors, markers, a stapler, a glue stick, Typex, a photocopier and a printer. He cuts, glues, paints, erases, and assembles, page after page, a progression that, as a sedimentation of thought, comes to an end at a certain point. The function of the notebooks is therefore not merely preparatory; they are objects in their own right, assembled by the artist himself, oscillating between the care given to their finish and their necessarily transitory status: they fix a moment in the creative process. Then, when the work has progressed in his head, he launches into another notebook.
Between May 2019 and October 2021, Jean-Luc Godard produced five notebooks, each one amending the previous one, adding to and subtracting from a main body of work articulated around 6 parts. The five notebooks bear witness to the physical process of research in which, like a painter, Jean-Luc Godard proceeds by assembling and collaging images, texts, ideas and references. This way of “thinking” the project is plastic, almost geographical. This is how Jean-Luc Godard finds a singular language. In the face of imminent death and the fragility that sets in, it is a question of continuing to “think with your hands”, which is “the true condition of man”, as Denis de Rougemont wrote.
When the artist decided on his voluntary death in September 2022, he made an 18-minute film that he called Scenarios, the plural of which underlines the distance from the notebooks. Preparatory exercises for a film that never happens, the latter are plastic works in their own right, like the notebooks of Delacroix, Manet or Klee. They are paper films: freed from the technical apparatus of cinema, Godard edits them through displacement, reworking and repetition, like a counterpoint to the themes developed in his earlier works.
The five notebooks have been reproduced, approximating their physical qualities as closely as printing techniques allows. A thousand numbered copies of this box set were published in July 2025 by Écran Noir Production (Paris, France) – which produced the Scénario(s) project. A limited number of the box sets are now available through Pie Projects Contemporary Art.
Inquire about Godard's box sets here or call 505-372-7681