Here is an intriguing footnote to Jean-Luc Godard’s extraordinary career - a docu-textual movie collage lasting just under an hour in two parts, or maybe two layers, completed just before his assisted death two years ago in Switzerland at the age of 91. His collaborator and cinematographer Fabrice Aragno calls it not the “last Godard” but a “new Godard”. In its way, this little double film shows us a very great deal about Godard’s working habits, and it’s a late example of Godard speaking intimately in his own person about his own creative process.
Scénarios appears to have grown out of thoughts generated by his last film, The Image Book, which emerged in 2018. Godard sketched out his storyboarded or scrapbooked ideas for a short piece, which would juxtapose images, quotations, musical cues and clips in his distinctive manner. Aragno edited and curated the film from this blueprint, then came back to see Godard and to shoot a brief sequence of the director reciting a text from Sartre to go at the end. This is the first short film we see.
But it was at this new meeting that Godard announced he had had another idea for a second Scénario film, with an almost complete storyboard-scrapbook, a handmade object which Godard had drawn up in his almost childlike manner. And so the second film is an extended video interview of Godard calmly and equably taking us through his ideas for it, page by page, quite without any asperity or performative zeal, occasionally puffing on a re-lit cigar.
So this is Scénario 2, destined never to be made. Or was it? Is not this second fly-on-the-wall discussion an entirely valid film in itself, in giving us Godard’s moment-by-moment comment? Scénario-slash-Scénarios perhaps echoes the title of his video project Histoire(s) du Cinéma: an acknowledgment of the plurality and proliferation of ideas.
These films reveal a lot about his collagist approach. Interestingly, he is asked here if he wants to shoot new footage or find old material. He goes for the latter. Here in Scénarios is his work-in-progress dynamic and though he is frail and elderly he doesn’t look ill. His research into the image was ongoing. Like Welles, whom Godard references here, he loved the process as much as the product. He brings in film-makers from Carné to Rossellini and Cassavetes (and his own earlier work). There is the characteristic invocation of the US army in Vietnam and a mischievous jab at Macron. There are images of power, tyranny and love; particularly, of course, love of cinema, that primal love which appears here to survive in Godard’s heart, despite his awareness of its tragic limitations. And in the first film, we see his classically simple style, the sound cues clunking in and out on the audio track.
What is Godard really thinking, you might wonder, as he casually walks us through this final project. Is he thinking about his imminent death just a few days away? Does he imagine people watching this after his death? Is that in any way important to him? It is a mystery. At any rate, this is a valuable and poignant document.
• Scénarios screened at the Cannes film festival.
