From December 14 to 22, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) will host Jean-Luc Godard: Scénario(s), an exhibition offering a unique exploration of the final creative work by cinema’s great innovator, Jean-Luc Godard. This exhibition will see Godard’s last two films, including the UK premiere of his final work, Scénarios (2024), installed in the ICA's upper galleries alongside his extensive creative notebooks, offering a rare glimpse into the artist’s reflective process, blurring the lines between film, visual art, and philosophy.
Scénario(s) invites viewers on a journey through the traces of this final creative gesture. It begins with the screening of Scénarios (18 min), completed in the last days of Godard’s life, and Exposé du film annonce du film “Scénario” (36 min), an earlier work that delves into the thought processes behind the film. In this long sequence shot, Godard’s hands and voice expose the film to come, immersing the viewer in the heart of an idea still in formation. The exhibition then moves to the five creative notebooks Godard assembled to reflect and transmit his project, presenting page-by-page reproductions that visitors can explore in detail, offering an unprecedented look into his meticulous, tactile method of “thinking with hands”.
Mitra Farahani, Jean-Luc Godard’s producer, reflects:
“These notebooks bear witness to the physical process of research, wherein, like a painter, Godard assembles and collages images, texts, ideas, and references. This initial method of conceptualising the film is plastic and almost geographical, representing Godard’s search for a singular language. In the face of imminent death and the frailty it brings, he continued to ‘think with his hands’, which Denis de Rougemont describes in The Image Book as ‘the true condition of man’. The function of the notebooks is not merely preparatory; they are complete objects in their own right, assembled by Godard himself and balanced between the care given to their finish and their inherent transitory nature. They capture an instant of the creative process and invite viewers to engage with the profound, raw documentation of his final artistic metamorphosis.”
Scénario(s) is accompanied by a curated film programme of rarely screened works by Jean-Luc Godard, spanning six decades, further contextualising his legacy in both film and visual art.