The Last Things Before the Last

Godard’s Posthumous Films

“Though truer to himself than anyone I have known, no one more roundly made me feel that ‘I is another’. He was suffering; his thoughts and images were being stolen from him; atrocious ones were being put in their place and they filled his head or gathered in his eyes.” 
– Jean-Paul Sartre1

Legend has it that, at the funeral of Ernst Lubitsch, William Wyler remarked to Billy Wilder, “No more Lubitsch,” to which the latter is said to have replied, “Worse than that: no more Lubitsch movies.” I thought of this exchange after receiving the news of Jean-Luc Godard’s death at ninety-one in September 2022. No more Godard, and no more Godard movies – a hard reality to imagine. Godard’s importance is greater than the immense influence he’s exerted on the way we think about films, although he’s also arguably unrivaled in this respect. Like Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock, his claim is less to film history than to the history of culture itself. Is there any person in the last century, philosopher or artist, who has thought more deeply about images, and who has asked more questions about what images mean to us? In our image-saturated present, the relevance of this insight cannot be overstated.

I count myself among those who find that the last decade of Godard’s work not only ranks among the best in his own career (a startling claim about a filmmaker who released over one hundred films across eight decades), but are among the few films today concerned to make a new cinema, rather than cling to the old one. Even in death, his films – their subjects as well as the daringness of their approach – remain our contemporaries. (His last film released before his death, Sang titre (2019), was made as a tribute to the people of Gaza and Ramallah.)

Not long after the announcement of Godard’s death, the news broke that the final projects he was working on would see some sort of posthumous release. What we’re left with are three films in various states of completion: one, a self-described “trailer” for Drôles de guerres, “a film that will never exist”; another, a completed short, Scénarios, done in the vein of the series of shorts Godard produced with Anne-Marie Miéville at the start of the century; and the last – and longest – a filmed dialogue between Godard and two of his recent collaborators, Fabrice Aragno and Jean-Paul Battaggia, about the plans for a feature film also titled “Scénario,” different to the short with which it was released.

Strictly speaking, the release of these works-in-progress is not unusual for Godard. As far back as the eighties, he frequently released blueprints outlining some of the concerns of his future projects. These include Scenario de sauve qui peut (1979), Petites notes à propos du film ‘Je vous salue, Marie’ (1983), and the longest – nearly a film in its own right – Scenario du film ‘Passion’ (1982). These coincide with a series of other developments in his career at the end of the seventies that help to carve out the start of his “late” period – more than twice the size of his “early” period – among which include the conclusion of his work with the Dziga Vertov Group and his “return” to filmmaking; the lecture series, ‘An Introduction to the True History of Cinema and Television,’ delivered in Montréal in 1979, a project that would later become Histoire(s) du cinéma (1987-98); and his move to Rolle, Switzerland that same year, where he lived until his death. All of this contributes to the changes in his work, more concerned with film history and more aware of his own place in it.

What is new in these posthumous films is the amount of access they offer into Godard’s working process, his thinking about films, and his working relationship to his collaborators in the last two decades of his life. There is a want to see these films as Godard’s testament, a personal statement on the fact of his impending death. But Godard has already dealt with these questions some decades earlier, in films like JLG/JLG – autoportrait de décembre, Deux fois 50 ans de cinéma français (both 1995), and, in another sense, King Lear (1987). To place the posthumous films in the realm of the autobiographical, to my mind, limits their interest. Instead, one might take them for what they are, fragments of a future “that will never exist,” but which nonetheless point us in a different direction. Insofar as the problems to which Godard dedicated his life, artistically and politically, remain unresolved, they remain for us both the most pressing and the most generative.

Film Annonce du film qui n'existera jamais: ‘Drôles de guerres’

First, a comment on the title of the planned feature, which refers to the period at the end of the 1930s, just before the Second World War, in which France and England nominally declared war on Germany after the invasion of Poland but which amounted to little in terms of action. It’s the same period in which the first works of existentialist literature in France began to be published, including the first novels of Sartre and Albert Camus and the last by Paul Nizan.

Speaking with Battaggia, Godard tells us that the film was to be an adaptation of the novel Faux passeports by the Belgian communist dissident Charles Plisnier, expelled from the Party on allegations of Trotskyism and who received the Prix Goncourt for the novel in 1937. The novel – translated into English in 1938 under the title Memories of a Secret Revolutionary – is broken into a series of portraits of various Party members in the years leading up to the war as they fail to contain the spread of fascism on the continent. Godard explains his intent to focus on the middle chapter, “Carlotta”, set in Italy, in which the narrator describes his encounters with a woman tasked with eliminating alleged spies within the Italian Communist Party.

The primary material of this trailer consists in forty-one stills of the workbook, each twenty to fifty seconds in length (the same length of the Lumière films, as Godard’s third collaborator, Nicole Brenez, points out in her monograph published a few months after his death).2 But more than this, the film relies on the dynamic between this material and the three other sources: (1) the sound recording of the discussion between Godard and Battaggia, describing what the hypothetical film might have been; (2) a quartet by Shostakovich chosen by Aragno to accompany parts of the short, used sparingly3 ; and (3) images and sounds from Notre musique (2004), Godard’s major statement on the relationship between cinema, war, and conquest.

The inclusion of material from this last source poses the most questions, although it is worth mentioning that clips from the film were already repurposed by Godard in another short related to Plisnier’s novel, Vrai faux passeport, made for his 2006 exposition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Godard quotes three moments from Notre musique in this “trailer”. At the center of the short, he inserts scenes shot at the Mostar bridge in Bosnia and Herzegovina of the two heroines from the prior film: Judith, the Israeli journalist who interviews the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish at the conference, and Olga, who threatens a suicide bombing off-screen in support of peace between Israel and Palestine. In addition to these scenes – the only moving images in the entirety of Film Annonce – Godard contrasts the images from his notebook with dialogue from Notre musique: first, a discussion between Olga and her uncle about the philosophical implications of suicide; and later, a discussion with Judith about Hannah Arendt.

How to account for this juxtaposition between Notre musique and the film “that will not exist”? The central interest lies in the proximity of Judith and Olga to Plisnier’s Carlotta, the only heroine among the portraits depicted in the novel, who’s hardened by her experiences with the Party. In this respect, the choice of dialogue from Olga seems especially crucial, quoting not only from the opening to Camus’s Le mythe de Sisyphe (1942), but also large stretches drawn from the third chapter of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Demons (1872), culminating in the most famous line from the novel, “There will be entire freedom when it makes no difference whether one lives or does not live. That’s the goal for everything.”4 Dostoyevsky’s novel has long been one of the core touchstones for Godard, serving among other things as one of the inspirations for his earlier film about student activists, La chinoise (1967). Its inclusion here, by way of Notre musique, helps to reinforce their common concern with the violence used to counter violence and the role of sacrifice in revolutionary action.

Scénarios

The first mention, at least as far as I’m aware, of the project that became Scénarios was an interview with the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles in early 2019, where Godard expressed his desire to make a film about the gilets jaunes protests during Macron’s first presidency.5 Later, in October, he shared more details about the project with Cahiers du Cinéma, including some photographs of an earlier draft of the notebook, following a different structure to the one eventually shown in Exposé.6 Planned as a feature, the final version of Scénarios runs a little under twenty minutes long, divided into two parts: DNA, subtitled “fundamental elements”, and MRI, subtitled “Odyssey.” Both share the same opening montage, compiling still images from F For Fake (Orson Welles, 1973), Ivan the Terrible, Part II: The Boyar’s Plot (Sergei Eisenstein, 1945), and Godard’s own Soigne ta droite (1987) alongside newsreel footage of American G.I.s crossing a river in Vietnam and photographs taken by Godard himself, some painted over in bright colors. Beneath this, we hear sounds pulled from the opening of Godard’s short film Puissance de la parole (1988), itself sourced from a sci-fi novel by A.E. Vogt.7

From here, the two part ways. The single longest sequence in DNA is again a self-quotation taken from Allemagne 90 neuf zero (1991), the informal sequel to Alphaville (1965) also starring Eddie Constantine as Lemmy Caution, in a sequence with a Russian sailor listening to a woman perform Bach. In a striking collage of faces, we see Dürer’s Melancholia (1514), the skull from Eisenstein’s Que Viva Mexico! (1933), a detail from the Portrait of Gabrielle d'Estrées and Duchess of Villars (1594) by the School of Fontainebleau that recurs in many of Godard’s films, a picture of Tippi Degré hugging a bullfrog from Growing up in Africa, and a mask from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex (1967). By contrast, MRI ends in a series of death sequences: the final shootouts from Bande à part (Godard, 1964) and The Lady From Shanghai (Welles, 1947); the car crash in Le mépris (Godard, 1963); Richard Barthelmess’s flight from the third act of Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939); Anna Magnani’s death in Roma città aperta (Roberto Rossellini, 1945); and others drawn from Weekend (Godard, 1967), Piranha 3D (Alexandre Aja, 2010), and The Chase (Arthur Ripley, 1946), as well as Rembrandt’s sketch of Elsje Christiaens execution. The final shot, as has been promoted at length, is of Godard in bed, filmed the night before his death by assisted suicide.

How to understand the rapport between these two halves? Dominique Païni argues that the former speaks to the biological uniqueness of the individual and the latter the medical imaging used to understand the body. It seems just as much a question of the division between l’esprit – note the emphasis on masks and faces – and le corps that inaugurates modern philosophy in the West. (Here it may be worth mentioning the focus in the first half on the close-up, once called “the soul of cinema” by Jean Epstein,8 while the latter relies more on the medium and long shot, better for capturing the body.) This distinction seems relevant to a quotation repeated at the end of both parts, drawn from Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay “Fingers and Non-Fingers” on the Austrian painter Wols, originally written for the anthology En personne (1963) and reprinted in Situations IV (1964; translated as Portraits, 2009). In fact, though the claim that the quote comes from Sartre is repeated in the promotional materials for the film, it’s actually a quote from Wols himself, who in turn attributes the quote to the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou. This kind of infinite recess of quotation is itself quintessentially Godardian, who once likened quotes to archaeological remains.9 And Sartre’s own analysis of Wols’s quotation seems just as accurate a description of Godard’s film practice: “When he opened up his bag, he pulled out words, some found in his head, most copied from books. He made no distinction between the two, though he scrupulously insisted on putting the author’s name at the foot of every quotation: there had, after all, been an encounter and a choice. A choice of thought by man? No, in his view, it was the other way about. Ponge once said to me at about this time, ‘One doesn’t think, one is thought.’”10

Twice, we hear Godard repeat the lines quoted by Sartre, “Taking fingers to illustrate the fact that fingers are not fingers is less effective than taking non-fingers to illustrate the fact that fingers are not fingers.” Contained in them are the same problems Godard has dealt with since the sixties and which has defined his work conclusively since the eighties, namely the status of the “contre-” in the term “contre-champ” (reverse shot). What haunts Godard’s collage films is the lacking power of the negative, what it means to make an image truly in opposition to the preceding shot. The failure to find this opposing image is bound up with those in his two other “odyssey” films referenced in the short: in Le mépris, the failure of the nouvelle vague to build a new cinema opposing the old one, and in Allemagne 90 neuf zero, the failure of the Soviet project to build a new society opposing Western imperialistic capitalism. In turn, it is the same problem that returns him, again and again, to the primordial question of montage. “I’ve always said that images don’t exist in cinema,” said Godard at the press conference for Passion, quoting an essay by Pierre Reverdy. “There is always an image before and an image after.”11 This view is in keeping with the artist who began his career in defiance of Bazinian orthodoxy by defending montage against the sequence shot, writing that “if direction is a look, montage is a heart-beat,”12 and who pursued this question in various forms, through the dialectical structure of Un film comme les autres (1968) and the blank shots in Pravda (1970) to his adoption of the TV switcher in the eighties in films like Grandeur et décadence d'un petit commerce de cinéma (1986) and, more masterfully, in Histoire(s) du cinema, through to the experimental, overlapping 3D effect in Adieu au Langage (2014).

Exposé du film annonce du film Scénario

Let us first take note of the fact that the film announced in this title, “Scénario,” is different to the title of the short with which it’s paired, which appears in the plural form Scénarios. But this is a minor difference compared to the vast difference between the film described in Exposé – a feature in six parts, based among other things on Racine’s Bérénice (1670) – to the one which has just played. And this pairing, itself, seems worth paying attention to. These are discreet works, made under different circumstances, by different means, and which refer to different projects, and yet, as released, are presented together as a single viewing. (It’s worth noting the distributor of the films only lists their combined runtime on their website, rather than individually.) And this is amplified by the various gallery presentations of the films at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Institute for Contemporary Art in London, where notebooks describing two other variations of the “Scénario/Scénarios” project planned and abandoned at various points in the four years before Godard’s death were available for view. Even more than Film Annonce du Film…, the juxtaposition of these two shorts asks us to invent an imaginary third film drawn out of these elements.

In the same vein, we may note the complete difference in the execution of Exposé and Film Annonce. Both are expository films clarifying the intentions behind each project, working page by page through his notebooks. But where the earlier film is a more conventionally Godardian collage of image, text, and sound, the latter – filmed in a single take some thirty minutes in length – seems in other respects the antithesis. Here, it seems, the curtain is finally pulled back: the master sits in his chair, surrounded by his closest collaborators, talking us through the inspiration behind each of the references one by one. At least, this is how it seems – but is it as simple as all of this? When Godard has used long takes in the past, in films like Weekend and One Plus One (1970), they are often played for tricks, usually less transparent than they first appear. One may start to wonder if the mistake discovered in his notebook midway through the film – a mistaken page in the fifth section, requiring a live correction with assistance by Aragno and Battaggia – is not as accidental as it first appears. (It’s worth noting the section in question is coincidentally titled “Le réel disparu”.) Amid the chaos, the camera turns back to Godard lighting his cigar. We are reminded that, of all the terms we may use to describe him – a critic, an auteur, an activist, a poet, a philosopher – he is no less of a showman, too.

• 1Jean-Paul Sartre, “Fingers and Non-Fingers,” in Portraits, trans. Chris Turner (Chicago: Seagull Press, 2007), 607.
• 2Nicole Brenez, “La Préhistoire du visible: sur Film annonce du film ‘Droles de guerres’ (1er Tournage),” in Jean-Luc Godard (de l’incidence éditeur, 2023), 279.
• 3Flavia Dima, “Interview about a film that does(n’t) exist: Fabrice Aragno, on Jean-Luc Godard’s Drôles de guerres,” Films in Frame, 12 February 2024.
• 4Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Demons, trans. Richard Peaver and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 115.
• 5“Entretenir quelque chose qui doit finir…”, Les Inrockuptibles, 17 April 2019, 8-17.
• 6Stéphane Delorme and Joachim Lepastier, “ARDENT HOPE – Interview with Godard – Cahiers du Cinéma,” translated by Srikanth Srinivasan and Andy Rector, Kino Slang, 21 December 2019. Originally published in Cahiers du Cinéma, 759 (October 2019).
• 7I’m grateful to Alex Lei’s review of the film for In Review Online for pointing out the origin of this sound.
• 8Jean Epstein, “Magnification,” in French Film Theory and Criticism, vol. 1, ed. Richard Abel (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988), 235-240.
• 9Antonina Derzhitskaya and Dmitry Golotyuk, “‘These aren’t quotes anymore, but archaeological remains’: Interview with Jean-Luc Godard,” translated by Sis Matthé, Sabzian, 9 May 2018. It was first published in Russian on the website of the magazine Séance and in 2017 in French on Débordements.
• 10Sartre, “Fingers and Non-Fingers,” 606.
• 11Pierre Reverdy, “The Image,” translated by Adrian Martin, Sabzian, 19 September 2018.
• 12Jean-Luc Godard, “Montage, My Fine Care,” in Godard on Godard (New York: Da Capo Press, 1986), 39.