Death of the Auteur

On euthanasia and Jean-Luc Godard's final film Scénario(s)

Jean-Luc Godard Scénario(s) is exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, 14–22 December 2024

At first glance, Jean-Luc Godard’s final film, Scénario(s) (2024) might seem incomplete: a mere eighteen minutes long split into two parts, with repeated footage, it falls short of a grand final statement. And there’s evidence that a grand final statement was what Godard had originally planned. The accompanying docu-trailer Exposé du film annonce du film “Scénario” (2024) and adjoining exhibition of Godard’s notebooks reveal a much more ambitious project drastically curtailed.

Matters are complicated further by the manner of Godard’s death, at 91, by assisted suicide. From what I could gather, he didn’t suffer from any debilitating or agonising illness, just the accumulated discomforts of senescence. Did he perhaps not care enough to fully realise his vision? Is this work the old age equivalent of juvenilia – let’s call it senilia – the work of someone who’s given up?

Those familiar with Godard’s life know that this wasn’t his first encounter with death and suicide. Éric Rohmer reportedly found him in a bathtub with his wrists slit after some tumultuous love affair. In 1971 he almost prefigured Roland Barthes’ death when a van crashed into him in Paris. In 2013 a false rumour circulated that he was ill and newspapers began preparing obituaries.

More importantly to the viewer of Scénario(s), those familiar with Godard’s work know that diligently realising plans and scripts (‘scénario’ in French) was never his preferred way of working. From his breakthrough Breathless (1959), where he wrote snippets of dialogue on the day, to King Lear (1987) where he spent the whole $1 million budget on Concorde flights and Norman Mailer, Godard sowed a tactical chaos that secured him greater artistic freedom. In Meetin’ WA (1986), a filmed conversation with Woody Allen, the American remarked that he never rewatches his films because they always fall short of his initial conception. Godard’s response? ‘I no longer feel such disappointment because I have no idea what film I’m making until it’s finished.’

So we shouldn’t judge Scénario(s) on the basis of its conception. Instead, the exhibition invites us to consider it alongside it. This too is a practice familiar from Godard’s earlier œuvre, which often incorporates aspects of a film’s production into the finished film itself: Godard writing checks to Jane Fonda in the credits of Tout va Bien (1972), Norman Mailer storming off set in King Lear. In Scénario(s) it’s significant that this material is presented in a non-cinematic form. ‘A book forces you to use hands to move back and forth in the narrative’, Godard says in Exposé. In cinema, the movement of the narrative easily becomes ineluctable. While this ineluctability was what drew Godard to cinema above literature – its ability to depict things simultaneously, in one image, rather than sequentially, in sentences – in Exposé this very feature is presented as a flaw.

Godard’s aesthetics can be thought of a relentless attempt to exploit and correct this fundamental flaw in cinema, its amenability to propaganda, ideology, and lies. His films a riddled with intrusive and disruptive sounds – car horns, seagulls – and disorientating cuts. Perhaps uniquely among his peers, Godard combined this goal of a political correction of cinema through aesthetics with the defining ambition of the Nouvelle Vague to render cinema as personal and responsive to authorial intention as literature. But while it’s well known that Godard of the seventies became disillusioned with the political potential of cinema, Éxpose suggests he also became disillusioned with that other project of the caméra stylo. He had reached the limit of cinematic form.

Title page of Godard’s notebook-cum-storyboard

Despite its modest size and Godard’s explicit qualms with the very enterprise of cinema, Scénario(s) is a beautiful and moving work. Stylistically recalling his monumental Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-98), a work in which he announces the end of cinema, Scénario(s) is a stripped back film on an intimate scale. Its two parts both end with a recitation of an apologue of the painter Wols quoted by Sartre in his essay ‘Fingers and non-fingers’:

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. Taking a white horse to illustrate the fact that horses are not horses is less effective than taking non horses to illustrate the fact that horses are not horses.

In Godard’s hands, this reference to the ‘white horse paradox’ of ancient Chinese philosophy becomes a statement about representation and non-existence. During the second recitation that ends the film, we see Godard on his bed, his shirt unbuttoned, writing it down. Here is the less efficient route, which he had taken so many times before, outliving so many of his actors and collaborators, now applied, soberly, to himself: an image of the director illustrating that the director is not a director anymore; the director is dead, he’s become something else – an idea, an image, dust.

Scénario(s) was completed on the eve of Godard’s voluntary death on 13 September 2022. Without attempting broader conclusions about the assisted suicide, it’s a work that, upon reflection, seems to come close to representing the true meaning of euthanasia. Like Socrates fearlessly drinking the hemlock, Godard’s final work elevates him to the highest rungs of ancient philosophy: as someone who learned how to die. Scénario(s) will count, I think, as one of the most remarkable deathbed statements of our time.

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Speaking of another late-career statement, I reviewed Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis (2024) back in October. Big thank-you to all subscribers who have stuck with me through my prolonged and inexcusable silence. I have several pieces in the pipeline which will amply reward your patience and good taste. Stay tuned!