Jean Luc Godard's last, 17 minute film, Sénarios, which was completed just a day before his 2022 assisted suicide death, is paired with the 36 minute 'making of' documentary for this year's New York Film Festival.
For fans of the late master, it is an emotional pairing because it's the last material to see and hear him on screen in his very last days. Originally planned as a feature, this long gestating project had been constantly worked on, even during the Covid lockdown.
With his failing health, Godard truncated the four part project into two chapters, DNA: Fundamental Elements and MRI: Odyssey. The message is also simplified and more direct. "The final warning" is uttered on several occasions, to whatever Godard saw as impending for us.
You can tell that the end was on his mind by the images of death, the violent ones, that are displayed - Pina (Anna Magnani)'s death in Rosselini's Rome, Open City, the car wreck that ends Contempt, and the infamous car pile up in Week End (both from Godard's own filmography). So are the images of war.
Like the DNA itself -- the base, the beginning element for all living creatures -- Godard here equates the old film clips to what cinema is based upon. The distinctive sound that a MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging, a modern medical technology of scanning your body for grave illness) machine makes, the beeping and the loud thuds, are incorporated into the latter part of the film. Not new to the procedure at that point in his life, Godard signals the end. The beginning and the end, of life and cinema, at least his own, ending as well.
Sénarios exhibits primary colors boldly painted on stock papers over the images and words, the technique he used in his later periods with Image Book and last year's posthumous release, Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars. The colors, shapes, texture painted over collages: Godard was in full late period Mattise mode.
At the end, we are shown his exposed old man's hairy torso, as he puffs away his cigar with wild white hair, reading Sartre's aphorism "Using a horse to illustrate that a horse is not a horse is less efficient than using a non-horse to illustrate that a horse is not a horse." I keep wondering what he would make of the current state of the world: the war in Ukraine and Gaza, the rise of misinformation, the world in chaos.
The making-of documentary that follows Scénarios confirms my assumption about the Mattise comparison. Mattise, wheelchair bound and with physical limitations in his final years, turned to a new type of medium, with the help of his assistants; he began creating paper cut collages (decoupage).
Godard, filmed by his long time collaborator Fabrice Argano in 2021, gives detailed instructions on, then, a planned four-part feature on stock paper cards, what to include, what to cut and what to modify in terms of images, music, colors and what sequences. With a lighter in his hand, we get the rare glimpse of his working method in his last years. It's an invaluable and emotional viewing for the fans of cinema at large.
Dustin Chang is a freelance writer. His musings and opinions on everything cinema and beyond can be found at www.dustinchang.com