Jean-Luc Godard's Visual Work: 28 Fragments

Postproduction notebook of Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise, 1967.

 

Keeping Tale of Current Times / Jean-Luc Godard—Visual Work (November 13, 2024––June 15, 2025), an exhibition at the Manoel de Oliveira Cinema House in Porto, Portugal, was organized by the Serralves Foundation and curated by the Collectif Ô Contraire! (Fabrice Aragno, Jean-Paul Battaggia, Nicole Brenez, and Paul Grivas). For the first time, Jean-Luc Godard’s career as a visual artist was presented in full, spanning from his childhood to 2022. Most of this work—including paintings, drawings, notebooks, and digital images—had never been exhibited before.

1.

As you enter the Casa do Manoel de Oliveira, you are greeted by a row of thirty-four digital self-portraits that Jean-Luc Godard took with his iPhone between 2015 and 2022. In some of them, his face is blurred, obscured, or broken into pixels. Digital brushstrokes in vibrant colors conceal his face or radiate like spokes from his head. In others, we only see his shadow or his hand clutching the keys to his house in Rolle, Switzerland, where he died in 2022 at the age of ninety-one through assisted suicide. Some of these images possess a quiet melancholy; others uncover a more playful spirit. In one selfie, a reclining Godard squints at the camera with a sheepish grin on his face. He emailed this photo to his longtime collaborators, Jean-Paul Battaggia and Nicole Brenez, with the cryptic message: “A fool is a priceless privilege, also with fairies.” Twenty-four of these emails are featured at Serralves under the rubric “The Afternoons of an IFaun.” Brenez notes: “Each email from Jean-Luc Godard offers a small opus based on the pleasure of simultaneously inventing links between the title and the body of the text, new resonances between image and language, fractures capable of making words blossom into cubist flowers [. . .] To the very end the phone remained a machine for creation.”1

2.

The exhibition title, Keeping Tale of Current Times, comes from his posthumous twenty-minute-long film Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: “Phony Wars” (2023), comprised of still images mounted on photographic paper. In shot #15, in Godard’s familiar cursive, we read: “It was a question of no longer trusting the billions of diktats of the alphabet and giving back their freedom to the incessant metamorphoses and metaphors of a real language by returning to the locations of the past, while keeping tale (tenant conte) of current times.” The play on words between tenant conte (“telling a tale”) and tenant compte (“taking account of”) captures an essential feature of Godard’s approach: the merging of invention and testimony, imagination and reality, fiction and reportage.

3.

The first room contains drawings and artist’s books in which a boy disowns his name, signing “IAM” instead. It marks the beginning of a long series of pseudonyms. Why “IAM”? Is it derived from the English “I am”? Perhaps the young Godard appreciated the irony of choosing a name that asserts presence while never fully inhabiting a fixed identity.

4.

The Family Circle: Overall Impressions, a seventeen-page-long handcrafted book from 1947 that Godard offered to his parents for Christmas, captivates with its playful yet subversive spirit. Painted in black, white, and red, this barbed gift includes an ironic editor’s note: “The author confessed to me that, fearing an outcry from the ignoramus, he thought it best not to name anyone and to remain hidden behind a pseudonym, ‘Moi-Même.’” The book presents a vitriolic portrait of his family, mocking their bourgeois milieu and literary pretensions. Godard embellishes it with crude drawings depicting his parents as floating heads atop serpents’ bodies and family members hurling stones and shooting arrows at the teenage author. This early artist’s book foreshadows the corrosive portrayals of the bourgeoisie that would later appear in such films as Une femme mariée (1964) and Week-end (1967).

5.

Nearby, five oil paintings, created in 1945, when Godard was fifteen, are on display. These include The Little Girl with Braids, an abstract portrait of his sister Véronique rendered in yellow, red, black, and green dash-like strokes against a blue background, and a portrait of his father painted in somber, shadowy hues with thick, textured brushstrokes. One thing quickly becomes evident: far from being a mere dilettante, the young IAM demonstrates genuine talent and a deep commitment to visual art. In The Family Circle, he even describes himself as an “apprentice painter.” It is clear that, had he continued along this path, Godard could have forged an alternate career as a visual artist.

6.

In the same room, there is a tribute to the writer Paul Valéry. Godard’s maternal grandfather, Julien Monod, was a close friend of Valéry, and Jean-Luc was familiar with his work from an early age. In this artist’s book, IAM copies Valéry’s poem “Le cimetière marin” (The cemetery by the sea) in graceful calligraphy, interspersing one black and white drawing and seven brightly colored gouaches throughout the text. The series of paintings is rendered in a variety of styles reminiscent of Joan Miró, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and others. It feels less like a young artist discovering his own voice than an attempt to assemble a catalogue of modernist idioms. The book anticipates what French critic Serge Daney would later call “Godard’s pedagogy”—a methodology that begins with an existing image, style, or discourse and sets it against alternative possibilities, without ever asserting a clear authorial viewpoint. In a somewhat pretentious four-page letter addressed to Valéry, IAM reflects on the impossibility of faithfully transposing the poem into a visual medium. He proclaims that he “would not have the impudence to pretend to explain or comment on Paul Valéry. In truth, it would take thousands of images (a film) or, in other words, none at all,” thus prefiguring, by way of an early reference to cinema, Godard’s later preoccupation with the incommensurability between the discursive and the figural. 

7.

A glass display case holds several books from Godard’s adolescent library, among them Blaise Pascal’s Pensées (1670), Alfred Jarry’s Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician (1911) and Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), a true livre de chevet for the young Jean-Luc. Camus’s Sisyphus would exert a lasting influence on Godard, who often returned to this meditation on the absurd, quoting the famous line “suicide is the only serious problem” in For Ever Mozart (1991) and Notre Musique (1993). Instead of commenting on passages from these books, Godard surrounds the text with doodles and quotations. In the margins of The Myth of Sisyphus, he jots down: “I will strengthen my delirium” (Paul Éluard), “Sisyphus was a bachelor” (Franz Kafka), “this feeling of my fundamental improbability places me in the world” (Georges Bataille), and “Thought taken ironically by something other than thought” (Maurice Blanchot), among other lines. The link between any citation and the main text is seldom obvious, establishing that Godard was exploring ideas through quotation, association, and juxtaposition long before he became a filmmaker.

Albert Camus,The Myth of Sisyphus. Book with handwritten notes by Jean-Luc Godard, c. 1947.

8.

As you turn the corner, you encounter a reconstruction of Godard’s workspace—a small array of modest tools and objects that include Edding markers, pencils, scissors, glue sticks, an iPhone displaying an image of a donkey, and cigars. These artifacts remind us that, for Godard, cinema was above all a form of manual labor, a concrete process of cutting, arranging, and thinking through touch. Godard often cites Denis de Rougemont’s line “Man’s true condition is to think with his hands”; the phrase that sums up his materialist approach to filmmaking. In The Image Book (2018), the hand even functions as a structuring device, with each of the five parts of the film corresponding to a different finger. For Godard, this means, above all, that the practice of montage should be conceived as a mode of thought in its own right—reflecting both his use of hands-on analog video editing technology (even after digital editing software became the industry standard) and his dialectical approach to montage. What’s crucial for Godard is not one image or another, but the friction between two images—the interstice.

9.

For, in Godard’s method, it is not a question of association. Given one image, another image has to be chosen which will induce an interstice between the two. This is not an operation of association, but of differentiation, as mathematicians say, or of disappearance, as physicists say: given one potential, another one has to be chosen, not any whatever, but in such a way that a difference of potential is established between the two, which will be productive of a third or of something new. […] In other words, the interstice is primary in relation to association, or irreducible difference allows resemblances to be graded. The fissure has become primary, and as such grows larger. […] It is the method of BETWEEN, ‘between two images,’ which does away with all cinema of the One. It is the method of AND, ‘this and then that',’ which does away with all the cinema of Being = is. Between two actions, between two affections, between two perceptions, between two visual images, between two sound images, between the sound and the visual: make the indiscernible, that is the frontier, visible.2

10.

The exhibition positions the notebooks as the living matrix of this cinema. They are not just conventional preparatory documents, but are, undoubtedly, works in their own right.

11.

Three recently discovered notebooks produced by the Dziga Vertov Group in 1969, titled Down with Cinema: The Beginning of a Long Struggle, are exhibited in their entirety. Working in dialogue with Jean-Pierre Gorin, Godard created them in response to a commission that asked the group to articulate their theory of militant cinema. Comprising roughly ninety pages, the notebooks draw largely on films the group was working on at the time. In one spread, an image of a cowboy about to draw his guns in a duel appears on the left page; it is set against a rephrased quotation from Marx on the right, also featured at the opening of Godard’s British Sounds (1969): “The bourgeoisie has created a world in its own image; let’s destroy that image.” Intriguingly, the image is not a frame from the original Western but a production still of the entire set. We see the distant figure of the director of photography perched atop a crane, his camera trained on us and framed between the cowboy’s legs in the foreground, revealing the artifice behind Hollywood’s self-made myths.

Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Groupe Dziga Vertov, Down with Cinema: The Beginning of a Long Struggle, 1969.

12.

In the same notebook, a two-page spread juxtaposes an advertisement for Super 8 cameras on the left with a collage on the right that combines a Photo magazine cover featuring a fashion model with a black-and-white newspaper photograph below it. A heading on the cover, “Cameras for James Bond,” is circled, with lines extending to both a Canon Super 8 camera on the opposite page and the face of a policeman amid injured protesters in the street. The newspaper image, ripped from the pages of France-Soir, documents the clubbing of demonstrators by police on the Boulevard Saint-Michel on May 10, 1968. Above it, Godard has written, “Unlearn to photograph”; below, he asks, “Who makes money from this photograph?” Through these hijacked images, Godard and Gorin expose how the victims of state violence are doubly exploited, since this popular Gaullist newspaper profits from the very images of the demonstrators’ brutalization.

The left-hand page of the following spread features an image from a Maoist pamphlet depicting a group of Chinese women in a desert landscape attentively listening to an instructor dressed in the uniform of the People’s Liberation Army. On the right-hand page, between two actual strips of 16 mm film, Godard inscribes, “Learn how to photograph.” Godard and Gorin imply that revolutionary learning can only occur through a simultaneous process of unlearning, which rejects and critiques the bourgeois ideologies embedded in prevailing modes of photographic production and consumption. These notebooks, informed by Althusserian Maoism and its emphasis on contradiction and dialectics, are particularly indebted to the Situationist strategy of détournement.

13.

One of the most charming artifacts is Godard’s notebook for Anne Wiazemsky, titled “5+4 Portraits of A.W. in the Form of Practical Work to Get Closer to A.W. When She Goes Away to the Countryside and the Weekend Becomes the End of the World.” In this work, Godard repurposes a mundane school notebook for “Practical Work,” transforming it into something deeply personal. On its pages, meant solely for her eyes, he fills the book with a series of drawings in various styles—à la Kant, à la Descartes, à la André Breton—that play on her name while quietly expressing his affection for her.

14.

Out of the corner of your eye, a collection of images catches your attention. As you draw closer, you see that the curators have reconstructed a collage Godard mounted on the wall opposite his desk in Rolle—a kind of totem or living tree of images that he constantly modified. The images include a photograph of a lost childhood portrait painting of his mother, Odile; IAM’s The Little Girl With Braids; a photograph of his dog Roxy, the star of Goodbye to Language; Matisse’s 1940 painting Romanian Blouse, a recurring motif throughout his films; a still from Arthur Penn’s The Miracle Worker (1962); a highly saturated image of a strip of nitrate film; an etching by Goya from The Disasters of War; a detail from Masaccio’s Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (1425); a still from Eisenstein’s unfinished ¡Que Viva México! showing a skeleton in sunglasses and a top hat; a recent magazine cover depicting the bombing of a Ukrainian city; and a mournful Giotto angel. Together, the ensemble calls to mind Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, in which the art historian arranged thousands of photographs of art, coins, celestial maps, and other items on black panels to trace how symbolic images from antiquity are reanimated in later art. Directly on the wall, Godard inscribes a quotation from Robert Bresson’s adaptation of Georges Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest (1954): “What does it matter—All is grace.”

15.

For Godard, the gaze of cinema replaces the gaze of the divine. Christian iconography becomes a metaphor for the renewed possibility of believing in the world—a redemption of the real. His cinema embodies a Spinozist philosophy of the image: the God of Godard’s cinematic universe is immanent. There are no “just” images, only images. Godard creates a space where images, texts, and sounds coexist without hierarchy. Freed from their original contexts, these elements enter what he calls “the fraternity of metaphors.”

16.

As you glance over the preproduction and postproduction notebooks for Godard’s eight-part video series Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–99), the recurring image of Chaplin stands out—an allegorical emblem of the “childhood of cinema.” For Godard, the history of cinema is ultimately the story of an unfulfilled promise. Although it began with high aspirations as a new instrument of thought, cinema eventually devolved into a toy, failing in its ethical obligations. Masaccio’s Expulsion from the Garden of Eden evokes this fall from the paradise of early cinema. The death knell sounded when the concentration camps went unfilmed and cinema abandoned its documentary mission. Godard also condemns cinema for failing to resist its occupation by Hollywood and the rise of television.

17.

You recall Godard’s audacious juxtaposition in Histoire(s) du cinéma of Elizabeth Taylor, smiling serenely as she embraces Montgomery Clift in George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun (1951), with images of corpses in a crematorium. Godard later explained that the scene conveyed to him a “shadowed happiness,” a feeling he traced to Stevens’s experience filming the liberation of the camps, so that beauty and horror became inextricably intertwined. Godard slows down the shot as Elizabeth Taylor bends to kiss her lover, with a painting of Mary Magdalene, looking much like an angel, encircling them, while his voiceover exclaims: “O what wonder to look at what one cannot see / O sweet wonder of our blind eyes. Montage!” Stevens upheld the role of cinema here as witness and redeemed it for not having been present at the Holocaust, an act accomplished through what Godard calls “historical montage.” Despite being expressed through Christian iconography, this notion of redemption is close to Walter Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image. Benjamin links redemption to happiness and to a laying hold of the past, not to transform it into cultural heritage but rather to fulfill it as an actualization in the present.

18.

Photograph, paint, film that which one cannot see.3 

19.

The cinematic archive is a realm of phantoms that can be reanimated through an audiovisual approach to historiography: a retrospective gaze that does not kill but rescues. In one of the postproduction notebooks for Histoire(s) du cinéma, you spot a drawing by Klee of an angel superimposed over a still of Godard as the Prince/Idiot from his underrated masterpiece Keep Your Right Up (1987). The still captures the moment when the Prince/Idiot has just disembarked from a plane and is handed a massive stack of film cans, which contain the film he has miraculously completed while on board. Moments later, he falls to the ground, reels and cans strewn around him: a fallen slapstick angel. One cannot help but think of Benjamin’s famous interpretation of Klee’s Angelus Novus, which he dubbed the angel of history. Indeed, references to Benjamin abound in Godard’s films, yet Klee’s drawing is absent from the final version of the video series.

20.

Happening upon the materials for Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: “Phony Wars”, you realize that the notebook is not a preparatory work but the film itself. When Yves Saint Laurent commissioned a film from Godard, he responded by delivering a notebook, declaring it to be the film. In the end, they accepted it, resolving the issue by transforming each page into an image. The only question that remained was how long each image should appear on screen.

21.

In a darkened room, sequences from Godard’s The Image Book unfurl across multiple translucent veils suspended from the ceiling. Images and sounds overlap and shift: we move abruptly from the frantic dance of the old man disguised as a youth in Max Ophüls’s Le Plaisir (1952) to World War II footage that dissolves into pixelated abstraction, while Godard’s raspy, quavering voice reverberates through the hall. The installation doesn’t explain anything. It envelops you. Godard preferred to call installations of the film an accueil (“a welcome”): a performative event situated between an exhibition and a screening. An accueil invites viewers into an intimate, embodied relationship with the work, mirroring the film’s own fractured nature. The fragmentation acts as a form of resistance, refusing to impose a single meaning on the scattered, often violent images. It breaks up the flow of history and refuses to settle into any complacent narrative. In one corner, on a small Persian carpet, beside a table lamp, Godard places copies of Roland Barthes’s The Rustle of Language (1984), Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am (2002), and Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance (1981). Unfolding between the late 1930s and World War II, Weiss’s historical epic traces the struggles of the antifascist resistance and the turbulent fate of Europe’s proletarian movements. Given its exploration of the relationship between political resistance and art, it’s easy to understand why the novel fascinated Godard.

22.

Godard’s late films encompass a range of approaches to the malleability of the image. In works such as Film Socialisme (2010) and The Image Book, he pushes the manipulation of image and sound to extremes: film excerpts are transformed into hypersaturated, Fauvist paintings, while scenes shot on mobile phones become blown-out abstractions. He contrasts both with hyperreal, high-definition imagery. His use of color is at once painterly and critical—a radical act that exposes how contemporary images are constructed and manipulated. By fragmenting and reworking material drawn from paintings, films, and the internet, Godard compels viewers to confront the mechanisms of representation. Across his entire career—from the jump cuts of À bout de souffle (1960) to the experiments of the television series Six fois deux: Sur et sous la communication (1976) and the 3D innovations of Adieu au langage (2014)—he systematically deconstructed the fundamental components of his art.

23.

The Porto exhibition also highlights the mutual admiration between Godard and Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira. It features a large photographic portrait of the two alongside their conversation published in Libération in September 1993, when Godard’s Hélas pour moi and Oliveira’s Vale Abraão both premiered in Paris. In the conversation, Godard describes starting with order and letting chaos emerge, while Oliveira speaks of attempting to tame chaos and shape it into some kind of order. Oliveira praises Godard’s Allemagne année 90 neuf zéro (1991), saying: “What I like in this film is the clarity of the signs, combined with their profound ambiguity. In fact, that’s what I like about cinema in general: a saturation of signs bathed in the light of their absence of any explanation. That’s why I believe in cinema.”4 This phrase would continue to haunt Godard, reappearing often in his later films.

24.

Many of Godard’s late films and notebooks show a renewed embrace of the hand-painted image. One especially resonant example is his poignant eighteen-minute-long film Scénarios (2024), completed just one day before his death. The film opens with shots of his iPhone self-portraits. Encountering them again, you are struck by how uncannily the vibrant colors recall the palette of his childhood paintings. After we scroll past the title, the following shot depicts one hand clasping another, the image covered in splotches of red, yellow, blue, and black. Godard then cuts to The Little Girl with Braids, his childhood portrait of Véronique. In this sequence, the circle closes, returning to the young IAM, who delighted in brilliant hues and the tactile quality of the paint.

25.

I came to understand that I was working like a painter making successive sketches, rather than like a writer writing a story that’s then adapted for the cinema, which is what most of today’s filmmakers do…

(…)

Cinema is very limited in terms of its scope. It doesn’t have the freedom of painting. No two paintings by Cezanne have the same scope. All of Griffith’s films have the same scope. Freedom needs to be found elsewhere.

(…)

I did a bit of painting when I was very young. And I saw a lot of it. So cinema is a return. A return not to childhood, but to the realm of childhood.5

26.

Test amen ts (2022), one of his last works, is a large-scale book exhibited here for the first time. It’s a standalone piece with no apparent connection to any specific film project, whether made or conceived. The front cover is painted black, its lettering punctuated by the words “test” and “amen” in vivid red. On the inside of the front cover is a still from Carl Dreyer’s The Bride of Glomdal (1926), which depicts a man rowing a small boat while looking back at a woman prostrate, as if dead, in the rear of the vessel. In Histoire(s) du cinéma, the image functioned as an emblem for the redemption of cinema. Here, the still is partially obscured. Painted over in red and black brushstrokes over a sky-blue background, it calls to mind the bespoke book covers Godard crafted as an adolescent for his favorite tomes. In Test amen ts, Godard revisits his repertoire of themes and motifs one last time, as if saying goodbye to a cast of recurring characters. Reduced to just a handful of images and words, they have been distilled: references to Freud and the unconscious, to filming the invisible. Pages are organized by categories: animals, hands, landscapes, Cezanne.

27.

What remains is not cinema, at least not if we define cinema in terms of reels, projectors, or pixels. What remains is a relation: a quotation penciled alongside a newspaper advertisement, a book positioned next to a pair of scissors, a reproduction of a painting juxtaposed with the sound of a piano chord. Keeping Tale of Current Times reveals that, for Godard, cinema was always something larger than film itself. The notebooks, objects, and collages are not peripheral; they constitute cinema, displaced onto other supports. Godard refuses to treat film as a finished artifact. He conceives of it instead as an endless critical encounter with the present. Rather than creating new images, he unearths existing ones and reworks them, bringing them into new alignments. His practice resembles an archaeology of images; an excavation of their political, historical, and emotional layers. At the Casa Manoel de Oliveira, this archaeology takes form in each material fragment, at once fossil and flare.

28.

It is difficult to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if it’s not there.6