From Paper to Paper: Jean-Luc Godard’s Final Notebooks

I first encountered Jean-Luc Godard’s Scénario notebooks not in a reading room or a book but at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), my eyes still adjusting after the UK premiere of Scénarios and Exposé du film annonce du film “Scénario” (both 2024). The ICA’s upper gallery was filled with page‑by‑page reproductions of the five notebooks Godard compiled between 2019 and 2021: dense image-text collages that he treated as “films of paper,” the material matrix out of which his last moving‑image works emerged. 

The layout of Jean-Luc Godard: Scénario(s) was simple and effective. Each hour began in darkness with Scénarios, the 18‑minute film completed literally the day before Godard’s assisted death, followed by Exposé, a 36‑minute single take in which his hands leaf through one of the notebooks while his voice sketches the “film to come.”¹ Only then did visitors move into the gallery, to see those pages frozen, dissectible.

Crucially, the ICA is only one node in a growing constellation. The same notebooks have already been exhibited in Gijón² and at Paris’ Musée de l’Orangerie.³ Scénario. The Five Notebooks of Jean-Luc Godard, a limited box set edited by Le Livre d’Image that painstakingly preserves every scratch, crossing‑out and splash of paint across five volumes.⁴ In Porto, Casa do Cinema Manoel de Oliveira hosted Keeping Tale of Current Times: Jean-Luc Godard – Visual Work,⁵ a major exhibition and accompanying 448‑page book dedicated to Godard as a maker of still images, notebooks and graphic work.⁶ And then there is the ICA’s Jean-Luc Godard: Unmade and Abandoned, a months‑long season curated by Michael Witt to accompany his new study of 393 unrealised projects.⁷ Taken together, these events suggest a shift in how we look at Godard. The late films remain vital, but the notebooks – once apparently ancillary documents – have moved to the centre, becoming one of the main ways into his final thinking. 

Exposé du film annonce du film “Scénario” at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA). Photo: Heather Shuker, 2024.

Metamorphoses of an Apparatus

One thing the ICA season and the Porto exhibition make clear is that the Scénario notebooks are not a late eccentricity. They belong to a long history of Godard treating paper, print and graphic work as parallel forms of cinema.

Michael Witt has described Godard as a “shapeshifter” who moves restlessly between film, video, television, books and installation, constantly recalibrating his tools to the state of the medium.⁸ A glance at his filmography already complicates any straightforward identification with “feature film”: since the 1970s he made nearly twice as many works on video as on film, not counting long television series like Six fois deux (1976) or France/tour/détour/deux/enfants (France/Tour/Detour/Two/Children, 1980). Alongside these, he published books of “phrases” extracted from his audiovisual works, collaborated on gallery installations and exhibitions, and designed elaborate storyboards and “video scenarios” as works in themselves.

The notebooks resonate strongly with this history. As Witt and Dominique Païni have shown,⁹ Godard’s experiment with “films de papier” – collage notebooks functioning as cinema by other means – has deep roots; and, as Nicole Brenez’s scholarship and curatorial work demonstrate, this graphic practice runs alongside his films across decades. Examples include the post-production notebooks for Le gai savoir (Joy of Learnig, Dziga Vertov Group, 1969), reproduced in the recent Serralves catalog, and the four-volume restaging of Histoire(s) du cinéma as dense spreads of stills and quotations.¹⁰

Technological shifts played a key role. In the early 1970s a high‑quality photocopier entered Godard’s studio, and suddenly it was possible to generate, cut and recombine images cheaply and at speed. Witt’s account of that period describes a profusion of collage work – large sheets of photocopied stills and text, a special issue of Cahiers du cinéma laid out as visual essays, “Colle et Ciseaux” pieces literally built with glue and scissors – that run parallel to the films.¹¹ Godard’s oft‑repeated line about wanting to “think with one’s hands” stops being metaphorical at this point; it names a concrete working method.

The Scénario notebooks intensify that method at the other end of his career. Between May 2019 and October 2021, Godard compiled five successive notebooks for a project first called Scénario and, a week before his death, retitled Scénarios. As the site notes from the publishing company, Le Livre d’Image Éditions, indicate, each notebook corresponds to a stage in the project’s development, serving as both research tool and “study” with its own internal logic; they were produced with particular care once it became clear that they might constitute the work’s final form.¹² Mitra Farahani, a close collaborator of Godard in his final years, underlines this continuity: the notebooks “bear witness to the physical process of research,” in which Godard, “like a painter,” assembles images, texts and references in search of a singular language, continuing to “think with his hands” even as illness made conventional shooting more difficult.¹³

Jean-Luc Godard: Scénario(s) at the ICA. Photo: Heather Shuker, 2024.

Sound, Image, Text: A Late Triad

In an earlier essay “Godard as Presence: A Ghost Obituary”, I argued that Godard’s late work might be best understood as a constantly shifting relation between sound, image and text – what he calls langage, a general language of cinema that exceeds any single medium.¹⁴ The ICA season around Scénario(s) made that triad unusually palpable.¹⁵

On one side, Scénarios and Exposé present a kind of three‑part harmony: archival film fragments and digital images, Godard’s ageing voice, quotations spoken and written. On the other, the notebooks in the gallery are entirely image and text, with sound displaced into memory and imagination. The accompanying film series at the ICA – which ran from Une femme est une femme (A Woman Is a Woman, 1961) through Le gai savoir, Numéro deux (Number Two, 1975), Comment ça va (How’s It Going, co-directed with Anne-Marie Miéville, 1976), Éloge de l’amour (In Praise of Love, 2001), Notre musique (2004) and, crucially, Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-19998) – let you triangulate those elements historically.

Witt’s reading of Histoire(s)… in Jean-Luc Godard, Cinema Historian is useful here. Drawing on Alain Bergala, he suggests that Godard came to see the film and video archive as a kind of Orphic underworld, a limbo in which “the bodies, faces and gestures” recorded on film linger, “suspended in the emulsion.”¹⁶ Cinema, in this myth, is the means by which Orpheus can turn and look back at the 20th century: a historian’s power to survey and reconfigure the past at will.

The notebooks seem to transpose that logic onto paper. If cinema history is a vast, unstable reservoir of images awaiting re‑montage, then the Scénario pages are an attempt to fix some of that flux – not in order to neutralise it, but to give certain clusters of images and words a more material, less fleeting support. Where the montage in Histoire(s) or Le livre d’image (The Image Book, 2018) is durational, flaring and disappearing on screen, the montage on the notebook page is spatial; you can return to it, trace its layers, read the crossing‑outs.

This is where Witt’s observation that Godard tends to collapse distinctions between process, preparation and “final product” becomes particularly suggestive. He notes that works, drafts, installations and paratexts often sit on a continuum in Godard’s practice: a “video scenario” can be both a sketch for a feature and a self‑standing piece; an exhibition can double as an essay on cinema; a book can re‑edit a film.¹⁷ With Scénario(s) that collapsing is almost literal. The notebooks are at once preparatory documents for Scénarios and Exposé and works in their own right; the two short films, in turn, are a kind of filmed reading of the notebooks. The boundaries between note, rehearsal and premiere blur.

Jean-Luc Godard: Scénario(s) at the ICA. Photo: Heather Shuker, 2024.

The Notebooks as “Paper Films”

The five Scénario notebooks look modest in scale – close to A5 – but monumental in density. Each spread is a small universe: a film still from Lang or Rossellini, a reproduction of a painting, a newspaper photograph, a block of printed theory, a line of handwriting in thick felt‑tip, sometimes a wash of colour or a pasted‑on shape. Godard’s working techniques, as described in the box‑set materials, were as manual as ever: composition and fragmentation, erasures and deletions, additions and juxtapositions, “repentances” and overpaintings.

The description from Le Livre d’Image Éditions makes it explicit that these are not simply storyboards waiting to be translated into “real” cinema. Each notebook, it says, “complements and complicates” the previous one, representing a distinct phase in the search for the work’s properties; they were designed with the awareness that they might constitute the project’s ultimate form.¹⁸ In other words, Godard was once again making cinema by other means, as he did with the La gai savoir notebooks or the Histoire(s) volumes – only this time with no prior feature as anchor.

The ICA webpage text follows Farahani in insisting that “the function of the notebooks is not merely preparatory”; they are “complete objects in their own right,” balanced between a careful finish and an in‑progress, transitory feel.¹⁹ Looking at them, you feel that balance. Some pages are laid out with near‑graphic‑design precision; others are palimpsests of revisions. Together they show what it means to “think with hands” at the end of a long career: the editing table has migrated to the notebook, but the logic of montage – association, collision, echo – remains.

There is a quiet poignancy in the way these “paper films” fit in the larger history of Godard’s unrealised projects. Witt’s Jean-Luc Godard’s Unmade and Abandoned Projects, examines such ventures across his career: aborted literary adaptations, unrealised political films, early television series, exhibition plans, even camera designs and architectural maquettes. Many left only traces in letters, treatment drafts or a few minutes of test footage; others mutated into later works. The Scénario notebooks belong to this “phantom filmography,” but they also mark a difference: here the unmade project didn’t disappear into the archive; it hardened into a set of books that can be watched, read and exhibited.

Jean-Luc Godard: Scénario(s) at the ICA. Photo: Heather Shuker, 2024.

Scénarios: Last Gesture, Open Form

If the notebooks are the slow, patient side of the project, Scénarios is its compressed, flaring counterpart. This is manifested in the film’s twofold structure – “DNA: Fundamental Elements” and “MRI: Odyssey”.²⁰ In 18 minutes, it condenses a jumble of notes, images and sounds into a double movement: a kind of origin story and a decline, bookended by a self‑portrait of Godard on his bed, bare‑chested, reciting a passage from Jean‑Paul Sartre.

An accompanying text by long‑time collaborator Fabrice Aragno gives a moving account of those final days: Godard sitting on his small cot with an A4 notebook on his lap, “Scénarios” written on the cover in blue pen; the frantic search for a rare Sartre text; the redrawn second part in red ink; the last shot staged on the Monday before the “terrible Tuesday.”²¹ It is hard to imagine a clearer instance of process and product folding into one another: the notebook, the editing plan and the filmed scene are all part of the same gesture.

For visitors to the ICA, the effect of seeing Scénarios and Exposé and then walking upstairs into the notebook room was almost vertiginous. In Exposé, Godard’s hand moves through the pages as he speaks; in the gallery, your own body retraces that movement, but silently, slowly, with other viewers in the way. The films insist on time; the notebooks invite you to slip out of it.

And beyond London, the institutionalisation of Scénario(s) continues. At Porto’s Casa do Cinema, Scénarios has been screened in a loop amid an exhibition of preparatory notebooks; at the Musée de l’Orangerie, the notebooks’ “plastic richness” was read against the museum’s collection of paintings. In all these spaces, Godard’s last work appears less as a single film than as an open form –one that museums, festivals and books are still figuring out how to host.

Scénarios

A Primer for Future Work

Where does this leave someone who wants to study Godard through the lens of the notebooks without getting lost in the weeds? The cluster of recent publications and programmes gives a rough map.

Keeping Tale of Current Times: Jean-Luc Godard – Visual Work widens the frame, showing how the late notebooks grow out of a much longer engagement with drawing, painting, photography and collage, and how Godard’s cinema is entangled with the visual arts in ways usually obscured by film‑centred histories.

Scenario: The Five Notebooks of Jean-Luc Godard offers a meticulously produced object that allows close reading: you can sit with a single page and trace its references and revisions, aided by the translations and commentaries by Dominique Païni, Nicole Brenez, Jean-Paul Battaggia and Witt.

Jean-Luc Godard’s Unmade and Abandoned Projects pulls the camera back even further, situating Scénario within a sprawling “negative history” of works that never made it to the screen but decisively shaped the ones that did. The ICA’s season, which realises a Godardian proposition by projecting Made in U.S.A (1966) and Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her, 1967) as a single integrated work and sets completed films in dialogue with unmade ones, is a curatorial extension of that book’s logic.

I have previously attempted to track the persistence of Godard’s presence in other people’s images, in ghosts and glitches, as much as in his own films.²² Encountering the notebooks renews the search for Godard’s presence. Here was Godard in the most literal sense – his handwriting, his edits, his last self‑portrait on film – yet the work they point to remains deliberately incomplete — a “scenario” in its older theatrical sense (Italian scenario, from Latin scaenarium “place for erecting stages,” from scaena “stage”; cf. commedia dell’arte scenarios pinned to the scenery): a sketch laid out for others to inhabit.²³

For the moment, that incompleteness feels right. The ICA exhibition is over; the Porto show has now concluded; the facsimile box set of the notebooks has entered circulation; and Witt’s book and the ICA programme have begun to bring Godard’s unmade films into cinematic and critical view. Since the writing of this piece, the constellation has continued to expand, with a major new exhibition at La Virreina in Barcelona²⁴ and the recent Blu-ray release of Histoire(s) du cinéma and related works by Radiance Films. Scénario(s), in this context, is less a final word than a methodological nudge. It suggests that to follow Godard now means shuttling between films and paper, between archives and exhibitions, between what exists and what almost existed.

The notebooks are not there to be fetishised as relics of a genius’s last days. They’re there as working documents – examples of how to “think with hands” when the old certainties of the apparatus have broken down. And this isn’t confined to one gallery hour in London. It is the cumulative effect of seeing Scénarios and Exposé in cinemas; walking past the page-by-page displays in Gijón, at the Musée de l’Orangerie, and at the ICA; handling the facsimile box set on a desk; reading the Serralves volume on the visual work; and mapping the “negative history” in Witt’s book and the ICA’s Unmade and Abandoned season. Taken together, these encounters make the Godard of the notebooks feel less like a mausoleum than a workshop sprawling across screens, walls, and pages. The tools – images, words, notebooks, projectors, printers – are on the table. What happens next belongs to viewers, readers, programmers, and students as much as to Godard: the work continues in how we study, screen, and recompose it.

Endnotes