Late auteur Jean-Luc Godard’s work will be tributed at the 77th Cannes Film Festival. During his era, Godard rose to prominence as a pioneer of the French New Wave film movement of the 1960s. According to AllMovie, his work “revolutionized the motion picture form” through its experimentation with narrative, continuity, sound, and camera work. His notable directorial credits include Masculin Féminin (1966), Weekend (1967), and Goodbye to Language (2014).
On 13 September 2022, the filmmaker breathed his last, marking the end of an era. Although the director left the world, his artistry will always be eternal. Last year, the Cannes Film Festival held the premiere of his short trailer for the film that will never exist: ‘Phony Wars.’ The event will once again honor the filmmaker as this year, the Cannes Film Festival will screen two final films from Jean-Luc Godard, and today brings the first images.
What is Jean-Luc Godard’s final two films all about?
Jean-Luc Godard left two of his movies behind before finally bidding farewell to the world. His first film, Scénarios, is 18 minutes long. In French, ‘scénario’ is cinema’s name for how it tells stories. This title was chosen by Godard for his final film, which was completed the day before he passed away. The film explores two themes: DNA, fundamental elements, and MRI, Odyssey. DNA is a biological signature that gives a human subject its uniqueness; MRI evokes medical imagery and the distress felt by a weakened body and suggests the subject being dissolved at the whim of magnetic resonance. Both these themes blend into a story that evokes both creation and decay through a collection of notes and images condensed into just 18 minutes.
The film reflects on death and serves as a farewell, resembling a funeral lamentation. Its two segments open with a series of identical sequences. The second segment then diverges and ends with a self-portrait of Godard, his final image. Sitting on his bed, bare-chested, he hides none of the wear on his body in the manner of Pigalle’s sculpted portrait of Voltaire.
First Look of Jean Luc Godard’s Final Film – Scenarios.The film closes with Godard transcribing Jean-Paul Sartre’s story about non-fingers, ending as it began, with a repetition, representing the eternal return. It’s a moment where time, which has been pivotal to the cinematic world, appears to cease.
The second film to be screened at the Cannes Film Festival is Exposé du film annonce du film Scénario. It’s a 34-minute film that reflects on the behind-the-scenes of making the aforementioned short.
This second film was shot in October 2021, and it captures Jean-Luc Godard presenting his idea for Scénarios in a film “combining still and moving images, halfway between reading and seeing.”
The Cannes Film Festival begins on May 14, 2024.
