Jean-Luc Godard's Final Film
Scénarios
Scénarios
Introduction
"I will complete these two scenarios and end my film career, my life as a film director. And bid farewell to cinema."
(From a video interview at the Kerala International Film Festival, March 2021)
When Jean-Luc Godard left this world on 13 September 2022, he had written thescript of his own self-death. For the last two years he had been working on his final feature-length film called Scénario, produced by Mitra Farahani from ÉcranNoir Productions, in co-production with Arte. He used many different editingnotes and books to clarify his ideas. However, in the days before he left us, Jean-Luc Godard shuffled the deck and gave instructions for the film to be completed in two segments. This would beco-me Scénarios. A year earlier, in October 2021, he explained his ideas for Scénario to his assistants, Jean-Paul Battaggia and Fabrice Aragno. This led to the birth of a second film: Exposé pour un film annonce du film « Scénario».
Scénarios
Jean-Luc Godard
"Scénario" is cinema's name for how it tells stories, and it is also the title that Jean-Luc Godard decided to give to his final film. This film was made literally the day before his voluntary death, but this does not mean it remains unfinished; rather, it is realized precisely in its state of incompleteness. Now, 'Scénario' is ultimately written in the plural as 'Scénarios,' consisting of two parts: "DNA: Fundamental Elements" and "MRI: Odyssey." DNA is a biological signature that constitutes the human subject as unique. MRI evokes medical imagery and the suffering of a weakened body, suggesting the subject dissolving in the play of magnetic resonance. Between these two poles that evoke origin and decline in a strictly materialistic way unfolds the story of a subject, made up of a mixture of notes and images, condensed into 18 minutes. A unique yet collective narrative, a narrative of life obsessed with death. Because this film is also an eternal farewell, a funeral elegy. The two parts each open with exactly the same series of sequences, but in the second part they diverge and end with JLG's self-portrait—which becomes his final image—sitting on his bed, bare-chested like Pigalle's sculpture of Voltaire, hiding nothing of his physical decline, transcribing Jean-Paul Sartre's logical and comical double parable about non-fingers. 'Scénarios' ends, like its opening, with repetition. That is, with the figure of eternal return, the moment when time—which would have been if not the only, then the great problem for cinema—ceases to pass.
Produced by | Écran noir productions (France) — Arte France (France) — Nekojarashi/Roadstead (Japan)
Exposé du film annonce du film "Scénario"
Jean-Luc Godard
In October 2021, Jean-Luc Godard presented the concept for a feature film project called 'Scénarios' consisting of six parts. A film that mixes still and moving images, somewhere between reading and seeing.
Produced by | Écran noir productions (France) — Arte France (France) — Nekojarashi/Roadstead (Japan)
World's First Premiere Sale on Roadstead
Limited DVT with Special Replica Notebook
Prior to its theatrical release, Scenario is being sold exclusively as a DVT on the Web3 platform Roadstead. Only 100 copies are available worldwide. Each purchaser will receive, as a bonus, replicas of five special notebooks, including some that appear in the film.
Roadstead offers a unique platform where digital films are treated like physical items, similar to DVDs. Users can watch and sell these limited-edition films, each with a edition number, ensuring only the purchaser can use them. Additionally, users can trade films, with part of the proceeds directly supporting filmmakers. As a pioneering "DVT" (Digital Video Trading) platform, Roadstead aims to provide fair compensation to creators and promote sustainable filmmaking.
About the 'Scénarios' Production Notebook Replica
Between the completion of the The Image Book (Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2018) and his voluntary death in September 2022, Jean-Luc Godard sought to create a complex form project that would combine theater, opera, and cinema.
Difficulty in reaching agreements with various institutional partners, combined with Godard’s growing fragility, led to Scénario being reimagined as a film alone—until the heavy machinery of cinema itself became increasingly difficult to mobilize, making the preparatory notebooks the project’s essential site and sole viable outcome.
Jean-Luc Godard’s oeuvre is replete with notebooks of collage, citation and assemblage. Using a variety of manual and conceptual techniques—composition and fragmentation, erasure and deletions, addition and juxtaposition, supplementation and repentance, approximation and hollowing, etc.—they served both as research tools and as a means of developing an original language form that gave each project its shape.
Between 2019 and 2021, Jean-Luc Godard designed five successive notebooks for Scénario, As it became increasingly apparent that these would constitute the project’s final form, they were designed with particular care. Each new study is the culmination of a stage in the quest for the properties of Scénario, which complements and complicates all those that preceded it.
Films of paper, specters of a film that will never see the light of day, these notebooks are haunted by recurring themes: “Fake news,” “Idée fixe,” monotheism, human comedy... nencumbered by cinema’s technique, Jean-Luc Godard continued to craft a language that could become that of a film, as shown by his reading of the fifth notebook in a 36-minute sequence shot, recorded in 2021, «Exposé du film annonce du film “Scénario.”
A week before meeting his death, Jean-Luc Godard gave instructions to complete an 18-minute film entitled Scénarios (plural), which appears to be a last resort of the final project he was devising.
The notebooks have been reproduced, approximating their physical qualities as closely as printing techniques allows.
The thousand numbered copies of this box set were published in July 2025 by Écran noir production (Paris, France) – which produced the Scénario project – via Le Livre d’Image Éditions (Paris, France), in collaboration with Éditions RWB (United States). They were printed by Grafiche Milani, Segrate (Milan, Italy).
- reproduction of notebook 1 (May 2019),
- reproduction of notebook 2 (July 2020),
- reproduction of notebook 3 (December 2020),
- reproduction of notebook 4 (March 2021),
- reproduction of notebook 5 (October 2021),
- booklet with English translations of the 5 notebooks by Michael Witt, introductory texts by Dominique Païni, Nicole Brenez, and Jean-Paul Battaggia.
※The bonus will be mailed to those who purchase the main film. Distribution is scheduled for 2025.
※The bonus content may change without notice.
