Breathless goodbye: the race to finish JeanLuc Godard’s last film, one day before he died
On Friday 9 September 2022, Jean-Luc Godard had one last wish. He needed a quote from Jean-Paul Sartre to complete his film, Scénarios, but the book was missing from the shelf in his Swiss home. Time was pressing: he was up against a hard deadline. The film’s final scene was to be shot on Monday. On Tuesday, the director would die by assisted suicide.
Fabrice Aragno takes up the story. As Godard’s longtime collaborator, Aragno was his eyes and his ears, his trusted technical advisor. Surely he would be able to find the book from somewhere. “So on Friday 5.30pm, I drive very fast to Lausanne, 20 miles away,” he recalls. “I park the car and I’m sweating. I run to the library but the library is closed. I run to a secondhand bookshop but they don’t have the text. It’s out of print anyway. And I’m running for my life. Or not my life, for JeanLuc’s life.”
The inscrutable order; the impossible challenge; the high-stakes caper plotline with a French philosopher as its Holy Grail … if Godard’s last act feels positively Godardian in spirit, there’s a good reason: it was all part of a piece.
The work was the man: intertwined, indivisible. Small wonder that his death became a creative enterprise in itself. “Running against the deadline is what Scénarios is all about,” says Aragno. “In French, you really hear that word for what it means, for how odd it is. Deadline.
It’s the line of death you’re either trying to outrun or to meet.”
It is the morning after Scénarios has played to a packed house at the Cannes film festival. Aragno is in town with the Iranian film-maker Mitra Farahani. The two were close to Godard, and curated and edited Scénarios following the great director’s demise. The experience has been strange; they’re still processing their reactions. “Until yesterday this was a live work, it was ours,” says Farahani. “Now it’s come out, it no longer belongs to us. It becomes another part of the Godard oeuvre.”
Mystifying and mesmerising in equal measure, Scénarios stands proud as an old master’s late abstract. Godard’s film collage extrapolates on the themes he explored in Goodbye to Language and The Image Book. It is fascinated by semiotics, by the energising crossfire of text and pictures. In the course of a crammed 18-minute running time, Godard juggles clips from old movies (The Lady from Shanghai,
Only Angels Have Wings) with archive newsreel footage. But he also threads the soundtrack with the ominous gonglike clang of an MRI scan to acknowledge implicitly the worsening state of his health.
Immediately after his death,
Godard’s family released a statement. “He was not sick,” it said. “He was exhausted.” What’s clear, though, is that the 91-year-old’s body had begun to break down. Farahani explains that she had convinced him to keep a journal of all his hospital visits. He wrote his last entry the day before he died. “He wanted to transcribe every detail of his physical struggle,” she explains. “So that the body and the work became intertwined.”
As for Sartre, he’s in there too, folded in amid the newsreels and old movies. The dash to the library had a happy ending after all. Lausanne lacked the book, but Paris came good. Aragno had a friend scan and email the right page, so that the film-maker could tinker with the text and read it for his final scene on Monday. Scénarios shows him sitting on the bed, bespectacled and bare-chested. He shoots a glance at the camera. Then we cut and he’s gone.
Officially speaking, Godard ended his life on 13 September 2022. But his films are undying, and to watch them is to revisit him at various stages. As a brilliant young man, he made brilliant young films (Breathless, Bande à Part) which were gorgeously freestyle, shot with natural light and so lightly stitched on to the ebb and flow of Paris life that they felt as though the world was simply moving in front of the camera lens.
In old age, he turned inward and alienated his early fanbase. The work became more intricate, insular and perplexing. But is the young Godard so different from the incarnations that followed? The man had started out as a critic. Probably he remained one until the end. All of his pictures are playful exercises in film language, pulling at the elastic, trying to find where it snaps. Every film should have a beginning, middle and end, he once said. “But not necessarily in that order.”
True to form then, that last shot of Godard on the bed isn’t quite goodbye. At Cannes, the completed Scénarios is followed by a 34-minute documentary, a flashback to October 2021. It shows the director outlining his plans for the work on a set of index cards. He is white-haired and frail, but as exacting as ever. He’s discussing Prokofiev and Stravinsky. He’s juxtaposing a Russ Meyer still with a painting by Francis Bacon. Aragno says that the director’s last few years could be hard. But each time the man appeared to be fading, he’d re-engage with his work and seem to snap back to life. “He always had so many references and ideas. All of the images were in his archive, his bank.”
“His bestiary,” says Farahani. “His bestiary,” says Aragno, smiling. “His bestiary or his forest. Because that’s what he was like. Not a tree but a forest. His work invites us to move through the forest from one branch to the next.” This comparison stirs a memory. “I remember we were walking the dogs in the forest. It was winter, I think, but there were still some birds singing. Jean-Luc had to stop now and then, because he got tired. He looked up at the branches and quoted a poem. He said that birds are words that the trees exchange.”
The man could be gnomic. Again, that was his nature. In the accompanying documentary, Godard explains that he wants to conclude Scénarios with “a sort of mysterious absence”. Aragno, for his part, is entirely unbothered by that. “Robert Bresson said that we live in mystery, and that mystery needs to be on screen. And there is another quote that I like from [Romanian writer] Emil Cioran. He said that every mystery becomes a problem. So we find a solution to solve the problem. But the solution only profanes the mystery.” Far better, he thinks, to simply live with the mystery.
Aragno worked alongside Godard for nearly 20 years. He was in his early 30s when he started, and jokes that he has now become an old man himself. He served as Godard’s loyal lieutenant, his sounding board, friend and fixer. It was Aragno who accompanied the director on the Costa Concordia, which would later run aground and partially sink, to shoot footage for 2010’s Film Socialisme. It was Aragno who devised the 3D camera rigs used on 2014’s Goodbye to Language. The one-time collaborator is now developing a film of his own based on another of Godard’s late ideas. But mainly, he says, he is helping to establish the Jean-Luc Godard Foundation, renovating an old factory in the director’s home town of Rolle. This will serve as an exhibition space and archive, but principally it will provide a seedbed for young artists.
Aragno points out that the audience at Cannes was largely composed of students: twentysomethings and thirtysomethings. He is delighted by this: it confirms what he has long suspected. “I don’t like the idea of Godard being a brand name, like Yves Saint Laurent,” he says. “But the young people don’t care about the brand name of Godard. For them, it is all about the work.”
After successfully shooting Scénarios’ last scene on Monday, Aragno knew that he had to say goodbye. The film was finished and the time had come. He told Godard he’d miss him. He shook the man’s hand and he cried. “But goodbyes are meaningless,” he says. “Goodbyes are impossible. That’s why the Foundation is so important. It’s a physical space for the work, for the young. So no goodbyes.” Aragno slaps his bicep in defiance. “Fuck the goodbyes. He lives on and continues.”
The soundtrack contains the ominous gong-like clang of an MRI scan – to acknowledge his worsening health