Jean-Luc Godard cultivated ironic subversion all his life. When he was a teenager and signed his drawings as IAM, he gave it to his parents with great reticence. Le Cercle de Famille. Impressions d’ensemble (The family circle. General impressions)a graphic notebook where he made fun of bourgeois life. And nothing more bourgeois than roots that came from banker grandparents in Switzerland, as was his case. It may not be surprising to find that the French-Swiss filmmaker, who helped build the new wave, He was a young rebel, who in the future would also use cinema as a political weapon, but it is undoubtedly striking to note that he channeled a part of his creativity through graphic work.
This unknown Godard is displayed in the exhibition Taking current times as a tale: Plastic work by Jean-Luc Godardwhich can be visited at the Casa do Cinema Manoel de Oliveira, at the Serralves Foundation, in Porto, until next May 18. “What we show here is a multifaceted Godard, a total artist who was not only a filmmaker, he was also a plastic artist who exposes the proximity between cinema and the visual arts,” says António Preto, director of the Casa do Cinema Manoel de Oliveira.
In the exhibition catalogue, the members of the Ô Contraire! collective, which includes four former collaborators of the filmmaker and who have curated the exhibition, admit that they would have refused to be defined as a “plastic artist” and that identifying him as a “painter” or “designer” graphic” would be correct but simplistic. “He was an artist in every sense of the word,” they emphasize.
He was ironic at the age of 17 and continued to be ironic until his last days. The collection of 24 digital self-portraits that greet the visitor in the entrance hall confirm the filmmaker’s ability to both laugh and create visual poetry even in limited physical conditions such as those he suffered in recent years. Selfies serve as a starting point for visual experiments full of color and humor. They also prove that until the end he embraced technological advances, highlights Preto, whether it was video or a latest generation mobile phone. One of the images shows his hand holding a key to open the door of his house in Rolle (Switzerland), the same place he chose to die in 2022 through assisted suicide, a legal right in his native country. He was 91 years old and had several disabling ailments.
It was the filmmaker’s friends and family who searched different residences to organize a collection of graphic works that would be relevant for an exhibition and that was scattered. The exhibition has been created by the collective Ô Contraire!, made up of its producer Fabrice Aragno, the screenwriter Jean-Paul Battaggia, the historian and film critic Nicole Brenez and Paul Grivas, Godard’s nephew and director of photography on his film Socialism Film (2010). The Porto exhibition is, to a certain extent, a rehearsal of the activities that could be organized by the Godard foundation that the group wants to promote.
One of the oldest creations that can be seen in the exhibition is a drawing that he gave to his sister Verónica and that he signs as Jam, “perhaps a pseudonym that comes from the English words IAM”observes António Preto. From that initial phase, the portrait of his father Paul is included, several paintings where he experimented with different painting techniques and the illustrations that accompany a letter that he wrote at the age of 17 to Paul Valéry, a friend of his grandfather Julien-Pierre Monod. The interest in playing with the combination of images and texts from those early years is visible, which would later be kept in notebooks, both work and personal. Additionally, Jean-Luc Godard’s first script is shown, Alinewritten between 1948 and 1949, which was believed to have disappeared.
There is also a reminder of the relationship of mutual admiration that Godard and the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira had. The pages of the conversation between the two that he published are reproduced Liberation in September 1993, when one premiered worse for me and another, The Valley of Abraham, in movie theaters in Paris. In the talk they confess that they often feel afraid of not making the next film. The Portuguese will confide in him why he liked it Germany, year nine zeroa 1991 Godard film: “What I like is the clarity of the signs added to their profound ambiguity. This is also what I like in general in cinema: a saturation of magnificent signs that are bathed in the light of the absence of explanation.”
This relationship contributed to the fact that, years later, the French filmmaker agreed to the Serralves Foundation’s proposal to dedicate an exhibition to him, which ultimately could not be held due to his death. The current exhibition also includes works by Godard’s friends, family or partners, as well as work instruments and numerous notebooks, where he reveals states of mind and political consciousness. In one of them, dedicated in full sentimental effervescence to the actress Anne Wiazemsky, one of his partners, he writes: “When the weekend becomes the end of the world.” The notebook is also shown The Chinesestarring Wiazemsky, with a phrase from Mao Zedong. The sixties are marked by his radical, Maoist position. In one of the notebooks from that time he reflects on photography as a bourgeois cultural tool. Next to the image of a cowboy with his back turned ready for a duel, he wrote: “The bourgeoisie created a world in its image. Comrades, let’s destroy that image.”
There are also post-production notebooks with collages and notes on I greet you, Maria or the notebook Drôles de guerres (False Wars)the posthumous work that became a new feature of rebellion. “YSL had commissioned a film from him and he gave them the notebook saying that was the film. Finally, it had to be accepted and it was resolved by converting each page of the notebook into an image, what it was about was deciding how long each one would last,” explains Preto.
One of the walls also reproduces the graphic tree that Godard had in front of his table: photos of his dog, a painting by Matisse or one of the works he painted when he was a young nonconformist, among others. In parallel to the exhibition, which includes an installation where images are projected on veils with the creation process for The picture book While Godard’s voice is heard, the Casa do Cinema will also dedicate a cycle to the filmmaker, who filmed more than a hundred films, and a series of conferences in which curators, art historians and film critics participate.