Keeping Tale of Current Times / Jean-Luc Godard-Visual Work

An exhibition at the manoel de Oliveira cinema House in Porto, Portugal, organized by the Serralves Foundation and curated by the Collectif Ô Contraire! (Fabrice Aragno, Jean-Paul Battaggia, Nicole Brenez, and Paul Grivas), Keeping Tale of Current Times / Jean-Luc Godard-Visual Work (November 13, 2024–June 15, 2025) presented, for the first time, Jean-Luc Godard’s career as a visual artist in full, spanning from his childhood to 2022. Most of this work-including paintings, drawings, notebooks, and digital images-had never been exhibited before.

1.

As you enter the Casa do Manoel de Oliveira, you are greeted by a row of thirty-four digital self-portraits that Jean-Luc Godard took with his iPhone between 2015 and 2022. In some of them, his face is blurred, obscured, or broken into pixels. Digital brushstrokes in vibrant colors conceal his face or radiate like spokes from his head. In others, we only see his shadow or his hand clutching the keys to his house in Rolle, Switzerland, where he died in 2022 at the age of ninety-one through assisted suicide. Some of these images possess a quiet melancholy; others uncover a more playful spirit. In one selfie, a reclining Godard squints at the camera with a sheepish grin on his face. He emailed this photo to his longtime collaborators, Jean-Paul Battaggia and Nicole Brenez, with the cryptic message: “A fool is a priceless privilege, also with fairies.” Twenty-four of these emails are featured at Serralves under the rubric “The Afternoons of an IFaun.” Brenez notes: “Each email from Jean-Luc Godard offers a small opus based on the pleasure of simultaneously inventing links between the title and the body of the text, new resonances between image and language, fractures capable of making words blossom into cubist flowers [. . .] to the very end the phone remained a machine for creation.”

2.

The exhibition title, Keeping Tale of Current Times, comes from his posthumous twenty-minute-long film Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: “Phony Wars” (2023), comprised of still images mounted on photographic paper. In shot #15, in Godard’s familiar cursive, we read: “It was a question of no longer trusting the billions of diktats of the alphabet and giving back their freedom to the incessant metamorphoses and metaphors of a real language by returning to the locations of the past, while keeping tale (tenant conte) of current times.” The play on words between tenant conte (“telling a tale”) and tenant compte (“taking account of”) captures an essential feature of Godard’s approach: the merging of invention and testimony, creativity and reality, fiction and reportage.

3.

The first room contains drawings and artist’s books in wich a boy disowns his name,signing “IAM” instead. it marks the beginning of a long series of pseudonyms. Why “IAM”? Is it derived from the English “I am”? Perhaps the young Godard appreciated the irony of choosing a name that asserts presence while never fully inhabiting a fixed identity.

4.

The Family Circle: Overall Impressions, a seventeen-page-long handcrafted book from 1947 that Godard offered to his parents for Christmas, capti

## The Space Between Images: Jean-Luc Godard and the Materiality of Thought

7.

The exhibition’s extensive use of quotation-from literature,philosophy,and political theory-reveals a crucial aspect of Godard’s creative process. Scattered throughout the space are handwritten lines such as “One does not see, one thinks” (franz Kafka), “this feeling of my fundamental improbability places me in the world” (Georges Bataille), and “Thought taken ironically by something other than thought” (maurice blanchot), among other lines. The link between any citation and the main text is seldom obvious, establishing that Godard was exploring ideas through quotation, association, and juxtaposition long before he became a filmmaker.

8.

As you turn the corner, you encounter a reconstruction of Godard’s workspace-a small array of modest tools and objects that include Edding markers, pencils, scissors, glue sticks, an iPhone displaying an image of a donkey, and cigars. These artifacts remind us that, for Godard, cinema was above all a form of manual labour, a concrete process of cutting, arranging, and thinking through touch. Godard often cites Denis de Rougemont’s line “Man’s true condition is to think with his hands”; the phrase that sums up his materialist approach to filmmaking. In The Image Book (2018), the hand even functions as a structuring device, with each of the five parts of the film corresponding to a different finger. For Godard, this means, above all, that the practice of montage should be conceived as a mode of thought in its own right-reflecting both his use of hands-on analog video editing technology (even after digital editing software became the industry standard) and his dialectical approach to montage. What’s crucial for Godard is not one image or another, but the friction between two images-the interstice.

9.

For, in Godard’s method, it is not a question of association. Given one image, another image has to be chosen which will induce an interstice between the two. This is not an operation of association,but of differentiation,as mathematicians say,or of disappearance,as physicists say: given one potential,another one has to be chosen,not any whatever,but in such a way that a difference of potential is established between the two,which will be productive of a third or of something new.[…] Simply put, the interstice is primary in relation to association, or irreducible difference allows resemblances to be graded. The fissure has become primary, and in this very way grows larger. […] It is the method of BETWEEN, ‘between two images,’ which does away with all cinema of the One. It is the method of AND, ‘this and then that’,’ which does away with all the cinema of Being = is. Between two actions,between two affections,between two perceptions,between two visual images,between two sound images,between the sound and the visual: make the indiscernible,that is the frontier,visible.

10.

The exhibition positions the notebooks as the living matrix of this cinema. They are not just conventional preparatory documents, but are, undoubtedly, works in their own right.

11.

three recently discovered notebooks produced by the Dziga Vertov Group in 1969, titled Down with Cinema: The Beginning of a Long struggle, are exhibited in their entirety. Working in dialog with Jean-Pierre Gorin, Godard created them in response to a commission that asked the group to articulate their theory of militant cinema. Comprising roughly ninety pages, the notebooks draw largely on films the group was working on at the time. In one spread, an image of a cowboy about to draw his guns in a duel appears on the left page; it is set against a rephrased quotation from Marx on the right, also featured at the opening of Godard’s British Sounds (1969): “The bourgeoisie has created a world in its own image; let’s destroy that image.” Intriguingly, the image is not a frame from the original Western but a production still of the entire set. We see the distant

In Godard’s cinematic universe, the gaze of cinema replaces the gaze of the divine. christian iconography becomes a metaphor for the renewed possibility of believing in the world-a redemption of the real. His cinema embodies a Spinozist philosophy of the image: the God of Godard’s cinematic universe is immanent. There are no “just” images, only images. godard creates a space where images, texts, and sounds coexist without hierarchy. Freed from their original contexts, these elements enter what he calls “the fraternity of metaphors.”

As you glance over the preproduction and postproduction notebooks for Godard’s eight-part video series Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-99), the recurring image of Chaplin stands out-an allegorical emblem of the “childhood of cinema.” For Godard,the history of cinema is ultimately the story of an unfulfilled promise. Although it began with high aspirations as a new instrument of thought, cinema eventually devolved into a toy, failing in its ethical obligations. Masaccio’s Expulsion from the Garden of Eden evokes this fall from the paradise of early cinema. The death knell sounded when the concentration camps went unfilmed and cinema abandoned its documentary mission. godard also condemns cinema for failing to resist its occupation by hollywood and the rise of television.

You recall Godard’s audacious juxtaposition in Histoire(s) du cinéma of elizabeth Taylor, smiling serenely as she embraces Montgomery Clift in George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun (1951), with images of corpses in a crematorium.Godard later explained that the scene conveyed to him a “shadowed happiness,” a feeling he traced to Stevens’s experience filming the liberation of the camps, so that beauty and horror became inextricably intertwined. Godard slows down the shot as Elizabeth Taylor bends to kiss her lover, with a painting of Mary Magdalene, looking much like an angel, encircling them, while his voiceover exclaims: “O what wonder to look at what one cannot see / O sweet wonder of our blind eyes. Montage!” stevens upheld the role of cinema here as witness and redeemed it for not having been present at the Holocaust, an act accomplished through what Godard calls “historical montage.” Despite being expressed through Christian iconography, this notion of redemption is close to Walter Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image. Benjamin links redemption to happiness and to a laying hold of the past, not to transform it into cultural heritage but rather to fulfill it as an actualization in the present.

Photograph, paint, film that which one cannot see.

The cinematic archive is a realm of phantoms that can be reanimated through an audiovisual approach to historiography: a retrospective gaze that does not kill but rescues. In one of the postproduction notebooks for Histoire(s) du cinéma, you spot a drawing by klee of an angel superimposed over a still of Godard as the Prince/Idiot from his underrated masterpiece Keep Your Right Up (1987). The still captures the moment when the Prince/Idiot has just disembarked from a plane and is handed a massive stack of film cans, which contain the film he has miraculously completed while on board. Moments later, he falls to the ground, reels and cans strewn around him: a fallen slapstick angel. One cannot help but think of Benjamin’s famous interpretation of Klee’s Angelus Novus, which he dubbed the angel of history. Indeed, references to Benjamin abound in Godard’s films, yet Klee’s drawing is absent from the final version of the video series.

Jean-Luc Godard: An Archaeology of Images

The exhibition Keeping Tale of Current Times at Casa Manoel de Oliveira offers a unique glimpse into the working process of Jean-Luc Godard, revealing cinema as an ongoing critical engagement with the present rather than a finished product.The show,assembled from the filmmaker’s personal archive,presents a constellation of notebooks,objects,collages,and films,demonstrating how Godard continually reworked and recontextualized images throughout his career. one especially resonant exmaple is his poignant eighteen-minute-long film Scénarios (2024), completed just one day before his death. The film opens with shots of his iPhone self-portraits. Encountering them again, you are struck by how uncannily the vibrant colors recall the palette of his childhood paintings.

Godard’s Return to Painting

After scrolling past the title, the next shot depicts one hand clasping another, the image covered in splotches of red, yellow, blue, and black. Godard then cuts to The little girl with Braids,his childhood portrait of Véronique. In this sequence, the circle closes, returning to the young Godard, who delighted in brilliant hues and the tactile quality of the paint.

As godard himself explained:

I came to understand that I was working like a painter making successive sketches, rather than like a writer writing a story that’s then adapted for the cinema, which is what most of today’s filmmakers do…

(…)

Cinema is very limited in terms of its scope. It doesn’t have the freedom of painting.No two paintings by Cezanne have the same scope. All of Griffith’s films have the same scope. Freedom needs to be found elsewhere.

(…)

I did a bit of painting when I was very young. And I saw a lot of it. So cinema is a return.A return not to childhood, but to the realm of childhood.

Test Amen Ts: A Final Repertoire

Test amen ts (2022), one of his last works, is a large-scale book exhibited for the first time. It’s a standalone piece with no apparent connection to any specific film project, whether made or conceived. The front cover is painted black, its lettering punctuated by the words “test” and “amen” in vivid red. On the inside of the front cover is a still from Carl Dreyer’s The Bride of Glomdal (1926), which depicts a man rowing a small boat while looking back at a woman prostrate, as if dead, in the rear of the vessel. In Histoire(s) du cinéma, the image functioned as an emblem for the redemption of cinema. Here, the still is partially obscured. Painted over in red and black brushstrokes over a sky-blue background, it calls to mind the bespoke book covers Godard crafted as an adolescent for his favorite tomes. In Test amen ts, Godard revisits his repertoire of themes and motifs one last time, as if saying goodbye to a cast of recurring characters. Reduced to just a handful of images and words,they have been distilled: references to Freud and the unconscious,to filming the invisible.Pages are organized by categories: animals,hands,landscapes,Cezanne.

Cinema Beyond Film

What remains is not cinema, at least not if we define cinema in terms of reels, projectors, or pixels. What remains is a relation: a quotation penciled alongside a newspaper advertisement, a book positioned next to a pair of scissors, a reproduction of a painting juxtaposed with the sound of a piano chord. Keeping Tale of Current Times reveals that, for Godard, cinema was always something larger than film itself. The notebooks, objects, and collages are not peripheral; they constitute cinema, displaced onto other supports. Godard refuses to treat film as a finished artifact. He conceives of it rather as an endless critical encounter with the present. Rather than creating new images, he unearths existing ones and reworks them, bringing them into new alignments. His practice resembles an archaeology of images; an excavation of their political, historical, and emotional layers. At the Casa Manoel de oliveira, this archaeology takes form in each material fragment, at once fossil and flare.

As Godard famously stated, “It is indeed arduous to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if it’s not there.”