Wavelengths 3: Exposé(s) – Jean-Luc Godard/John Smith
(France, Japan, United Kingdom)
Dir. Jean-Luc Godard, John Smith
Programme: Wavelengths
How does one begin to write about Jean-Luc Godard and John Smith? Two legendary filmmakers, each with distinguished, decades-spanning careers that have advanced the language of cinema into unforeseen territories, each hailing from empires with distinct traditions. Their films could not be more different, with Godard’s heavily textured collages and Smith’s minimalist, diaristic confessions, yet they are united by reflections upon life and death, sound and image, cinema and language.
After the circulation of Film annonce du film qui n’existera jamais: “Drôles de guerres” (Trailer for a Film that Will Never Exist: Phony Wars) on the festival circuit, declared in 2023 as his final film, Godard unexpectedly offered the world two additional films. Scénarios, the first, is a patchwork essay comprised of drawings, photographs, quotes, voiceovers, news footage, scenes from his filmography, and the work of other filmmakers. The 18-minute film is a late work in the sense that it’s marked by ambition, innovation and experimentation, and in the sense that it was completed a day before Godard’s assisted death in 2022. This fact inhabits every frame as Godard juxtaposes staged and documented images of violence, and directs us to the birth of cinema through the figure of the horse. A rather abstract composition, the film can be read in many ways: as a treatise, a study of language, a final meditation on his life’s work, and a public admission of his mortality.
What does it say that Scénarios is screened alongside Exposé du film annonce du film “Scénario,” a 36-minute documentary on Godard’s ideas for an unrealized film? The two projects share nearly identical titles, employ collage techniques, and seem to be concerned with similar ideas. However, the latter is decidedly not a behind-the-scenes making of the former. Rather, the film depicts Godard as he guides us through his scrapbook, narrating his decisions on casting, editing, visual references, representational strategies, and so on. Shot in a rough, handheld manner, we’re granted a glimpse into his unusual storyboarding process as he flips through a stack of index cards detailing the contents of the six chapters that would’ve organized a hypothetical feature-length film. It’s remarkable and moving to witness the filmmaker at work with such lucidity. The film bursts with creative energy, evidence of his resistance to complacency, and his dedication to iteration and reiteration despite the inevitable. Viewed as a diptych of sorts, the films reveal Godard’s devotion to the medium of cinema, as well as the perpetual risks and rewards of filmmaking, which remain eternally available to those who believe there are still risks and rewards to be discovered.
This sentiment feels true for John Smith, whose structural filmmaking efforts have not ceased since the revelatory The Girl Chewing Gum. In his latest, Being John Smith, the British avant-garde artist, who is still going strong at 72, applies his affection for subverting expectations to an autobiographical essay film that is at once wry and sincere. With his profoundly ordinary name as the point of departure, Smith spirals into ruminations on his life, his career, his progression as a filmmaker, how his ethical commitments inform his artistic ones—the impossibility of disregarding the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people as a contemporary filmmaker, for instance—all narrated by an assemblage of family photographs, documents, ephemera, medical imaging, digital screenshots, voiceover and text. Words carried by sound contradict words carried by script, disparate ideas unfold on screen at the same time, the relationship between language and images is questioned throughout.
Where so many musicians are eager to lend their names to their debut works, trumpeting their arrival to the world with eponymous albums as artistic statements, Smith emerges with a self-titled film that feels rather unfixed, perhaps more open to explorations of style and motivation in his next films. What remains resolute, however, is the explicit turn to the political, a striking move that speaks to the necessity of art derived from the concerns of reality. Regarding the turn to address social issues more overtly in recent films like Citadel and Covid Messages, Smith has stated in an interview, “This hasn’t been a conscious decision, it’s just that the West’s 21st-century collapse into chaos has become a bigger and bigger part of the everyday consciousness from which my ideas develop.” In other words, there’s simply no other way to exist, work, or live.
If photographs are memento mori, participating in the mortality of another person, as Susan Sontag observed, they must also mediate their subjects’ aliveness, visiting at moments of vulnerability and transformation. For works that contemplate death, finality, and the uncertainty of existence, the films of this program are exceptionally invigorating, the images of Godard and Smith reminding us of cinema as a monument to living, renewal, possibility, and presence.
