What’s new in the Godardosphere? An exhibition currently on display on the outskirts of Porto, “Keeping Tale of Current Times”, dedicated to the “visual work” of Jean-Luc Godard, places the filmmaker’s formal interests on a new trajectory.

It was as clear as day that even after the artisan’s death, his work would continue to reverberate, even renew itself. Two or so years after his passing, a new exhibition further completes his vision. Will it ever be restored to us in its entirety? A vast undertaking for anyone even remotely familiar with its rhizomatic ramifications, yet one that cannot stifle the unifying energy of the “Ô Contraire” collective, responsible for curating the exhibition. Behind this playful pun are his close collaborators from the last years of his career (since the extraordinary Film Socialisme, which in 2010 once again reset the Godardian meter) – Fabrice Aragno, Jean-Paul Battaggia, Nicole Brenez, and Paul Grivas. They have taken on the difficult task of safeguarding his legacy, indefinitely prolonging the echo of his creation. The risk is twofold: on one hand, that of reifying a living thought, of putting it on a pedestal, of fixing it into a ceremonial devoid of critical sense; on the other hand (though somewhat related), that of transforming Godard’s practice into a commodity and a brand, a recognizable logo. That is precisely what the author himself so gracefully avoided, balancing between a prickly form of pop and an aura of marble-like yet mischievous guru – that “in-between” space that obsessed him all his life.

Yet, the risk is worth taking. By showcasing Godard in a museum, the exhibition is simultaneously going against the filmmaker and fully in tune with him. He rarely ceded the cinema in favour of the exhibition space – and when he did, as at the Pompidou in 2006, the process proved to be roaring – but over time, it became increasingly difficult to hide the fact that his films de facto belonged to an artist’s consciousness rather than that of a director. In other words, they existed precisely to mask, subvert, and postpone this temptation toward visual art. If photography, as has been known at least since Duchamp, is a readymade painting, then perhaps it’s no coincidence that Godard chose cinema as an imaginary substitute for the physical museum – as a museum of the eye.

Especially since Serralves, the off-centre Porto district where the exhibition is being held, does not house a conventional museum institution. The foundation of the same name is set within a beautiful urban garden designed by the great local architect Álvaro Siza. Here, in 2019, Casa do Cinema Manoel de Oliveira was inaugurated, an exhibition space that hosts a permanent collection dedicated to this patriarch of Portuguese cinema (including an honorary Golden Lion received in 2004 at Venice and a multi-screen installation featuring the beginning of Non, ou a Vã Glória de Mandar, 1990) on the first floor and temporary exhibitions on the ground floor (in the past, it has featured Agnès Varda and Straub-Huillet). The prohibitive ticket price (€24) and its location deep outside the tourist centre make visiting the exhibition feel more like a pilgrimage than a happening or a coincidence – an experience that, from the outset, demands a certain effort from visitors.

Inside, three rooms are connected by a corridor lined with “24 digital self-portraits,” either printed or displayed alternatively as a looping slideshow on an iPhone – IFaune, as Godard would say – like a collection of mini-slides. This collision of the ages of technology and imagery asserts itself as one of the exhibition’s guiding principles: from the first gouaches painted in adolescence to the playful selfies from his final years, a strange continuity characterizes Godard’s work, in which this mania for being contemporary at all costs merges with the desire to constantly lighten his device, gradually removing all that is unnecessary to reach, like a rocket nose cone, the essence. Thus, his final video essays – like the extraordinary Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: “Phony Wars” / Film Announcement of the Film That Will Never Exist: “Drôles de guerres” (2023), a film riddled with silences and voids – reveal at last what was there from the start: an inclination toward stillness. It took Godard a lifetime to close the loop, retracing his own steps toward a form of plasticity that dispenses with the alibis and props of the cinematic medium. No surprise, then, that at just 17 years old, the future author of Pierrot le Fou (1965) had painstakingly copied down the famous phrase by Maurice Denis, turning it into a sort of motto: “Remember that a painting – before being a warhorse, a nude woman, or some anecdote or other – is basically a plane surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.”

Was Godard precocious? Let’s say that in his artistic journey, major ruptures (first and foremost, May ‘68) coexisted with immutable landmarks. Therefore, bringing together his early pictorial work, scattered across the homes of his mighty genealogical tree (the Monod family was a respectable clan), is more than just an antiquarian or geeky endeavour – it is, in fact, the fundamental gesture that allows certain misunderstandings to dissipate. Two rooms stand face to face, illustrating this dialectic between all that changed in Godard following his politicization and all that was already there, waiting to resurface when summoned. One of the few exhibits not belonging to him is the famous painting by Gérard Fromanger, a superstar painter of the ‘60s-‘70s who combined consumerism critique with a poetic pop impulse: much like here, in Le Rouge, where the stability of the blue-white-red tricolour seems to give way to a metaphorical seepage, with red turning into liquid, i.e. into a trail of blood.

In those years, Godard was just beginning to embark on his political-reflexive chapter; he was still basking in a kind of artistic jet-set, a mastermind who also acted as a barometer of artistic cool; his thinking had not yet reached the point of vexing or alienating. Through a few collages – a French flag that, like Fromanger’s, turns into a bloody puddle; a “postcard” image of a landscape over which he scrawled in marker: “Cuba, a territory [free] of illiteracy” – the room succeeds in anchoring this newfound interest in politics, explored through written work, graphic inscription. The exhibition could just as well have processed certain shots from his films that, from the beginning, manifested this inclination toward scripturality, but it chose to avoid this particular terrain: his cinematic oeuvre. The radical gesture of this decentralization, however, is far from unique. A work recently reissued in France, VOX JLG, written by researcher Paule Palacios-Dalens, puts forth a hypothesis that can help in understanding the exhibition as a shift of emphasis from Godard’s films to all the visual work surrounding and containing them. The author writes: “Filmmaker and typographer: these two professions meet in a shared function – putting text into images, whether by serving it, adapting it, interpreting it, or composing it. […] Godard’s graphic contribution is not limited to mere striking appearances: title cards and credits, close-ups of newspaper lines and store signs, all forms of on-screen writing, the omnipresence of books. His graphic contribution is the art of a mise-en-page unique to cinema itself – it is the establishment of film as a book.”

This intuition of Godard’s films as mise-en-page rather than mise-en-scene only radicalized over time, as his works increasingly embraced stillness, collage, and pictorialism – until every trace of movement evaporated entirely in the aforementioned Phony Wars. In this sense, the exhibition is doubly conditioned – a simultaneous culmination and point of origin – a dynamic facilitated by the construction of Godard’s oeuvre as a Möbius strip. It could just as well be subtitled not so much Materials as The True Face of his creation. This idea is evident from his earliest artistic attempts – undeniably juvenile and ecstatic. A letter sent to Paul Valéry, accompanied by illustrations for his poem The Graveyard by the Sea, was part of a book project that, in retrospect, clearly signals Godard’s passionate, almost mystical, devotion to the cultural act. These early experiments already displayed an extraordinary confidence in aesthetic judgment. From a portrait of his sister, where the facial lines are composed of words – reminiscent of Apollinaire and other Surrealists – to playful imitations of shapes, volumes, and colours in the manner of Mondrian or Kandinsky, young Godard’s work, sometimes signed under the pseudonym IAM, represents an initial synthesis of an emerging artistic universe. Additional references would accumulate over time: from Goya to Matisse (La Blouse roumaine appears as a small digital reproduction on one of the walls) to the tutelary shadow of Nicolas de Staël, with his studies in red-blue-white-black, oscillating between total abstraction and figurative. But these influences did not dramatically alter the coordinates of a vision that already seemed operational; they merely guided it toward maturity.

Theorist Thierry De Duve once wrote in an essay: “After Duchamp, being an artist is easy; being a painter or sculptor, infinitely harder.” Godard seems to have spent his entire career wrestling with the torturous process of becoming an artist – of fully embracing the artist’s status. This need to measure himself not against cinema in particular (he grew increasingly insistent in rejecting film as a cinephile “game of mirrors”) but against art, in general, is nowhere more visible than in the workbooks that make up the final – and most expansive – room of the exhibition. Some are detailed, others more succinct (some, like the more recent The Image Book / Le Livre d’image, nearly merge with the resulting film, which feels like a direct translation from page to screen). These notebooks allow for a reconsideration of his cinematic oeuvre in a new light. They are not just conventional preparatory documents – the early buds from which films would blossom (though, of course, they are that as well). They are, undoubtedly, works in their own right. There is no aestheticizing impulse here, no attempt to ossify them into high culture artefacts. Rather, the exhibition follows its own implicit but evident logic, positioning the notebooks as the living matrix of this cinema. As critic Cyril Neyrat wrote in a text dedicated to the exhibition: “The hypothesis proposed here is that the place and form of origin, for Godard the filmmaker, is the notebook.”

Filled with all sorts of auxiliary documents – such as the legendary Cahiers du cinéma issue No. 300, whose layout was entirely entrusted to Godard, transforming it into a typographic montage – this room reveals the filmmaker’s practice as an ongoing process of reflection, a continuous, if torturous, effort to give visible form to the workings of intellectual creation. The film as an object is thus desacralized, reduced to the status of a mere realization of the project – a by-product among others, born of the artist’s egalitarian vision. Paule Palacios-Dalens also noted: “If typography’s primary function is to make text visible, then Godard’s underlying pursuit – regardless of his chosen medium (video, paper, or film) – is related to painting: how to represent thought, and what colour to give it (both politically and pictorially).”

Though it is always theoretically and practically justified to remind us that cinema is a collective art form, the exhibition inevitably illustrates a counter-credo: the solitude of the artist-filmmaker at work – at the editing table, or, more simply, before the pages of his notebook. All forms of expression – writing, painting, typography, cinema – collapse here into a totalizing praxis that dissolves any pointless boundaries between word and image, movement and stillness.

The exhibition also includes some surprises that go deeper than a mere anecdote. In fact, one of its strengths is its ability to transform every newly uncovered trace of Godard into a meaningful piece of the puzzle. Such is the case with printed emails – scattered thoughts sent to his usual collaborators, a congratulatory message to Bruno Dumont for his film Jeanne (“Péguy will be pleased!”), a Dadaist wordplay addressed to actress Sara Adler, and so on. These fragments mark Godard’s seamless transition, without remorse, into the democratic world of the Inbox, as well as his playful desire to keep up with the times – to always catch us off guard. Another easter egg turns out to be perhaps the most moving section of the exhibition: a reconstruction of the artist’s workspace, revealing a disarmingly humble arsenal of tools – markers, scissors, pens, glue sticks, the inevitable cigar, and, at the centre, an iPhone displaying an image of a donkey. Far from being a Disneyland peek into the artist’s studio, this melancholic piece creates an intimate proximity to the departed filmmaker. It brings us back to the argument at hand: a cinema conceived as concrete labour, as a tangible act of assemblage, as thinking-with-the-hands. Godard’s entire cinema resides in these common tools, which here, definitively, inscribe the promise of unseen and yet-to-be-created fragments of his oeuvre.

The exhibition begins with an obligatory nod to the patron of the venue, Oliveira – another filmmaker who took care to shape his own posterity, as seen in his intimate documentary Visita ou Memórias e Confissões, shot in his home in the early 1980s and intended for posthumous release, which happened in 2016. For this small subsection, the curators referenced a 1993 dialogue between Godard and Oliveira published in Libération, alongside a photograph by Roland Dumas. It was in this conversation that Oliveira uttered a phrase that would haunt Godard so persistently that he later included it in Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988): “This is what I love about cinema in general: a saturation of magnificent signs bathed in the light of their absence of explanation.”

The tour ends with a video installation featuring sheer curtains filtering Godard’s handwritten text, as it appears flickering in Le Livre d’image. The marker lines become incantations, and hope – one of Godard’s favourite words – floats beyond the walls, outside. Like a contradictory spirit – something between a gentle teacher and a distant guru – Godard watches over the place.

Keeping Tale of Current Times is on view at the Casa do Cinema Manoel de Oliveira in Serralves until May 18, 2025.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.