Scénario – The five notebooks by Jean‑Luc Godard

Scénario
The five notebooks by Jean‑Luc Godard

This boxset brings together, reproduced identically, the five Scenario notebooks by Jean‑Luc Godard, created between May 2019 and October 2021. The notebooks were printed and bound in July 2025 by Grafiche Milani, Segrate (Milan) in one thousand numbered copies.

Filmmaker Jean‑Luc Godard (1930‑2022) considered editing as an instrument of thought in service of all the arts. After completing The Image Book in 2018, he begins a new project, Scénario, which he believes will be his final film—and it indeed was. From this ultimate work, an open work where project and realization merge (“The scenario,” Godard said, “is written at the end”), five notebooks remain, five sketches for a film composed of images, painting, drawing, photography and texts cited or invented.

These notebooks are “paper films”: freed from cinema’s technical apparatus, Godard conceives them through displacements, pentimenti, repetitions, as a counterpoint to the themes developed in his work.
Between the completion of the film The Image Book (Special Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2018) and his voluntary death in September 2022, Jean‑Luc Godard attempted to create a project initially conceived as an unprecedented form combining theater, opera and cinema. Difficulties encountered with various partners, compounded by Godard’s growing fragility, necessitated a rescaling of Scenario: as cinema’s heavy machinery seemed increasingly difficult to mobilize each day, the preparatory notebooks became the only viable outcome of the project.

The creation of notebooks composed of collages, quotations, and assemblies is a frequent practice in Jean‑Luc Godard’s work. Mobilizing different manual and conceptual techniques—composition, fragmentation, erasure, strikethrough, additions and over-additions, supplements and pentimenti, approximation, hollowing out…—these are simultaneously research tools and the development of an original form of language. Between 2019 and 2021, Jean‑Luc Godard successively created these five notebooks for Scenario. Each new study represents the culmination of a stage in the quest for Scenario’s stakes.

Ghosts of a film that will never see the light of day, these notebooks are haunted by themes dear to him: fake news, monotheism, human comedy, convergence of images… From the fifth notebook was finally born, recorded in 2021: Exposé du film annonce du film “Scénario” where Jean-Luc Godard unveils, in a 36-minute long take, the dramaturgy of a film that will remain purely imaginary.

The notebooks were reproduced using exceptional technical means that contemporary printing allows, approaching as closely as possible the plastic qualities of the originals: strikethroughs, stains, textures, overprinting…

The boxset is completed by a booklet with English translations of the 5 notebooks by Michael Witt, accompanied by introductory texts by Dominique Païni, Nicole Brenez and Jean‑Paul Battaggia.