KEEPING TALE OF CURRENT TIMES | JEAN-LUC GODARD - VISUAL WORK

For the first time, Jean-Luc Godard's career as a creator of still images is on view, ranging from his childhood to 2022. Most of Godard's visual works (paintings, drawings, notebooks, digital images), as well as family photographs taken by his mother Odile Monod, have never before been exhibited.

The title of the exhibition, ‘Tenant conte des temps actuels’, [Keeping tale of current times] is taken from Film annonce du film ‘Drôles de Guerre’ (1er Tournage) [Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: ‘Phony Wars’ (2022). ‘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 past shoots, while keeping tale of current times.’ The superimposition between Tenant conte / Tenant compte (Telling [a tale] / Keeping tale) combines notions of fabrication and of accuracy; imagination and description; invention and attention – in short, the requirements and resources of cinema in the face of reality.

In 1993, Jean-Luc Godard met Manoel de Oliveira for a major interview for Libération, appearing on the paper's cover on 4-5 September. In it, Oliveira uttered a phrase that haunted Godard's films and cinephiles ever since: ‘That's what I like about cinema in general: a saturation of magnificent signs bathed in the light of their lack of explanation.’ In 1998, Manoel de Oliveira dedicated a poem to Jean-Luc Godard, Yellow Dog, which ends with these lines: ‘a peerless cinema / called Godard.’ These literary exchanges culminate in a dialogue between films: Film Socialisme (2010) by Jean-Luc Godard can be seen as a response to Um Filme Falado (2003) by Manoel de Oliveira.

Exhibition organized by Serralves Foundation,

curated by Collectif Ô Contraire! for the Fondation Jean-Luc Godard

(Fabrice Aragno, Nicole Brenez, Jean-Paul Battaggia and Paul Grivas)