The spirit of the French New Wave is alive with the short films at the Cannes Film Festival this year. Leos Carax’s love for Jean Luc Godard cinema is no secret, and it feels fitting that the two filmmakers both debuted their short films this year. Jean Luc Godard’s final film Scenarios premiered as part of Cannes Classics and Carax made his return to the the festival with his short film C’est Pas Moi after winning the Best Director award for Annette. Godard and Carax are both attempting to make personal films while juxtaposing images, abstractions, music, narrative, and documentary into short art films that hope to serve as somewhat of a statement on the artist’s life. Scenarios is explicitly declared as a concluding statement on Godard’s life, while C’est Pas Moi (or It’s Not Me) attempts to answer the question “where are you at, Leos Carax?”
Godard finished Scenarios in the final hours of his life, and like the best of Godard’s work it seamlessly blends the personal and the political. Godard continues his tradition of postmodern recontextualizations of his own place within cinema history, with Historie(s) du Cinema and The Image Book being clear predecessors. Scenarios is an 18 minute long film essay followed by an interview with Godard where describes a second unmade film and it serves as a worthy send off for a film legend.
Godard put the finishing touches on the film just one day before his assisted suicide at the age of 91 in 2022, and the haunting shadow of death looms over the film. The film reaches into the artist’s past work to approach the concept of dying through his own films – using scenes from Contempt and Band of Outsiders as well as clips from Howard Hawks, John Cassavetes, and other influential filmmakers to confront his looming death through montage. Both filmmakers reject the idea that cinema can be personally all-encompassing, and, Godard embraces the works of art that shaped him and uses their images to help tell his own story.
The second section of Scenarios is a nearly 40-minute unbroken take of Godard being interviewed about an unmade short that is similar in structure to the one we have just seen. He flips through a book of images that he has pasted onto white paper and physically manifests a flip book of montage theory – with each individual image taking contextual meaning from the surrounding pages. It is full of sad, brilliant, and reflective moments about the artist and his philosophies on film, but one moment stands out above the rest. While flipping through the pages of his book Godard mentions the way that you can feel the physical passing of time in the story while you are reading. He seems like he is about to make a definitive statement declaring that you cannot do that in film before stopping himself. “It hasn’t been done yet,” he says. Scenarios is a moving retrospective on the life of a great artist, and is full of hope for a future full of artists who will push the limits of filmmaking in the same way that he did.
For many fans of the French New Wave the last memory of Jean Luc Godard will not be Scenarios, but his appearance (or lack thereof) in Agnes Varda’s 2017 film Faces Places. In the new documentary about Varda’s husband Jacques Demy that also premiered at Cannes Classics this year, Godard appears in an archival interview heaping praise on the singular vision of his friends and Demy’s iconoclastic blend of fantasy and realism. But after agreeing to do an interview with Varda for Faces Places he refused to come out of his house, simply leaving a note on his front window and bringing Varda to tears. Godard’s cinematic legacy is full of contradictions and Scenarios is a continuation of his artistic mystique – though regardless of his artistic intent what he did to Varda is undeniably the mark of an asshole (or “dirty rat” as she more eloquently put it.)
Godard ends Scenarios with a reading of a Jean-Paul Sartre quote, “Using a horse to illustrate that a horse is not a horse is less efficient than using a non-horse to illustrate that a horse is not a horse.” The existentialist’s quote is a representation of the big ideas that have dominated Godard’s work as an artist and a reflection of his complexities as a person and an artist. There is no inherent personal truth to be found in cinema, only a distorted reflection, and as much as we may be inclined to take this final piece of film as a work of self-portraitry there is always going to be more to the story. Especially with Godard. After reading off the quote he ends the film by looking directly into the camera and saying “okay,” a sad ending to the short that feels as much of a moment of acceptance of death as it does a sadness for the last piece of artistic expression he will be able to put out into the world.
Carax’s C’est Pas Moi follows in the tradition of late-period Godard in many ways, premiering the day after Scenarios in what feels like a carrying of the torch moment. Carax also recontextualizes his previous films, with Denis Lavant reprising his role as Monsieur Merde and Baby Annette reprising her role as Baby Annette, while poetically searching for some form of personal revelation through image making and montage. The film centers on the question “where you at Leos Carax?,” and the title of the film is an immediate indication that he feels incapable of fully answering it. Like Godard, he too questions the idea that a film could be wholly representative of a person’s life. Still, he searches for answers and meditates on the future of the form through a mix of cinema history, personal stories, and fiction.
He has been more experimental with film form than almost every other filmmaker with his scale and budgets, but still struggles with the question of where the medium goes from here that seems to be plaguing many filmmakers lately. He harkens back to a time where grips followed actors while pushing camera carts and audiences thought the eyes of God were following the characters, comparing it to the relative meaninglessness of a boy following his girlfriend around with a camera. What now when we all have the power of a camera in our hand?
He interrogates the history of film to lay bare his frustrations and anxieties, showing Muybridge’s horse and the Lumieres’ train as if to wonder whether we are capable of shocking and transporting audiences in the way they used to be. He laments that images have become so ubiquitous and unceremonious, wondering if there is something the eye of the camera has lost that needs to be reclaimed. Though he uses Godardian form to get his point across, and his ideas of oversaturation and cinematic beauty are similar to Scenarios and The Image Book, there is an unmistakable difference between the two approaches. While Godard looks both backwards and forward Carax mostly keeps his eyes trained on the past – examining how his influences made him into the artist that he is. And while Godard’s approach to his film essays has been jarring, Carax is poetic and ruminative – stopping to reflect on his father and daughter while delving into his cinematic influences.
Cannes is undoubtedly the best place to be debuting a film like C’est Pas Moi, as the names and images of New Wave legends adorn the Croisette and the legacy of the filmmakers are revered. It’s no surprise that Carax left the theater while smoking a cigarette to rapturous applause, with Denis Lavant and the puppet Baby Annette on either side of him. But as the selections at Cannes become more mainstream and Americanized it is exciting to see an artist like Carax still bring the house down for a film like C’est Pas Moi – where the incredible post credit sequence was also met with thunderous applause. Carax shies away from the public eye and is somewhat of a mystery. Even his name is a pseudonymic anagram. And much like Godard his attempt at explicit self-reflection is deliberately obfuscating. Though the answer to “where you at Leos Carax?” may be just as unclear after watching the film, C’est Pas Moi is one of the most personal, exciting, poetic, and arresting films at the Cannes Film Festival in 2024 and is a worthy companion to Jean Luc Godard’s final film.