In the gardens that flank the Casa do Cinema Manoel de Oliveira (CCMO), sounds of excitement fill the clear sky. A few minutes later, a group of teenagers joyfully parade by, unaware that, nearby, another teenager illustrates Le Cercle de famille. Ou impressions d’ensemble [The Family Circle. Or Impressions of the Whole]. This is one of the first cahiers of a jeune garçon called Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022), dating from 1947, a satire against family and the bourgeoisie, which Godard was kind enough to gift to his parents for Christmas. As any good antibourgeois, he was born in a wealthy Parisian neighbourhood, into an ultra-bourgeois and protestant well-to-do family. He was the second child of Paul Godard, a doctor, and Odile Monod, whose father Julien Monod was a prominent French banker and a man of erudite culture. Since his grandfather was an anti-Semite and a supporter of the Vichy regime, little Jean-Luc grew up rooting for the Third Reich and suffered with the capitulation of the Nazis in El Alamein, in Egypt. This is told so flippantly in Richard Brody’s Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, it is as if we were talking about his football club’s defeat (it is interesting to think about this considering the way in which Godard insistently evoked the Holocaust in all his work). Four years after his birth, his family moved to Switzerland, where Jean-Luc said he had experienced an idyllic childhood, surrounded by erudition, but also sports and physical activity. Le Cercle de famille, which contradicts this story and where he portrays himself being attacked by his family, is part of this exhibition curated by the collective Au Contraire. In chronological order – from 1940 to 2022, the year the filmmaker decided to resort to assisted dying in Rolle, Switzerland, where he had been living for decades –, we follow Godard’s hitherto unknown path as a visual artist. Most of the material (found in other people’s spaces, since the Great Archivist of the History of Cinema was never an archivist of his own memories) came as a surprise for the curators themselves. There is a room dedicated to the 1940s, featuring the cahiers, with paintings, gouaches, Indian ink on paper and copious annotations/citations. In the larger room, we find his work from 1960 to 2022, composed of various work notebooks related to the pre-production, filming and even post-production (Godard ‘continued’ his films even after they had been concluded, by making collages and taking notes) of the films he did shoot and the projects that never materialised. In them we also find scattered thoughts that would in some cases be incorporated into his films – think of Histoire(s) du Cinéma [(Hi)story(ies) of Cinema]. If in the beginning of his career, these notebooks served as referential maps for the films to be shot, in his final years, they constituted the films themselves, thoroughly detailing their meticulous anatomy.

The first notebook that we know of is called Peinture par IAM [Paintings by IAM], from 1940 (he was only ten years old at the time!), a series of ten paintings where figurative art, abstractionism and geometric art live alongside each other playfully. It was his older sister Rachel, an artist and teacher, who introduced him to painting and abstractionism in its many forms, especially the work of Nicolas de Staël (which supposedly was Godard’s inspiration for the colour of Pierrot, le fou [Pierrot, the Fool], from 1965). The colours of Peinture par IAM were a foretaste of those found in the films In Praise of Love (2001), Filme Socialisme [Socialism Film] (2010) and Goodbye to Language (2014). There is a text accompanying these paintings, where Godard draws on a sentence by Pascal (‘How vain is painting, which is admired for reproducing the likeness of things whose originals are not admired’) to reflect on the very nature of image (‘Colourful images or paintings only exist in relation to those who look at them and the so-called pictorial relationship is always intentional’). This technique of citation and reappropriation would be exhaustively used in his filmic work, as his old and profusely scribbled editions of Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus) and Pascal (Thoughts) make clear.

Le Cercle de famille, a pamphlet filled with humour and self-irony – qualities that also apply to his filmography and that have never been properly analysed, since Godard took himself less seriously than his detractors claimed – was conceived after Godard left Nyon (1946) to study in Paris, where he prepared for his exams in engineering (!). But by then cinema had already made an appearance: a keen reader of La Revue du cinema (forebearer of Cahiers du Cinéma) and a patron of the French Cinémathèque and the Club du Quartier Latin (in whose magazine La Gazette du cinéma he published his first texts), he had also started writing film scripts. A sample of his first script is shown at this exhibition (an adaptation of the novel Aline, by Ramuz). He ended up failing his exams in 1948 and going back to Switzerland. After finally passing his exams he went back to Paris the following year, where he applied to the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques (IDHEC), the most renowned French film school, but was rejected. He then enrolled in Ethnology at the Sorbonne, but he quickly gave up, being committed to becoming a writer. In December of 1950, he left Paris once more to avoid being drafted for the war in French Indochine. At a time when his parents’ marriage had already broken down, he joined his father and sister Véronique in New York, where they embarked on a long boat journey through Central and Southern America. Not much is known about this trip, since he never wanted to talk about it, but according to those closest to him (François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette), it changed him profoundly. He returned quiet and circumspect. According to Collin McCabe (author of Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy), the trip ended because his father Paul Godard was no longer willing to support him financially. After trying to make money prostituting himself in Copacabana, Jean-Luc returned to Paris, where he started to write for Cahiers du Cinéma and played the protagonist of Présentation ou Charlotte et son steak, his friend Eric Rohmer’s first short film. The parental portraits by Godard shown at CCMO (both oil paintings from 1947), removed as they are from any realistic imperative, indicate, in their distinct approaches, the equally distinct facets of his relationship with each parent. Odile Monod’s portrait, in its depiction of a delicate sleeping beauty, but also in its warm colours and round forms, is a definite clue to the understanding and tenderness that he always received from his mother. A childish, even whimsical environment of great candour dominates the canvas, which interestingly enough is not negated by the dark background; her expression is as compassionate as Mary’s, the Mother of all mothers. By contrast, the portrait of Paul Godard (name of a character from the 1980 film Every Man for Himself, a filmmaker estranged from his ex-wife and daughter) stands out for its deliberately deconstructed figuration, harsh and quick lines, and choice of colour – brown and bright red prevail –, which expresses the distance between the painter and his subject. A composition where the dark background is at times unsettling and at others malignant, and where the facial physiognomy (compressed lips, inquisitive gaze and authoritarian nose), is angular – as opposed to Odile’s, which is rounder – and has something monstrous or bestial about it.

Interestingly, this painting bears some resemblance to his self-portrait, visible at the entrance of the exhibition, where Godard distorts a selfie taken with a cell phone (a type of digital image that he used a lot), by drawing and painting over it. Another five oil paintings, also focussing on the family milieu, further develop these motifs, either diverging from them or expanding on them. They are united by the prominent use of colour and the alternation between a proximity and a distance from the figurative model, even if they are portraits – think of La petite fille aux nattes [The Little Girl with Braids], whose multicoloured dots, evoking geometric abstractionism, compose the silhouette of his sister Véronique. But the abstractionist influence could be seen before that. Every year, at his parents’ wedding anniversary, Godard would recite the famous poem ‘Le Cimetière Marin’, by Paul Valéry, a close friend of Godard’s grandfather Julien. In 1943, at only thirteen years old, Godard illustrated verses by Valéry (who taught him Latin), creating an interesting pictorial series. Besides two portraits (one of them of Valéry himself), abstractionism (sometimes featuring some cubist motifs) acquired a renewed originality and boldness, exuberant forms and colours, with its latent marine environment.

In the Autumn of 1952, after a visit to the cash register of the magazine Cahiers, Godard went back to Switzerland, where his mother found him a job in television. A new theft – this time it was the TV’s safe – resulted in a few days in prison, which only came to an end thanks to his father’s intervention. He had him committed to a psychiatric clinic. His mother came to his rescue once more, and by the end of the year, Godard was living with her. That Christmas, he met Jean-Pierre Laubscher, Odile’s lover, eighteen years younger than her and only three years older than Godard himself. Laubscher, an Engineering student and aspiring writer, was working on the gigantic Grande Dixence dam. He found Godard a job (first as a bricklayer, later as a telephone operator). This was the premise behind his first short film, Operation Concrete (shot in the mid-1950s). It portrayed – the documentary style of the film was sabotaged by its poetic voice over – the construction of what was then the highest dam in the world. In 1954, Odile died tragically in a motorcycle accident after a violent discussion with her son Claude. When Jean-Luc showed up at his mother’s funeral in Lausanne, the Monod family barred him from entering. They had not forgiven him for stealing the original Valéry editions and a Renoir painting from the family’s collection so he could support himself in Paris. In 1956, back in the city, Godard showed a producer a script (that was never used) entitled… Odile (based on the character Ottilie from Goethe’s Elective Affinities).

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