Jehanne-Marie Gavarini

Art Department,

University of Massachusetts Lowell
Visiting Scholar,

Women’s Studies Research Center,

Brandeis University
gavarini@brandeis.edu

 

Review of: Voyage(s) en Utopie, Jean-Luc Godard 1946-2006, In Search of Lost Theorem. Paris: Pompidou Center, 11 May-14 Aug 2006.

 

Voyage(s) en Utopie, Jean-Luc Godard 1946-2006, In Search of Lost Theorem was presented at the Pompidou Center in Paris from May 11 to August 14, 2006. With this installation, Godard pushes the cinematic envelope a step beyond his legendary experimental aesthetic. Rather than offer a retrospective or traditional cinematographic exhibition, Voyage(s) en Utopie stands at the intersection between cinema and the visual arts. Faithful to Godard’s cinematic style, his museum piece does not pre-digest the filmmaker’s thoughts for his audience. Juxtaposed signs and symbols produce unexpected associations; combined, they form a gigantic puzzle. The viewer is expected to gather and decode a plethora of information in order to create an individualized mental montage. The exhibition uses strategies such as appropriation of imagery, found text, and film that have been championed by Godard since his early films. Although contemporary visual art is little quoted in Godard’s films, Voyage(s) en Utopie confirms that a two-way dialogue exists between Godard and other contemporary art. The poetry, revolutionary aesthetics, and political engagement of Godard’s films inspired numerous art practitioners. His influence on several generations of filmmakers, visual artists, and video artists is well documented. Correspondingly, Godard is clearly aware of developments in visual arts where strategies of appropriation are strongly rooted. From the cubists to Marcel Duchamp and Sherrie Levine, visual artists have endlessly quoted one another. Additionally, many visual artists such as Douglas Gordon or Matthias Müller have appropriated from cinema.¹ While the form of Voyage(s) en Utopie is not necessarily groundbreaking, the multiple meanings and associations found in this exhibition set Godard apart from present-day artists who use similar strategies only to reduce their comment on contemporary culture to one-liners.

 

Voyage(s) en Utopie was originally planned as a different show titled Collage(s) de France, archéologie du cinema, d’après JLG.² The former director of the Cinémathèque Française, Dominique Païni, who was the curator of Collage(s), explains that in the original show, space was meant to be “used to describe a temporal process, that of thought itself.” Païni adds:

 

In fact the visitor was invited to experience the time of a film’s conception in a new way: the time of “materialization” (to use JLG’s words), the time that passes between the phases of imagining and making, before arriving at the condensed time of the finished work, which is then painfully separated from its maker and swallowed up into the tomb of distribution and communication.

 

Voyage(s) en Utopie differs from Collage(s) de France. Here space is used not merely to provide the viewers with the experience of the duration of a film’s conception, but more as a mean to travel in time, give a material form to memory, and reify the history of cinema and culture. Godard’s shift from motion pictures to the presence and power of still objects in a museum setting appears to conjure up a desire to stop the forward motion of cinema. The filmmaker’s object-based installation is grounded in the material world, but like all installations it will cease to exist at the end of the show. A still frame in the history of motion pictures, Voyage(s) en Utopie provides a short pause in the filmmaker’s prolific sixty-year journey.

 

Despite having abandoned the original project, Godard refers to Collage(s) de France throughout Voyage(s) en Utopie. From the moment viewers enter the exhibition space, they are presented with the history and archeological strata of Voyage(s) en Utopie. On the wall immediately behind the entrance turnstile Godard places an initial placard indicating that the Pompidou Center decided to cancel the exhibition because of artistic difficulties. Two other reasons (financial and technical difficulties) are also mentioned but crossed out by Godard’s hand along with a photo of one of the scale models for the original show. The same placard is seen in several other spots within the exhibition. Although no further explanation is provided, the viewers get a sense of the built up tensions and difficult relationships that can develop between artists, curators, and institutions. The crossed out text undoubtedly signifies Godard’s disagreement with the Pompidou Center’s official version of why Collage(s) was abandoned. By exposing the history and baggage behind the show, this rebellious and ever-questioning artist refuses to abide by the rules. When he reveals what took place behind the scene, Godard goes against the expected sanitized façade usually presented to museum audiences.

 

Voyage(s) consists of three rooms, but viewers are not told what order they should follow while visiting the exhibition. Their intuition alone guides them through the show. The first room, Salle -2: Avant Hier (“Room -2: The Day Before Yesterday”) is dedicated to Collage(s) de France. Here Godard shows the remains of the first project: models and models of models for nine separate rooms along with some full-scale objects intended to be in the original show. Although frequently shown in architecture exhibitions, models in the context of an art installation are more of a surprise. This is particularly true because these models are roughly finished and are not presented in a glass case, as they would be in traditional displays. Their integration within the installation introduces the idea of a story. But Godard’s narratives are typically nonlinear and their decoding requires nondiegetic information. The presence of the models, and in particular the use of several scales of models, creates a mise en abîme that elicits questions about the nature of the objects presented; viewers may wonder whether they are actually looking at Collage(s) or Voyage(s). Furthermore, are the models actual art objects or simple devices documenting the history of the exhibition? This approach transforms the status of the abandoned project from rough draft to work of art. It creates confusion between originals and their copies, art objects and their representation; and destabilizes the nature of conventional exhibitions.

 

Figure 1: View of the exhibition “Voyage(s) en utopie, Jean-Luc Godard 1946-2006, à la recherche d’un théorème perdu.” © Jean-Claude Planchet, Centre Pompidou 2006

 

The difficulties Godard encountered with the abandoned project are visually and perceptually emphasized by the unstable environment he creates in this room. The models are stacked, sometimes precariously. Remnants of floorboards and metal fences scattered on the ground produce uneven floor covering on which the viewers are walking. Contrasting with the extraordinary aesthetic character of recent films like Notre Musique (2004), this show aligns itself with the anti-aesthetic of contemporary visual art.³ It derives from the unfinished look that prevails in many contemporary art installations. In particular, Godard borrows from Christian Boltanski’s signature style by making visible large black webs of electrical cables on the gallery’s white walls.⁴ Voyage(s) also resembles the visual and conceptual wreckage of Ilya Kabakov’s L’Homme qui s’est envolé dans l’espace, (The Man Who Flew into Space) an installation presented at the Pompidou Center in the late nineteen eighties. In this installation, Kabakov’s fictional character supposedly flew through the ceiling of his apartment leaving behind a wrecked environment in which sits the contraption he built to escape communism and his reality. Similarly, in Voyage(s) trash and debris are strewn around the floor. Unfinished and partially painted walls reveal the guts of the show: DVD players and other electronic devices, layers of sheetrock, and tangles of wires and cables. Enclosed behind a fence, the objects planned for Collage(s) are not accessible to viewers. To emphasize the idea of prohibition further, Godard uses a clip from The Old Place (1999), a film commissioned by the New York Museum of Modern Art that he co-directed with Anne-Marie Miéville.⁵ This clip features the opening shot from Citizen Kane (1941). Welles’s notorious “No Trespassing” sign is immediately followed by a clip of another sign also shot through a metal fence: “Défense d’entrer, propriété de l’État” (“No Trespassing, State Property”). This juxtaposition of signs suggests the ban of Collage(s) de France by the Pompidou Center, a state-funded institution.

 

Beyond this jab at the hosting museum, Room -2 looks at cinema as metaphor. In one of the models, a short text tells the story of a woman who finds drawings she created as a little girl; fifty years later she realizes that the drawings match a series of quotes she has gathered throughout her life. The story concludes that such a moment corresponds with the end of the battle between the image and the spirit of the text.⁶ To give form to the story, Godard creates an object that resembles a Mutoscope, one of the flip-card devices that preceded the film projector. A full-scale replica sits behind the metal fence along with other objects intended to be in Collage(s). This visual element creates free association between memory and the Mutoscope, the mechanisms of the psyche and cinema. Room -2 itself stands for Collage(s); it represents what has been repressed, the unconscious of Voyage(s). Cinema’s history is embedded in our psyche; it performs the role of social unconscious.

 

Further examining the social unconscious, responsibilities, and guilt, another model addresses the European powers’ lack of involvement in the War in the Former Republic of Yugoslavia. After For Ever Mozart and Notre Musique, this model denounces imperialist ideology and ethnic cleansing. Wood fences that bring to mind imagery from old military forts cut through the space. An American flag overlaid with an eagle is juxtaposed with a sepia-toned photograph of a Native American. Other flags from the European Union hang on a metal fence whose stakes are driven into images of Bosnia. A miniature drive-in theater projects a clip from Je vous salue Sarajevo (1993) on an iPod. This two-minute film was conceived as a video-letter from Godard to the inhabitants of Sarajevo. It denounces war, military power, and the European Union in a poetic and dramatic manner. Godard, who has dedicated a large part of his oeuvre to the examination of the politics of war and the denunciation of Nazism, condemns the passivity of viewers who watched the horrific war in Bosnia on screens designed for entertainment. The size of the projection signifies the minimal importance of the horrors of the war in the former Republic of Yugoslavia. Furthermore, it comments on the shrinking size of screens. With the digital revolution, the number of screens is growing at an exponential rate, but their increasingly smaller sizes diminish the impact of the images.

 

 

Figures 2 & 3: Views of the exhibition “Voyage(s) en utopie, Jean-Luc Godard 1946-2006, à la recherche d’un théorème perdu.” © Jean-Claude Planchet, Centre Pompidou 2006

 

Salle -2: Avant Hier connects with Salle 3: Hier (“Room 3: Yesterday”) via a tunnel with an electric train traveling back and forth. In Salle -2, the words “Avant Hier,” instead of being hyphenated as they are in standard French, are separated by a large space.⁷ This creates a visual division between these words and Godard’s subtitle for the room: Avoir Été. “Avant” (“before”) is stacked with “Avoir” (“to have”), and “Hier” (“yesterday”) with “Été” (“summer”). Thus, the words can be read as groups or as separate entities, creating several possible interpretations for this room’s title. Typical of Godard’s clever and playful language manipulations, this title’s basic interpretation, “The Day Before Yesterday” or “To Have Been,” is complicated by the separation and stacking of the words. Viewers can also understand this title as bringing together the concepts of “before” with “having” and “yesterday” with “summer” and with “the past.” In the next room, the visual division is even more obvious. A window cuts through the word Hier, separating it into two sets of letters, “Hi” and “Er,” neither of which constitutes a word in French. Recalling Godard’s numerous denunciations of totalitarian regimes and Nazism in particular, this author stood in front of the room’s title wondering if she was the only viewer who felt tempted to fill in the gap to create the word Hitler. The subtitle Avoir is also divided into two words, “A” and “voir,” by the same window.⁸ “Yesterday” equals “to have,” but viewers also understand that something that took place yesterday needs to be seen; most likely, Godard is referring to twentieth-century cinema. In this room, he introduces the filmmakers who have shaped his vision: for instance, Fritz Lang, whom he quoted in his elaborate Histoire(s) du cinéma, and, maybe more importantly, who plays the film director in Contempt (1963) while Godard holds the role of his assistant. The use of a clip from Orson Welles’s self-produced and unfinished epic Don Quixote is another reference to the impossibility of Collage(s). Godard uses many more clips from films, such as Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954), that he has quoted repeatedly in his own works. Excerpts by filmmakers who have been Godard’s role models, his friends, or collaborators such as Roberto Rossellini, Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Jean-Pierre Melville, and Jacques Becker among others attest to the extraordinary intellectual web formed by the Nouvelle Vague. Godard also includes sixteen clips and short films of his own work and that of Anne-Marie Miéville. These range from classical Godard like Weekend (1967), a provocative caricature of the life of the French middle class in the sixties, to Vrai Faux Passeport (2006), a film created for this exhibition that comments on the rating by critics of television and cinema. Godard, who appears increasingly concerned with historical memory and with the need for preserving his own oeuvre, lures his viewers with these teaser-clips. Their voyage might expand beyond the walls of the Pompidou Center and be prolonged by a trip to the cinemathèque, the movie theater, or the video store to explore further the dialogue he sets up between these fragments of films.

 

Figure 4: View of the exhibition “Voyage(s) en utopie, Jean-Luc Godard 1946-2006, à la recherche d’un théorème perdu.” © Jean-Claude Planchet, Centre Pompidou 2006

In Salle 1, Aujourd’hui, Godard recreates a contemporary home, including bedroom, kitchen, living room, and office. This room represents or documents life in today’s world. This is perhaps the most explicit or literal part of the exhibition. People walking on Beaubourg Street, which is on the east side of the Pompidou Center, appear included in the installation. Viewed through the window, they rush pass Godard’s sign “Aujourd’hui: Etre” (“Yesterday: To Be”) and enter his scenography; their mere presence under Godard’s placard makes them live material in this contemporary art installation. They are transformed into philosophical beings who exist within today’s world. On the west side of the large glass-enclosed space, the slightly opaque and partially open blinds reveal a group of homeless people living in tents and forming a tidy camp.⁹ Although not officially part of the exhibition, they are unofficially included in the show. Their presence is an uncomfortable reminder of the inequalities dividing museum audiences from street people.

 

 

Figure 5 & 6: Views of the exhibition “Voyage(s) en utopie, Jean-Luc Godard 1946-2006, à la recherche d’un théorème perdu.” © Jean-Claude Planchet, Centre Pompidou 2006

 

Like an open loft space, this imaginary home is subdivided into several living areas. Directly across the entrance to the room, two gigantic screens set horizontally on a tabletop broadcast French TV. In an interview with Christophe Kantcheff, Godard explains that the screens are presented horizontally because they are called flat screens. He adds that their flatness is a metaphor for the lack of depth of this apartment.¹⁰ Entering the room, Godard’s viewers will probably agree that

 

there is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you. Suddenly the TV reveals itself for what it really is: a video of another world, ultimately addressed to no one at all, delivering its images indifferently, indifferent to its own messages (you can easily imagine it still functioning after humanity has disappeared). (Baudrillard 50)

 

A typewriter, precariously resting behind the television screens, appears to have been violently hacked to pieces. Its bare parts and missing keys are a commentary on the rapid changes in technologies. With this object, Godard creates a nostalgic image for a time gone by, the time of the mechanical era that preceded the violence and speed of the digital revolution. The ubiquitous presence of new media in this contemporary environment is alarming, particularly in the bedroom. Behind soft pillows, the bed’s headrest is an LCD screen displaying a clip from Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (2001). Godard’s appropriation of this Hollywood film is in line with his relentless questioning of the politics of war and his examination of representations of violence in cinema. The clip also signifies not only the presence of cinema and of Hollywood in our dreams; it also graphically illustrates how images of wars haunt our sleeping hours and make a way into our unconscious.

 

Although it features some realistic elements, “Today’s” apartment is obviously a set. The general feeling of this home is emptiness; however, the center of the room is occupied by oversized scaffolding left lying on its side. This evokes Contempt‘s paint cans and ladders in Paul and Camille’s new and unfinished apartment. While the apartment was a sign of the young couple’s climbing up the social ladder and their access to the dream of modernity, their relationship was coming undone. In Voyage(s), the use of contemporary furniture makes the apartment look familiar to the viewers who casually sit on the bed or the sofa to rest or watch a film clip. In doing so, they become actors in Godard’s installation. His set becomes the mirror of their domestic space and personal lives. His comment on contemporary society interpellates the viewers directly: “Today’s homes are not safe nests, and your house itself is most likely a site of indoctrination.” Other details in the room add to Godard’s critique of the present era. On the living-room table, a letter scale weighs an envelope on which the viewers can read the words “plus jamais ça” (“never again”). Empty, the envelope weighs little on “Today’s” scale. This saying, often used to refer to the Holocaust, reminds the viewers that Europe closed its eyes once again during the war in the Former Republic of Yugoslavia. Two other phrases–“Les lendemains qui chantent and “L’appel de Stockholm“–reaffirm his long-term alignment with left-wing politics.¹¹

 

Figure 7: View of the exhibition “Voyage(s) en utopie, Jean-Luc Godard 1946-2006, à la recherche d’un théorème perdu.” © Jean-Claude Planchet, Centre Pompidou 2006

 

The kitchen area adds to the domestic atmosphere with its appliances and modern home décor. However, once the viewers get closer, they discover that pornographic images are the centerpiece of Godard’s table whose surface is another oversized flat-screen television. A Godardian pun, this tabletop features two versions (one short and the other longer) of x-rated films. A mound of lubricated flesh squirms on the screen while the individual human bodies suck, grab, and penetrate each other obsessively with little apparent pleasure. Consumers of objects, images, and flesh, Godard’s viewers are reminded of their affliction. Today’s culture keeps generating new and insatiable desires for its potential shoppers. Like processed foods and other commodities, pornographic images have entered contemporary homes. No more seen through peepholes, pornography has become one of the models that structure the human psyche. The inclusion of x-rated films adds to the cynicism of the exhibition. The utopia presented in Voyage(s) is clearly ironic. “Today’s” apartment represents the fake dreams offered by consumer culture. Godard has examined popular culture and scrutinized the role of cinema for several decades. Hence, while he packs thirty-one film clips in Avant-hier and Hier–the rooms that represent the past–Godard includes only five clips in Aujourd’hui. Besides the excerpts discussed above, he shows a clip from Barocco by André Téchiné, a filmmaker who has written about him in Cahiers du cinéma, and another from La Môme vert de gris, a film in which Eddie Constantine plays Lemmy Caution, the famous FBI agent that Godard recontextualized in Alphaville. Thus popular culture is taking center-stage in “Today’s” world while Godard’s films are noticeably absent from the present, on which they have barely left a trace.

 

Voyage(s) en Utopie continues Godard’s investigation of linear time. In Notre Musique the script declares repeatedly that “before” is “after.” In this installation, Godard takes his viewers from the present to the past and back, from Voyage(s) to Collage(s). Although he gives a semblance of chronology by numbering the rooms, their numbers are odd and non-sequential. Meaning only appears when solving the implied equation (-2 +3 =1) that translates into text: Avant-hier + Hier = Aujourd’hui (The Day Before Yesterday + Yesterday = Today). Godard, critical of an empty present, has poetically calculated a theorem ascribing today’s absolute value as less than yesterday’s. The Pompidou Center’s ban on Collage(s) amplifies the mathematical metaphor. Godard presents the loss of the original show as taking away from yesterday’s cultural heritage. Devoid of Godard’s films, “Today” might consider itself number one, but it remains an impoverished experience that is marked negatively. The lack of representation of Godard’s oeuvre in today’s room makes him a phenomenon of the past. Thus, beyond his obvious bitterness at the Pompidou Center, Godard provides a nostalgic view of a time when he received more social recognition. Collage(s) could have brought Godard’s public image up to date and strengthened it, but instead viewers are presented with Voyage(s), its truncated version. Godard does not merely tackle the French institutional and social system. His use of still objects is an attempt to suspend linear time. It is a buffer against cinema’s fleeting images and its time-based constraints. Viewers, who weave in and out of the three separate rooms, move forward and back; they stop at their own leisure. Like the hands of a clock, their movement within the space keeps track of time, but does not go solely in one direction. Traveling through the exhibition, they draw their own map according to the visual and conceptual connections they make. In this battle against time, the viewers’ movement in space counters the forward motion of cinema. Choosing to exhibit static objects, and taking refuge within the stillness of the museum, the filmmaker could be warning us about cinema in the digital age. Interestingly, Voyage(s) surveys the history of cinema but stops just before the contemporary era. The aging filmmaker does not give a sense of his beliefs in or of his vision for the future of cinema. Is he telling the world that the history of cinema stops with Godard? In Contempt, his set for Cinecittà proclaims an unexpected slogan in very large letters: “Il cinema è una invenzione senza avvenire.”¹² Could Godard have been anxious about the evolution of technology as early as 1963? Could he have foreseen that films would be viewed on iPods and cellular phones? Godard may be telling his viewers that cinema is now in need of seclusion, retreat, or protection, and that it will become necessary for filmmakers and their oeuvre to find sanctuaries outside movie houses.

 

Notes

 

1. For instance, Gordon’s installation 24 Hour Psycho (1993) slowed down Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho to make it last twenty-four hours. In Home Stories (1991), Matthias Müller appropriates Hollywood clips. The collaged piece reflects on the construction of femininity and confronts the audience with their own voyeurism.

 

2. The original title translates to “Collage(s) of France, archeology of the cinema, according to JLG.”

 

3. For further ideas on this concept, see Foster, particularly Rosalind Krauss’s essay, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.”

 

4. Noticeably, Boltanski is the only contemporary artist quoted by Godard in The Old Place, a film on the role of art at the end of the twentieth century.

 

5. Along with directing her own films, Anne-Marie Miéville has been Godard’s main collaborator since 1973. They have co-directed several films and she is the Art Director of Notre Musique.

 

6. “Pour elle le combat de l’image avec l’ange du texte était achevé.”

 

7. When hyphenated, these words mean “the day before yesterday.”

 

8. “Avoir” means “to have,” but “À voir” means “must be seen.”

 

9. A very controversial subject, these tents were distributed to homeless people in 2005 and 2006 by Médecins du Monde (Doctors of the World.) This health and human rights organization has been working to fight poverty and find housing for all for several decades. Médecins du Monde provided the tents as a temporary solution for homeless people in Paris. The goal was not only to give back some dignity to these people but also to make the problem of homelessness visible. Besides several acts of vandalism against the tents, the summer’s tourist season has brought many attempts from the city of Paris to get rid of the camps.

 

10. “Puisqu’on les appelle des écrans plats, je ne vois pas pourquoi on ne les mettrait pas à plat. Dans cette salle, on est effectivement dans la platitude. On a la cuisine, la chambre à coucher, la cuisine, le bureau, c’est plat. Il n’y a pas de profondeur” (Kantcheff).

 

11. The first phrase translates to “Toward Singing Tomorrows.” This is the title of Gabriel Peri’s autobiography. Peri was a communist leader who was executed by the Nazis in 1941. Full of idealism and passion, his last letter describes communism as a way of life that will bring happy days for the future. The second phrase translates to “The Stockholm Appeal,” which was a call against nuclear armaments that was signed by one hundred and fifty million people including Jean-Luc Godard in1950.

 

12. “Cinema is an invention with no future.”

 

Works Cited

 

• Baudrillard, Jean. America. London: Verso, 1988.
• Foster, Hal, ed. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Seattle: Bay, 1983.
• Kantcheff, Christophe. “Un entretien avec Jean-Luc Godard à propos de son exposition au Centre Pompidou: Je n’ai plus envie d’expliquer.’” Politis 29 Jun 2006. <http://www.politis.fr/article1760.html>.
• Païni, Dominique. “D’après JLG …” Jean-Luc Godard: Documents. Ed. Nicole Brenez and Michael Witt. Paris: Editions du Centre Pompidou, 2006.