The Legacies of Jean-Luc Godard

14. Godard’s Utopia(s) or the Performance of Failure

217 14 14 Godard’s Utopia(s) or the Performance of Failure André Habib after four years of intensive labour, after much talk and many postponements , Jean-Luc Godard’s long-awaited Pompidou exhibition Voyage(s) en utopie, JLG, 1946–2006, À la recherche d’un théorème perdu opened on May 11, 2006, and was met with skepticism and dismay even among his friends in the milieu. Antoine de Baecque would write in Libération: “Godard est une catastrophe et il en est fier.”1 Crowds gathered to witness what a great majority of critics and the press too quickly labelled an utter failure.2 Fig. 14.1 “Ce qui peut être montré ne peut être dit”(What can be shown cannot be said), Ludwig Wittgenstein. (Courtesy Jean-Luc Godard, Voyage[s] en utopie [2006], Centre Georges-Pompidou [view of the exhibit]. Photo by Michael Witt) Formalist Legacies: Narratives and Exhibitions 218 The visitor was welcomed by two olive trees (bought at great cost apparently) and a Wittgensteinian sentence written by hand directly on the wall: “Ce qui peut être montré ne peut être dit” (What can be shown cannot be said) (see Fig. 14.1). Side by side, there were two reproductions of the same Fragonard painting (Le verrou [1774–78], in which a young man is putting the lock on a door in order to prevent the young women he is with from escaping)3 and a black and white image taken from the 1939 version of The Cat and the Canary4 with—appropriately—Paulette Goddard entering a room (through the back) where a horrifying character is hiding (in the front). As very often in Godard’s work (Histoire[s] du cinéma for instance), one simply needs to enumerate and describe the elements that come into play in his composition in order to set in motion the web of their possible interpretations. He sets up here an elaborate interspace of reflection on the confrontation between showing and saying, revealing and hiding (The Secret Behind the Door could have been the subtitle of the montage); a young girl enters a room as another tries to escape (shot/counter-shot)—as we are about to enter a room (Godard seems to say “abandon all hope, ye who enter here”).5 There was another door (in red metal), placed against the wall, set alongside wood panels, with four details from famous portraits of female subjects (Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring [c. 1665], da Vinci’s Madonna [c. 1490], his Portrait of Cecilia Galleran [1489–90], and La Tour’s The Cheat [1620s], in a Warburgian visual montage. Before entering the gallery proper, pinned on the wall, one could also read this warning sign (next to a crossed-out image of the initial exhibition project) (see Fig. 14.2): Le centre Pompidou a décidé de ne pas réaliser le projet d’exposition Collage(s) de France, archéologie du cinéma, d’après JLG, en raison de difficultés financières, techniques et artistiques qu’il présentait, et de la remplacer par un autre projet antérieurement envisagé par Jean-Luc Godard et intitulé Voyage(s) en utopie—Jean-Luc Godard 1946–2006. Ce second projet inclut la présentation partielle ou complète de la maquette de Collage(s) de France. JLG et Péripheria ont agréé la décision du Centre Pompidou6 . The baffled visitor who then entered the 1,100 square metres of the Galerie Sud, divided into three distinct spaces—Avant-hier (avoir été) (salle 2), Hier (avoir) (salle 3), Aujourd’hui (être) (salle 1)) (see Fig. 14.3)—was engulfed in a noisy, multi-layered, maze-like accumulation of quotidian objects (chairs, beds, tables, desks); writing on the walls and on the floor (an unattributed quote by Bergson, a verse by Cuban poet José Lezama Lima);7 film excerpts presented on television sets, iPods (a clip from The Searchers, inside one of the scale models), or plasma screens (in the room Hier, some of Godard’s mainly late-1960s and ’70s films [Vent d’Est, One Parellel Movie (with Godard’s Utopia(s) or the Performance of Failure 219 Fig. 14.2 “The exhibition Collage(s) de France, archéologie du cinéma, d’après JLG has been replaced by Voyage(s) en utopie—Jean-Luc Godard 1946–2006.”(Courtesy Jean-Luc Godard, Voyage[s] en...