Opinions all agree that the whole of Godard’s work is permeated by a deep longing and an attraction for the past, just short of resentment. (…) Voyage(s) en Utopie expressly boasted of its intention to reassemble the pieces of an enterprise that never went beyond the modeling stage, beyond its design in miniature. The trip here was a return back, and the utopia was perhaps nothing more than a ruined Arcadia of which the subsequent models of Collage(s) de France testified renunciation. And yet seeing these models again in an exhibition, stacked in a vague semblance of abandonment, I thought that these volumes made of cardboard retouched with gouache, of glued objects and miniature screens secretly comprised the ideal fulfillment of the enterprise. The models were true collages, between an architectural project and small combine paintings that would not have been cast off by a Rauschenberg to whom Godard alludes at the time of the painter’s retrospective at Mamac in Nice (see the press conference at Cannes in 1997 in the Histoire(s) du cinéma DVD edited by Gaumont). But it is precisely at this stage of a provisional conclusion, perhaps intimately experienced by Godard as provisional, that Voyage(s) en Utopie makes its sad return, meaningfully placed in the center of the room “Avant-hier” with a certain kind of solemnity, like a display of painful regret. It is in the extent of this remorse that I could see once again the particular form of Godard’s utopia, which was often expressed in the desire to turn back, to look back, like no other art or other spiritual activity but film allowed him to do: “Only film allows Orpheus to turn around without killing Eurydice” (Histoire(s) du cinéma, episode 2A, Seul le cinéma).

Dominique Païni, Souvenirs de Voyage en Utopie. Note sur une exposition désoeuvrée