le studio d’orphée and the home-studio of new wave director jean-luc godard
Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Studio d’Orphée at Fondazione Prada, Milan
At Fondazione Prada, the fashion house’s home for contemporary art in Italy, there is not one, but two spaces that are dedicated to the late French-Swiss New Wave auteur, Jean-Luc Godard. One is the mirrored Cinema Godard, renamed during the summer of 2023, a year after his passing. The second is Le Studio d’Orphée, a version of his home studio in Rolle, Switzerland, recreated in the Milan exhibition space. Covered in layered Persian rugs, photos tacked to the wall, and a Dyson handheld vacuum tucked in a corner, the space, opened in 2019, is at once home and atelier, editing studio and creative sanctuary.
Le Studio d’Orphée, opened in 2019, is a sort of transposed version of Jean-Luc Godard’s studio in Rolle, Switzerland | all images © Agostino Osio – Alto Piano courtesy of Fondazione Prada
Jean-Luc Godard and the Nouvelle vague
Just last year, the American filmmaker Richard Linklater’s film Nouvelle Vague came out with a lighthearted retelling of the making of Godard’s debut feature film, Breathless. The 1960 film, memorable for Jean Seberg in the New York Herald Tribune shirt, put the former film critic on the map for his experimental approach to cinema. He went on to pursue over sixty years of filmmaking that resulted in the likes of Contempt (1963), Vivre sa vie (1962), and Pierrot le Fou (1965). His images were striking in their peculiarity, and his ideas could often be challenging. At Fondazione Prada, when they invited actress Juliette Binoche to speak, she reflected on her experience on Hail Mary, or Je vous salue, Marie (1985), in the cinema that held the director’s name. She didn’t shy away from the difficulties around working with the director, while at the same time lauding his impact on modern cinema.
Breathless (1960) put the former film critic on the map for his experimental approach to cinema
Finding Le Studio d’Orphée
Visitors who find time between visiting Fondazione Prada’s Damien Hirst or Louise Bourgeois masterpieces can climb the narrow stairs to the upper floor of the Sud Gallery and enter the intimate space that gave birth to the later works of the nouvelle vague, or French New Wave, icon. Entering the room, you have to pass through a tastefully unkempt room with a fold-out chair, a lamp resting on the table, and a director’s block in mid-swing. The walls have humbly tacked-up photos and other clippings that look as though they were taken out of the plastic sheaths of a photo album.
a look at Le Studio d’Orphée in Milan’s Fondazione Prada
Jean-Luc Godard’s many monitors
Inside the main ‘studio’ there are benches on the back wall where visitors can sit and look onto a version of the home studio once occupied by Jean-Luc Godard. There are two simple wooden tables, pushed up next to each other to create a kind of editing bay. One monitor has a gray mixing interface from updates and updates ago; another shows a film playing. That same video is simultaneously being screened on a larger television that sits on the other side of the room. Here, there’s the opportunity to see Le livre d’image (2018) and nine other short films created by Godard between 1981 and 2008. Le livre d’image was actually created amongst this equipment when it was still in Switzerland, simulating the actual conditions of the artist when he was in the midst of cutting, pasting, and reviewing his work. The space holds fragments of the film, suspending the installation between the real—his studio—and the imagined—a physical display of the inspiration and ideas moving through his mind at the time. This straddle, between a lived and imagined world, is where the studio installation takes its name, referencing the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, where the musician goes to the land of the dead to find his wife.
media readers are precariously stacked on an ornately painted wooden table
The tchotchkes of a home studio
There is an undeniable homeliness to the space. Le Studio d’Orphée looks more to be a salon or a living room, one that collects dust and has been lived in for more years, than a professional production space like those that show up in behind-the-scenes footage for major blockbusters. Fondazione Prada took care to arrange the room such that it looks as though you’re stepping into one of Godard’s days. Media readers are precariously stacked on an ornately painted wooden table. A coat stand holds a month’s accumulation of outerwear. Pencils and paintbrushes look forgotten on a seat. What results is the opportunity to step inside Godard’s world in a way that goes beyond pressing play on one of his films. Though the auteur is gone, you can still inhabit his work in this intimate corner of Milan.
inside the main ‘studio’ there are benches on the back wall where visitors can sit and look onto a version of the home studio once occupied by Jean-Luc Godard
the divide between a lived and imagined world is where the studio installation takes its name, referencing the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice
project info:
name: Le Studio d’Orphée
director: Jean-Luc Godard
location: Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy | @fondazioneprada
opening date: December 4, 2019
This article is part of designboom’s MODES OF HABITATION chapter, exploring how the spaces we inhabit can reshape the ways we live together. Discover more stories rethinking domesticity, shared living, and the many forms a home can take here.
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