Histoire(s) du cinéma (Jean-Luc Godard, 1988-1997)
It’s difficult to write about this because in a way it’s much more than a film. It’s a decade-in-the-making piece of audio-visual art that is personal enough to reflect that author’s personal taste and experience but broad enough to encompass history: war, aesthetics, desire, gender, politics, suffering, and beauty. Sometimes I compare these so-called essay films to zines: cut up collages and the reflections of a single author. This is much more than that. When Godard lets the images themselves speak - think of the bird filled sky from The Birds superimposed over a fleet of bombers - it’s neither fully straightforward nor simply sensual. It’s neither autobiographical nor totalizing in a chronological history. What is it? It’s like this massive archive, this visual literacy in Godard’s head that really just needs to be experienced.
What would it look like if you used images from the cinema to illustrate the history of the 20th century? I didn’t expect it would look like this. It hurdles by quickly, 10 years of work, 100 years of history all crammed into 250 minutes. The subtitling was terrible and incomplete and you had a constant creeping feeling that so much information and so many associations were just passing you by without coming across. Godard insists that the cinema is a 19th century art form that completely shaped the 20th century. That dividing line is important, I suppose. In politics, in news, in our conception of the world in the 19th century things happened, wars were declared, politicians gave speeches, etc etc and people wrote about it. In the 20th century these events became plays staged for the camera. The image - the cinematographe, as Godard likes to call it - can project itself and that makes it different from other art forms. That gives it power.
Godard praises, dismisses, and provokes in the way that only he can. He praises Hitchcock (‘he succeeded where Napoleon and Hitler failed, he managed to control the universe’); Italian cinema (‘with Rome, Open City a nation was able to look itself in the eye again’); and the importance of people making things with their hands. The histoires are very Eurocentric in that there is no reference to Japanese cinema for example, he quotes Debord but ignores Fanon, though he makes reference to the Algerian war. He focuses on nations a lot. England contributes nothing (except Oscar Wilde), Poland made Kanal in an expiatory gesture and it was a “nostalgic” film, and the Americans’ treatment of cinema amounts to an “occupation” in the colonial sense. The technological development of cinema was dealt with. Godard insists that cinema could have been invented in colour, that the technology existed, but with the dawning of a new century it was decided to dress reality up in black and white: colours of mourning. He said Kodak made their money from x-rays. There is a lot of death in the histoires.
Godard talks about Langlois and the films he showed. He talked about invisible films. The films you couldn’t see. He took an even sweet and nostalgic turn at the end dedicating the last part of the serious to Anne Marie Meiville, his life partner and collaborator, and then to himself as well. He said, ‘If a man passed through paradise in a dream and was given a flower as proof of that journey. And if he woke up and still had that flower with him. I was that man.”
What would it look like if you used images from the cinema to illustrate the history of the 20th century? I didn’t expect it would look like this. It hurdles by quickly, 10 years of work, 100 years of history all crammed into 250 minutes. The subtitling was terrible and incomplete and you had a constant creeping feeling that so much information and so many associations were just passing you by without coming across. Godard insists that the cinema is a 19th century art form that completely shaped the 20th century. That dividing line is important, I suppose. In politics, in news, in our conception of the world in the 19th century things happened, wars were declared, politicians gave speeches, etc etc and people wrote about it. In the 20th century these events became plays staged for the camera. The image - the cinematographe, as Godard likes to call it - can project itself and that makes it different from other art forms. That gives it power.
Godard praises, dismisses, and provokes in the way that only he can. He praises Hitchcock (‘he succeeded where Napoleon and Hitler failed, he managed to control the universe’); Italian cinema (‘with Rome, Open City a nation was able to look itself in the eye again’); and the importance of people making things with their hands. The histoires are very Eurocentric in that there is no reference to Japanese cinema for example, he quotes Debord but ignores Fanon, though he makes reference to the Algerian war. He focuses on nations a lot. England contributes nothing (except Oscar Wilde), Poland made Kanal in an expiatory gesture and it was a “nostalgic” film, and the Americans’ treatment of cinema amounts to an “occupation” in the colonial sense. The technological development of cinema was dealt with. Godard insists that cinema could have been invented in colour, that the technology existed, but with the dawning of a new century it was decided to dress reality up in black and white: colours of mourning. He said Kodak made their money from x-rays. There is a lot of death in the histoires.
Godard talks about Langlois and the films he showed. He talked about invisible films. The films you couldn’t see. He took an even sweet and nostalgic turn at the end dedicating the last part of the serious to Anne Marie Meiville, his life partner and collaborator, and then to himself as well. He said, ‘If a man passed through paradise in a dream and was given a flower as proof of that journey. And if he woke up and still had that flower with him. I was that man.”