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    Histoire(s) Du CinmaAuthor(s): James S. WilliamsSource: Film Quarterly, Vol. 61, No. 3 (Spring 2008), pp. 10-16Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fq.2008.61.3.10 .Accessed: 21/10/2013 19:04

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    HISTOIRE(S) DU CINMA

    JAMES S. WILLIAMS APPLAUDS JEAN-LUC GODARDS (HI)STO

    Histoire(s) the DVD remains essentially unchangedfrom the 1998 video version, which many had expected bythis stage to be re-edited, perhaps even digitally, by Godard,particularly in the light of his recent compilation of editedhighlights transferred to 35mm, Moments choisis desHistoire(s) du cinma (2004). Each disc is uncoded (Region 0)in the PAL standard and the transfers are accurate in the1.33:1 aspect ratio. So exceptional is the quality of reproduc-tion, in particular of the stereo soundtrack, that one feels thisis Histoire(s) as it was always meant to be. Yet the DVD is alsovery different from the CD-ROM lovingly put together re-cently by Japanese scholars which constitutes, for those luckyenough to read Japanese and afford it, a vital resource by pro-viding the sources and references for much of Godards foundmaterial. In fact, the DVD resolutely refuses to conform tothe expectations of DVD culture. There are no tailor-madespecial features, no interviews with the director or actors, nosupplementary catalogue or essaynothing, in fact, thatcould make it special in standard commercial terms. Allthat is provided extra are short extracts of two press confer-ences Godard gave at Cannes in 1988 and 1997 presentingHistoire(s) and the ne fty-minute video short made in col-laboration with Anne-Marie Miville,2x50 Years of FrenchCinema (1995). Strangely, all three pieces lack subtitles, inthe case of the latter explicably so since it was produced bythe BFI and has already been broadcast with them on Britishtelevision. The DVD is not even divided into commodied,user-friendly chapters, a clear artistic decision by Godardnot simply to avoid confusion with the nomenclature ofHistoire(s) itself which is divided into eight chapters (IA, IB,2A, etc.), but above all to oblige us to experience the work asan organic whole without editorial guidance. In short, the ar-tisanal and authorial aspect of the presentation, further en-hanced by the minimalist style of the packaging recalling theart brut installations of Godards 2006 exhibition,Voyage(s)en Utopie, at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, serves to under-line and guard intact the artistic status of Histoire(s) as a

    Originally made as a video for Canal+, La Sept, and Gaumont,this 264-minute work began life as an experimental series ofimprovised talks and lectures Godard gave at the ConservatoiredArt Cinmatographique in Montreal in the late 1970s (sub-sequently transcribed and published in 1980 asIntroduction une vritable histoire du cinma). The opening two longepisodes were eventually broadcast on British and Europeantelevision in 1989, and subsequent parts were screened atlm festivals and museums as and when they became avail-able. It was not until 1998 that the work saw the light of dayas a complete (and re-edited) whole, released in France byGaumont as a four-part VHS boxed set to great acclaim. Thiswas complemented by a set of four hybrid art books byGallimard derived from the series and a 1999 remixed CDversion of the soundtrack from ECM Records that includestranscriptions in French, German, and English.

    It is only now, after endless delays and complicationsover copyright issues, that the DVD ofHistoire(s)is nallyavailable in its entirety to an English-speaking audience.However, it must be noted that the optional subtitles, al-though excellently rendered, are far from being completeand indeed are at times extremely selective. Clearly it wouldhave been impossible to translate every word since this poly-phonic multimedia work incorporates many different lan-guages and the already dense screen is regularly taken up byintertitles and captions. Such a move would also go againstthe spirit of Histoire(s), which dees easy translation andsummarizing and insists always on the mystery of cinema, or,to quote Godard citing Robert Bresson, a margin of indeter-minacy. The compromise reachedthe not-always-consis-tent subtitling of Godards voiceover as well as of texts recitedby actors such as Alain Cuny, Juliette Binoche, and JulieDelpy that form the majority of the works non-archival foot-ageis thus understandable.

    10 SPRING 2008

    Film Quarterly , Vol. 61, No. 3, pps 1016, ISSN 0015-1386, electronic ISSN 1533-8630. 2008 by the Regents of the University of California.All rights reserved. Please direc t all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California PresssRights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/FQ.2007.61.3.10

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    video rather than DVD. This is an uncompromising state-ment of faith by Godard in (analogical) art as opposed to pre-programmed (digital) culture, as well as in the intelligenceof his audience.

    A PROJECT OF REMEMBERING

    It is immediately clear thatHistoire(s), like much of Godardswork, is really an essay of lm criticism and thus in perfectcontinuity with his early career as a lm critic. Yet nothinglike it has been attempted before in lm and nothing lookslike it, apart, that is, from Godards own remarkable, idio-snycratic video essays inspired by it such asDans le noir dutemps (2002) and De lorigine du XX1 sicle (2000), as well as

    lms like Notre Musique (2004), a meditation on war set inSarajevo whose opening section (Hell) could almost be anout-take of chapter 3A which begins with a disturbing concat-enation of images of human horror and grotesque barbarism,over which Godard reads Victor Hugos speech of 1876 on anearlier Balkan war. Never has the case been made so power-fully for the centrality of cinema to our lives, and the phe-nomenal scope and inuence of cinema as a medium thathas touchedand been touched byevery other form of artand representation. By placing cinema in this expanded con-text Godard is not only trying to establish new links acrossdifferent art forms but also, in the very process, to formalizethe fundamental nature of cinema and what it alone can

    FILM QUARTERLY 11

    Elements of montage: superimpositions and an empty black screen. 1988/1998 Gaumont

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    12 SPRING 2008

    achieve. It does not matter that all the extracts visual andaural cannot be identiedand for the spectator comingfresh to the work that ambition is soon rendered unrealisticand even undesirable. (An identication of most of the citedlms and authors was, in fact, realized by the lm historianBernard Eisenschitz for Gaumont with Godards assistance,resulting in the list available in the published art books. Thereis also now a fairly complete table of ref-erences by Cline Scemama publishedby LHarmattan in 2006.) What countsabove all is that an intersubjective criti-cal space is created that actively encour-ages the processes of memory, andforces us also to consider the importand value of our own lmic memories.

    The rst three chapters of His-toire(s)All the (Hi)stories, A Single(Hi)story, The Cinema Alone)pres-ent the core themes, which are actuallyquite standard lm historical fare: thepurity of origins, the innite promise of invention, thebetrayal of cinemas popular mission and scientic vocationby Hollywoods greed for narrative and spectacle, the deathof the silents at the hands of the talkies, the slowly successivedeaths of national cinemas, and the takeover by corporatetelevision. The episodes that follow are essentially case stud-ies: Hollywood beauty and the cosmetics industry, post-warItalian cinema, the nouvelle vague, Alfred Hitchcock (thegreatest creator of forms in the twentieth century), andnally Godard himself, who presents himself hyperbolicallyas a dissident lmmaker engaged in combat with a morallybankrupt nation (France). Organized around big names andbig events,Histoire(s) remains largely EurocentricFrance(the mother of invention), Italy, Germany, Russiaand re-produces familiar topics and names, places, moments, andmovements while pursuing its anti-Hollywood polemic.Godard willingly agrees with the late Serge Daney, withwhom he lms himself in conversation in Chapter 2A, thatonly a member of the nouvelle vague like himself could haveproduced such a work asHistoire(s) since he grew up duringthe war and thus observed (although without knowingit) the story of cinema from its virtual end. The war, in fact,and specically the Holocaust, represents point zero ofHistoire(s), for according to Godard cinema committeda two-fold crime: rst it failed to record the Nazi deathcamps, and then it failed to understand that it had effec-tively already shown them in lms likeGrand Illusion (1937), The Rules of the Game (1939), and The GreatDictator (1940).

    It would be relatively easy to critique and debunkGodards purely rhetorical claims to know and show all thehistories of cinema, including even those that were lost, ordestroyed, or never made. In the case of contemporary lm-makers, only Alain Resnais, Philippe Garrel, Rob Tregenza,and a few others feature inHistoire(s); commercial Americanlmmakers like Stanley Kubrick are virtually ignored. Yet the

    work is not conceived as a history of thegreatest lmmakers, still less a chrono-logical account of cinemas evolvingforms and genres, but rather an explora-tion of the legend and ideal of cinemaand how it came unstuck at the handsof the Real which exacted a terrible re-venge for its fatal swerve to spectacleand the sex-and-violence formula.Godard dissects brilliantly the ideologi-cal underpinnings of the cinema indus-try as a dream factory and the relationsbetween cinema and national identity.

    Indeed, Histoire(s) is at its most trenchant when exploringthe tensions and discrepancies between cinema as a tool ofction (it was a phenomenon of the nineteenth century re-solved in the twentieth century, as Godard neatly puts it)and the demands of rampant capitalism and military power.

    The history of cinema is for Godard a story of the nightwithout words and thus remains forever virtual. It could notbe otherwise since, as Godard remarks at one point withpseudo-scientic authority, we are surrounded by nebulousphantom matter which constitutes the other half of what isactually visible. Such acute self-awareness becomes the verycondition of intellectual integrity: all one can do now is tosimulate a recovery of lost times and beliefs and, yes, invent(within reason). By cutting the mnemonic material into nar-rative shape,Histoire(s) expressly allows ction to have its say(Godard, as we know, has always refused to separate Lumireand Mlis). His fundamentalist cinematic zeal, togetherwith his increasing sense of professional guilt, inspires him toever-more poetic speculations, such as his imaginary tale ofthe discovery of the mathematical principle of projection in2A, and his elegant hypothesis at the end of 3A that the great-ness of Italian neo-realist lms lies in the fact that the imagesare shot through with the language and spirit of Dante, Virgil,and Leopardi. Godards basic method of tracking down vi-sual and aural echoes and associations, the signs and shardsof memory, harks back directly to his Montreal lectures whenhe projected one of his own lms in conjunction with an-other and used the resulting juxtaposition as the basis for hisreections. Here, however, the process has been taken to

    Never has the case been madeso powerfully for the centralityof cinema to our lives, and thephenomenal scope and inu-ence of cinema as a mediumthat has touchedand beentouched byevery other form

    of art and representation.

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    FILM QUARTERLY 13

    1988/1998 Gaumont

    THE IMAGE WILL COME AT THE TIME OF THE RESURRECTION

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    14 SPRING 2008

    unparalleled lengths both in form and content, makingHistoire(s) an extreme, dizzying, and often overwhelming ex-perience. The diverse material encompasses lm extracts, lmsoundtracks, television images, newsreels, cartoons, textualcitations, painting, sculpture, drawing, engraving, sketches,photography, fragments of recorded music, speech, song, andradio broadcasts. Godard cuts as it were live into the elec-tronic esh of our collective imaginary and produces withinthe space of a frame often unprecedented new connectionsand surprises, not only in the juxtapositions and ruptures heengineers but also in the way images and sounds are manipu-lated, distorted and reversed: for example, the crude bluemarks that stalk the clothes of the now-black-and-white danc-ers in An American in Paris(1951). It makes the only otherwork at all comparable to Histoire(s), Scorseses four-hourPersonal Journey Through American Movies (1995), seemironically sober and sedate.

    CINEMA REBORN

    If montage has always been critical to Godards work it nowdenes completely his artistic practice, presented here, in an-other phrase borrowed from Bresson and much cited, asbringing together for the rst time elements not predisposedto being linked. Indeed, for Godard the lmic image is mon-tage because it was cinemas unique invention. Godard thuscreates a kind of image machine generating metaphors thatin turn carry the prospect of bringing the vibrations of Historyback to life. Apart from odd techniques provided by onlinevideo such as spotting, inserting, compositing, and ashing,the effects obtained in Histoire(s) are largely derived fromearly cinema: juxtaposition, dissolves, cross-cutting, accelera-tion, iris shots, slow motion, fading, and above all super-imposition which, in its slow and gentle mode whereby theoriginal lmic image is retained in composite frames, instan-tiates an idea of Otherness, or rather what might be calledseeing through the Other. Hence, the value of montage is atonce critical, historical, and ethical. Godard is at the heightof his inventive powers here, and there are some virtuoso setpieces of editing across form, including his reworking of hisown lms, as when he superimposes his own face over thenal moments of Contempt (1963) in IB; the extended playon birds from Hitchcock to Pier Paolo Pasolini as variously anidea, concept, word, image, metaphor, and symbol in 3A; theprobing historical montage around trains during World WarII (again in 3A) that tease out new lines of connection be-tween Kandinsky, newsreel images of French collaboration,Les Visiteurs du soir(1942), and the Jewish writer IrneNmirovsky (to name just a few of the elements brought intoplay); and the quite mesmerizing sequence in 1B when

    Godard plays with the suspense of the nal gory moments ofthe Technicolor shoot-out on the cliff between Jennifer Jonesand Gregory Peck in Duel in the Sun (1946), introducingironic intertitles such as oh temps! (to be understood pho-netically as au temps, part of a recurring phrase attributedto St. Paul which Godard types word by word into the se-quence: the image will come at the time of the resurrec-tion). In this breathtaking deconstruction of classicalnarrative cinema that staggers and decomposes the sequence,redubbing it with music from Psycho (1960) and LeonardCohen to illustrate the grotesqueness of the narrative spec-tacle of sex and death (and, by extension, the violation ofEuropean cinema by Hollywood). Godard is reconguringsound and image to generate new ideas and sensations. Notall the collages and fraternities of metaphors inHistoire(s) are as persuasive, however, notably the provocative juxtaposi-tion in 4B of the words Israel and Ismael with a termGodard claims was in circulation at Auschwitz, musulman.

    Two particular styles of montage stand out inHistoire(s). First, there are the dense, rhetorically motivated formations,one of the most audacious and discussed of which occurs in1A immediately after Godard has championed GeorgeStevenss color footage of the camps as part of the martyr-dom and resurrection of the documentary. It involves thesuperimposition within a single frame of shots of the concen-tration camps, a stop-started sequence from Stevenss A Placein the Sun (1951), and a noli me tangere representation byGiotto, tilted ninety degrees so it looks as if Mary Magdaleneis descending from the clouds like an angel, her outstretchedhands encircling Elizabeth Taylor and drawing her up to-ward the heavens. A prohibition against touching (the risenChrist is just visible bottom-right of screen) has been stun-ningly reversed by Godard in a new and unheralded form oftouching across form, such that all the different elements,banal and divine, are stretched to their limits and inverted. Attimes like this, a wake for the dead (the recorded trace oftwentieth-century history as a graveyard) is transformed intorapture, rising above the constitutive melancholy ofHistoire(s) and thus offering the temporary illusion that the fateful andignominious story of cinemas inexorable decline might actu-ally be reversed and sublimated. This is cinema reborn astranscendent art which, as Godard often likes to declare, cit-ing Malraux, is what is reborn in what has been burnt.Such self-consciously sublime metaphorical events, whichrequire careful unpacking and interpretation, are offset, how-ever, by non-discursive moments of association, conuence,contiguity, and conjunction that instead trace the interrela-tions of human form at the level of shape, gure, contour,and silhouette. These more basic and spontaneous associa-

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    FILM QUARTERLY 15

    An unheralded combination: Rembrandt,Self-Portrait: Wide-Eyed (1630, Rijksmusem, Amsterdam); A Place in the Sun (George Stevens, 1951/ Paramount Pictures); Stevenss concentration-camp footage; Giotto, Easter Morning (160406, Capella degli Scrovegni, Padu 1988/1998

    tionsat once material, proximate, and localpresent amore inclusive and immediate experience of seeing and feel-ing, and it is these associations that one notices more now inthe DVD version where the quality of resolution and color isthat much greater.

    Taken together, these two competing aesthetic drivesprovide for a fascinating encounter between the intuitive andthe counterintuitive that generates much of the internal

    drama and rhythm of Histoire(s). No one else has demon-strated so powerfully and so imaginatively that the cinemacan serve as a means of thinking through ones hands (thephrase is from Denis de Rougemont), through the creationof what Godard describes with winning simplicity, formsthat think. There are dangers, of course, with this relentlessprocess of creative cogitation, for whatever the precise modeof operation images are continually wrested from their origi-nal plastic and dramatic context and begin to look like a se-ries of epiphanies signifying nothing other than the essential

    mystery of cinematic creation. Yet at such lyrical momentsthe videographic process achieves what music alone nowrepresents for Godard, or at least music the way Godard usesitshort, repeated bursts and fragments of Hindemith,Mozart, Kancheli, or Keith Jarrett. Always moving forward inlinear time, music is the past recasting itself poetically intothe future with revelatory promise. As such, it manages to es-cape the fatal nexus of money, cinema, and history-for-sale

    that Godard regards as a particularly pernicious aspect of ourcurrent condition, and which is summed up for him in justone name: Spielberg.

    A MODEL OF RESISTANCE?

    The full signicance and implications ofHistoire(s) are still along way from being comprehensively explored and under-stood. The initial reception of the work has focused inevita-bly on questions of history and lm historiography, inparticular regarding the representation of the Holocaust and

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    16 SPRING 2008

    JAMES S. WILLIAMS is Professor of Modern French Literature and Film aLondon.

    ABSTRACT This essay reviews the DVD boxed set of Jean-Luc Godardphilosophical, argumentative video essay on the history of lm and the twtury. The essay stresses Godards remarkable use of montage to create new ative juxtapositions that carry unique emotional, historical, and political cha

    KEYWORDS Godard, the Holocaust,nouvelle vague, montage, lm history.

    DVD DATAHistoire(s) du cinma . Director: Jean-Luc Godard. 1988/1998 GaumonPublisher: Gaumont Vido, 2007. 65.71, 4 discs.

    the difference of approach between Godard and ClaudeLanzmann, as well as more generally on issues of montage,citation, and the archive. Yet the works immediate materialand emotional impact constitutes a vital part of its overallachievement. As Godard puts it in one of his mantra-like for-mulae: What is great is not the image but the emotion whichit provokes. The extended sequence in Chapter 1A, for ex-ample, when he stages himself with his machine-gun-rattlingtypewriter gearing up to take hold of the beast of cinema as amicrophone moves slowly into frame, is a moment of puretheatrical suspense and visual fascination. If Godard gureshere personally as cinemas memory with montage serving ashis individual signature, he is also visibly consumed and evenshattered by the sheer excess of the sounds and images hecalls up, in particular of the newsreels of the camps and war-time executions and the devastating scenes of torture fromlms like Open City (1945). And so is the viewer who, byforce of identication and empathy, is brought face to facewith the signs and stimuli of an Otherness that can be neitherincorporated nor expelled.

    Histoire(s) is an extraordinary statement of faith in thepower of cinema still to affect us radically and, in so doing,help effect social change and greater human understanding.One of the many stills used throughout the work is takenfrom Bergmans early and relatively little known lm,TheDevils Wanton (1949). Here we see the alcoholic journalistThomas (Birger Malmsten) and the prostitute Birgitta (DorisSvedlund) huddled beside a cinematograph in their hide-away attic while looking out towards the viewer. It is the mo-ment before they project a short, silent slapstick farce calledDeath and the Devil which temporarily reverses Birgittasdepression, allowing her to articulate the truth of her terriblepast (the two subsequently fall in love, though their happi-ness is short-lived). Godard clings to this moment of cine-matic innocence and promise, what he calls in Histoire(s) and elsewhere the childhood of art (not to be confusedwith the dream-work, the stuff of nightmares inThe DevilsWanton). The complex closing sequence of Histoire(s) thatsuperimposes a yellow ower over an image of Godards face,itself imposed over a reproduction of Francis Bacons secondStudy for a Portrait of Van Gogh (1957), while Godardsvoiceover recites Borgess transcription of Coleridge aboutwaking from a paradisiac dream with a ower in his hands,ends with a simple statement charged with genuine pathos,I was that man.

    This nal, almost sentimental resort to the romantic no-tion of the author signing off his individual work completesthe clearest argument yet made by Godard for the crucial rel-evance of ction and fantasy. Can the pioneering and

    uniquely challenging work ofHistoire(s) in any way provide ablueprint for resistance to what Godard has just posited asthe encroaching uniformity of the global super-present sup-plied by todays televisual and digital communications, wherethe different processes of history and memory, as well as of artand culture, all risk being attened out? Probably not. Whatcan be said, however, and Histoire(s) offers irrefutable proof,is that the forms of artthe forms that thinkcan help laythe basis for new forms of being. This is Godards gift to us: athrenody of love.

    (Thanks to Michael Witt for his helpful comments.)

    Dream factory. 1988/1998 Gaumont

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