Histoire(s) du cinéma

From its start, the series makes audible the sound of technology from various periods: Godard's typewriter, his squeaky marker pen, the sound of the projector; levels mixed too loud, delay on voices, sound effects, snippets of the classical music canon, pop songs, noises. Godard repeats a number of key ideas several times across the opening episodes, sometimes verbatim: like musical themes coming around, sometimes as obvious recapitulations, at others as ghostly half-echoes; visual and aural puns (words split, truncated, divided) emphasizing first one then another part of a combined, often contradictory meaning. Making use of video to conduct an autopsy of cinema, the series develops the notion of cinema as out-of-time, fated, cursed; the forces of the modern are beholden to the nightmare of the past, borrowed costumes of present and past in mutual disguise. The roots of all modern technology were developed in the 19th century; the 20th century merely provided the technical means to execute them (whether these be projection or imperialism). Photography developed as compensation for the freezing and totalisation of all relations under the sign of capital--the technology for colour photography existed, but it was developed in black and white ("the colours of mourning"). Rather than releasing that which photography had frozen, cinema was a melancholy reenactment of that freezing. Cinema came along as a further method of mourning; technicolour ("the colours of funeral wreaths") is not celebration, but denial. Meanwhile, video and television have supplanted cinema's faux-cosmic possibility, boxing it up, condensing it, and have erased cinema's overwhelming time of the sublime, where a Proustian temps retrouvé be enacted beyond the scope of language ("cinema exists for the words caught in the throat"), condensed and controlled through fast-forward, rewind etc (video's revenge on cinema enacted in the very form of this film). So this is a further act of mourning, made on the periphery of the end of the Cold War: a flattening and totalisation.

(See also separate reviews under each individual episode)

Godard, often one of the most pedantic authors in the historie(s) of cinema, unleashes a speech without special interest, using images and dialogues from hundreds of films, seasoned with photographs, titles and bombastic phrases, without it being very clear to us why or for what.

It begins with Godard typing the names of various classic films on his typewriter, with superimposed images of Chaplin, Ray, Lupino, and stupid signs with inane puns. After 5 minutes, we wait for the movie or documentary or whatever it is to start; but at 10 minutes we see there is no more than that.

Funny montages of classic films, interrupted by images of Godard with many books behind him, to show that he is an intellectual. Complicated textures of sometimes superimposed images, sometimes in slow motion, and with background music by Beethoven, Bach, Mahler, Schubert...; all mixed with some politics, with archive images of the Romanovs, the corpse of Lenin, Hitler, bombings, concentration camps...

The voiceover repeats phrases such as: "Cinema replaces reality"; "a world according to our desires"; "all the stories that there will be, that there would be, that there have been"; "you have to dream"; "darkness, oh my light!"; "the theater is something too well known, the cinema something too unknown... until now"; "only the hand that erases can write"...; or so-called brainy untranslatable puns like: "Is it that the u in produire prevents it from containing "dire"?"

What can we think of comments on the function of cinema in times of war such as: "1939, 1940, 1941, betrayal of the radio, but the cinema keeps its word. Because from The Death of Siegfried, and M, the Vampire of Dusseldorf, to the Great Dictator and Lubitsch, the movies had already been made, right? A simple 35mm rectangle saves the honor of everything real." This is the intellectual rigor of the discourse...

And at the same time, as it is supposed to talk about the many histories of cinema, telling us the obvious about Irvin Thalberg or Howard Hughes, the American film industry...

Some reputable critic alludes to Joyce and his Finnegans Wake, something only justifiable if you haven't read Joyce at all..., here we enter into an often insipid game of free associations: a shot by Jean Renoir, followed by Impressionist paintings by his father and with the music of Puccini: that is the inventive level at which we are.

Interesting for movie lovers, due to the potpourri of unforgettable images from so many wonderful films, used as a source of free associations following a speech without interest in itself.

This is often described by critics as Godard's 'Magnum Opus', which is probably a fair assessment when considering his entire body of work. People who only know Godard from his earlier, more high-profile films (Breathless, Pierrot Le Fou, etc.), might find this pretty challenging, but it's definitely in keeping with Godard's later work (In Praise of Love, Film Socialisme, etc.).

Histoire(s) du cinema does not conform to any typical conventions of film, it is a series of non-linear montages, very loosely themed, made up of a wide range of clips from film history and images of other 20th Century artworks. Images, sound and text are all overlapped and multilayered in such a way that it is extremely difficult to 'follow' at times. To genuinely 'understand' every moment of this film would take a huge number of viewings, and it may be better to approach the film like a piece of music, let it wash over you and take in what you can, rather than attempting to dissect it.

The choice of source material is hugely varied, deeply personal to Godard, and even a very well-versed film-scholar will at times be struggling to identify the images. That being the case, this is not a 'documentary' in any traditional sense, and it is certainly not an education on the history of cinema. This is more of an extended video art piece, of extraordinary depth and scale, bringing together one man's perspective on the film and art of the 20th Century.

Not for everyone, but it's hard not to be impressed by the ambition, scale and technical complexity of what Godard has achieved here. If redefining genres, and cinema itself, is Godard's legacy, then this really is his 'Magnum Opus'.