Fatale beauté

In the final Histoires entry, Godard says "I understand better, why earlier I had such a hard time beginning, what voice had invited me to speak lodged itself in my discourse." This may refer to any number of beginnings, one of them I like to think is the false start of the Histoires films back in 1988.

Godard would like to enclose all of life in cinema, long shots and short shots, pans of nature and poses on deathbeds, but in those first two Histoires films I got the sense that it was slipping from his fingers. The greatest question then of a beginning of cinema is this, where and why do we start a shot, where and why do we end it? Where do we begin to see and where do we stop, and what kind of life have we seen inbetween? As it pertains to this chronicle of cinema, where do we begin to tell the story?

Godard finds premises in different things, the French New Wave included, but it's more important for me to see where these stories end, where the narrative thread is finally abandoned. It's always inwards, with introspection. This speaks as I see it of a desire for self-awareness, which he marvellously exhibits in films like Nouvelle Vague, but also an attempt of an intimate view of consciousness and soul, where all the formations of cinema are born.

When this really begins to matter for me, is when Godard abandons the intellectual analysis, and instead approaches cinema with a poet's sense of awe and wonder. How the person who looks from behind a camera looks upwards to imagine starstudded worlds beyond the ephemeral, and how that glance at the divine brings about a downfall of ideas. He laments that downfall from the idea to the base desire with pornographic shots of early stag films, other kinds of violence.

In the fourth Histoires, he solves for us the provocative claim that "cinema is not art, it's barely a technique". Cinema is a mystery, a mystagogy we participate in. The greatest despair of the artist then, the desperate attempt to build the imperishable and eternal from what perishes (sound, image), is at once a great dream and a great folly. Whereas once he was anxious to use cinema as a lever that participated in the discourse for a better society, now he contends himself with a flight into beauty. We take that for what we will.

Mysteries for me must exist unresolved, remain enigmatic otherwise they dissolve, so to what extent shall we pursue the mystery of cinema and can we hope for a measure of liberation?

Godard asks, how many films about babies, flowers, and how many about gunfire. If glory is the mourning of happiness, then the glamour of the show biz is a veil that masks something sinister. It's a mask, in the way that it obscures the true face of things. For 50 Cecil B. DeMille's, how many Dreyers? Another contradiction for Godard, but what's it worth? Perhaps the admission that cinema can obscure, with song and dance and violence, both what is good and what is bad. At this point I find myself questioning the mystery, if it can ever be means to something, or if we arrive at the core by peeling layers we find nothing.

One thing is for sure, the Histoires as a whole, clocking in at 4 hours, emerges not as just a history of cinema, it is hardly that, or a story of that history, of which it is but adequate, but as a story of Godard. That is, for what Godard regales us with, he rummages through cinema to find images that correspond. Now it's James Stewart jumping in water to save Kim Novak, now it's John Wayne on horseback.

It's not surprising then that these images exist, by which Godard projects his thoughts into cinema, because it's the primary reason these images exist in the first place, as a projection of thoughts, but that the notion of a story born of the abstract cinematic essentials, sound, image, motion, which can communicate the innermosts is possible.

This must be the triumph of cinema then. Not that it can mirror the macrocosm, address the grand ideas and elevate us to the divine (which is a chimera), but the profound ability to speak about the small things we consider true inside of us, individually, collectively. A shot of an anguished woman, stripped off context, retains its emotional power, which is to say that the context of narrative is firstly illusionary, foremostly that something exists embedded in the image which we cannot wrestle away by any means.

An image to haunt, the flickering face of Marilyn Monroe superimposed over shots of The Birds, black crows flowing out of her forehead, or inside of it. A state of mind emerges from the image, which is true both as an expression of the outside and as an impression of what's inside. The link of this, between thought and action, is karma. Godard here teaches what's possible of cinema, perhaps like no one else did before.

Godard saves the greatest realization for the end, a partial answer to the questions which haunted his mind an entire career. Only when life is lived in full, with all the forces available to our body, only then can life stop questioning itself and accept itself as the true answer. Mind is the great antagonist then, a chimera.

Thirtyeight years after Breathless, now I can be friends with Godard. This is a masterwork of cinema in my estimation, but I believe will be better appreciated as a work that flows from a career or life in progress, if we have a picture of who Godard was, who he came to be.

2b) continues the female narrator's explorations of beauty, storytelling, dream, escape; this time, though, the focus is Proust, introduced by Godard: Albertine as the icon of lost beauty kept imprisoned: aesthetics and jealousy, the rage of vulnerability, art as fetishisation and reification of its objects. It's not a smell or a sentence or a piece of music that triggers involuntary memory and the re-finding of time--time's retrieval contains its 'trou', its gap or absence, its void, the way that Godard finds the emptiness within a shot that in context is given a panoply of meaning, the gap within a crowded scene, remixes them across time, puts them in dialogue. Godard starts early on that cinema could have been about flowers, babies, and so on, but it became about death. Eros/thanatos merge as icons of Hollywood martyrdom like James Dean brood in frozen still images, and the ever-present images of historical catastrophe--Vietnam, the holocaust, what I think is the First Intifada--allegorise this doubleness of spectatorship--most notably, an image of a little child walking past a field of bodies, apparently unconcerned, into which images of escape and fantasy (a woman clinging to an impossibly high streetlamp) enter, like one image emerging from the burning embers of another (Godard says that cinema comes from burning, a Promethean destructiveness that this repeated trope of emergence--a kind of joke about dissolves, wipes, fades, and the like--frequently enacts), more so in this episode than previously. Godard jokingly references the scopophilic and gendered nature of film viewing, a cap on his head, cigar in his mouth, sitting shirtless at his typewriter, his jaw dropping; images of female bodies and of the motif of hands (hands think, Godard states) grasping, groping, gesticulating: a visual equation between the gestures of power (fascist demagoguery, the salute and the raised arm) and sexual conquest? The episode's concluding section features a relatively fixed camera as an actor reads out statements on art and beauty: given the density of the preceding material, it feels like a moment of utter stillness, the suspended time that cinema always seeks and always rejects.

As I continue my excursion through Godard's jaw dropping experimental odyssey of a mini series 'Histoire(s) du cinema', I find myself growing more appreciative of how spectacularly unique the portrait Godard is painting here. It is occasionally indulgent and pretentious, but, in the end, it is unlike anything I've ever seen before and has been constantly excited to see what happens next.

So far, this is my favourite episode, and the one I feel the most compelled to re watch. At first, I was less than impressed with this entry, but as I allowed Godard's magic to play out, I found myself moved, amused, and greatly impacted. Godard, at one point, suddenly stops his hijinks to showcase a woman going off on a sort of monologue about beauty and, at first, it felt kind of overlong and silly, but eventually it became one of the most moving moments I've seen appear in the more heavily experimental parts of Godard's filmography. The music, editing, and vibrant visuals have all worked together in each episode so far to create a theatrical, magical, strange, surreal, and challenging experience, and nowhere has it been more directly successful so far than it has been here, in this highly philosophical and occasionally extremely playful installment of what I feel may just be one of Godard's greatest masterpieces.

Since the first episode of Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinéma, I can assure you, I think I figured out what he was trying to go for. Godard seems to be trying to illustrate the experimentation people conducted with film throughout its history, while, simultaneously, making a film that is pretty experimental as well. It's about as meta as one can be, and while it's a novel concept that has some merit, four parts in and I'm almost ready to wave the white flag in defeat to Godard's constant defiling of convention and traditionalism.

Deadly Beauty, the "b" part of chapter two in this ongoing expedition of cinema, offers about the same amount of information as the previous three chapters, which amounts to very little in the long-run. Because Godard goes for a heavily impressionistic style for a documentary that should be constantly informing, there's little information that sticks, and even the beautiful, often poetic images of films and art only linger in ones mind for a brief time before dissipating into empty thoughts.

Godard has some interesting musings in this part, however, from illustrating the idea that cinema has often been about death and murder and how we rarely see miracles like a flower blooming or a newborn baby being born. This idea that cinema has been more concerned with death than life would be hugely interesting if we saw some sort of compilation of clips alluding to that, rather than practically accepting it as anecdotal thought, but unfortunately, the idea is abandoned almost as soon as it is brought up.

On top of that, we once again witness some seriously beautiful images captured under seriously droll and monotonous narration from Godard, which is the same old vagueness in thought and idea we've gotten before. Reviewing this series has almost been as much of a task as watching it because of the fact that there is little to discuss that hasn't been brought up before. Godard has found the style, and, regardless of what I or others think, he's sticking to him. I applaud him as much as I want to never watch another film by him again.

Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard.