Histoire(s) du Cinema

Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinema is one of the Holy Grails of film. The four-hour production was made between 1988 and 1998, released in separate chapters of eccentric length – the opening installment is 51 minutes long, other chapters are as short as 23 minutes. Until December 2011, this television movie, shot on video it appears, was not available outside of Europe. Gaumont, Godard’s producer, had not secured North American rights to the hundreds of film clips that comprise the picture. The movie was known from a few screenings at MOMA in New York and from a German-produced soundtrack box on ECM, accompanied by a transcript of the words and intertitles shown in the film. The picture is generally characterized as Godard’s “documentary” about cinema but characterizing the picture in those terms is wholly inadequate to suggest the nature of the work. Some critics equate the film to Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake and, certainly, the texture of the collage of images, sound, and superimposed titles is impossibly dense. Godard layers film clips, bleeding them into one another, or superimposing moving pictures on still images or vice-versa. Fragments of Beethoven, Bach and American popular music jostle one another on the soundtrack – sometimes Godard himself, always typing or inspecting books in his library or running film back and forth through a movieola editing machine, growls epigrams or mutters fragments of sentences to the accompaniment of densely quilted sound-collages of film dialogue and movie music. Snips of films succeed one another at lightning speed and Godard’s associative logic is never clear – it is always subtle, difficult to understand, and, frequently, willfully obscure: Hollywood love scenes collide with atrocity footage; people kiss on soundstages as partisans are executed and real corpses shoved into real graves. French phrases or sentences, appearing as bright block intertitles or superimposed over the film clips, flash across the screen punctuating the cascade, the torrent of film clips. All of this is complicated for an American viewer with no French by a barrage of subtitles bursting across the already crowded frame. You can’t watch this movie. You have to read it. And the process of reading is complicated immeasurably by the beauty or horror of the iconic images that Godard strings together in impossibly swift succession. After more than thirty minutes, exhaustion occludes any appreciation of the film – Godard seems to have recognized this: later episodes become progressively shorter and shorter. For Godard, it seems that cinema is a battlefield, a contested territory where word wars against image and where ideas wrestle with arrays of pictures that continuously oppose and resist the expression of those ideas. The film is built like Pound’s Cantos, a endless self-referential and recursive system of citations in which each ideograph (that is each collage of sound, title, music, and image) refers to, and opposes, each other ideograph. The viewer and critic struggles for analogies – what you are watching is certainly not film in any normal meaning of the word, not a documentary, either, and not, even, the kind of difficult “essay” directed by Chris Marker – rather, the picture seems more like some attempt to make pictures and clips from films perform as components in a musical structure, the battery of citations achieving a kind of rhythmic counterpoint, a sort of visual and pictorial fugue. To Godard, film is the beginning and the end of all things. The camera shows us the world, invents the world as it were, and demonstrates what it means to think and be human. When Carter and Carnavon first peered into the darkness of Tutankhamen’s crypt, they were astounded at the beautiful things heaped there – but the tomb was also a kind of doom for them; for the rest of their lives, the two men were condemned to studying and cataloguing the riches hidden in that grave. Histoire(s) du Cinema imposes the same kind of catastrophe on its viewers – either you look away, and seal up the treasure trove, or you spend the rest of your life trying to understand what Godard has shown us.