HISTOIRE(S) DU CINÉMA

By: Grey Daisies

INTRODUCTION À UNE VÉRITABLE HISTOIRE DU CINÉMA

Le cinéma, c’est l’enfance de l’art. – Jean-Luc Godard

As early as the beginning of the 1970s Jean-Luc Godard proposed an image/text collage scenario for a project on the history of cinema to Italian television (RAI). In 1978 the project reappeared, this time at the Montreal Film School (the Conservatoire d’Art Cinématographique), where Godard – at the invitation of Serge Losique, and following in the steps of Henri Langlois († 1977) – delivered a series of lectures (or “voyages”, as Godard called them) on cinema history. Rather than delivering lectures, Godard proposed a form of historical cinematic montage, whereby the projection of one of his own films, together with a range of other films, would provide the basis for a reflection on cinema history and his place within it. These lectures were partially transcribed and published in France in 1980 as Introduction à une véritable histoire du cinéma. Godard left this project, feeling that the history of film was best told in images and he was lead into the Histoire(s) du Cinema project. The book has never been translated into English.

These are the seven voyages:

* First journey
Fallen Angel (Otto Preminger)
A Bout de souffle (Jean-Luc Godard)
M (Fritz Lang)
Le Petit soldat (Jean-Luc Godard)

* Second journey
Nana (Jean Renoir)
The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer)
Greed (Erich von Stroheim)
Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer)
Carmen Jones (Otto Preminger)
Vivre sa vie (Jean-Luc Godard)
The Man with a Camera (Dziga Vertov)
The Bad and the Beautiful (Vincente Minnelli)
La Nuit Americaine (François Truffaut)
Le Mépris (Jean-Luc Godard)

* Third journey

Faust (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau)
Rancho Notorious (Fritz Lang)
La Belle et la bête (Jean Cocteau)
L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Alain Resnais)
Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard)
Nanook of the North (Robert J. Flaherty)
The Flowers of Saint Francis (Roberto Rossellini)
Persona (Ingmar Bergman)
Une Femme mariée (Jean-Luc Godard)

* Fourth journey

Sunrise (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau)
You Only Live Once (Fritz Lang)
Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray)
Ugetsu Monogatari (Kenji Mizoguchi)
Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard)
Sous les toits de Paris (René Clair)
Pickpocket (Robert Bresson)
La Fille de Prague avec un sac très lourd (Danielle Jaeggi)
Masculin Féminin (Jean-Luc Godard)

* Fifth journey

Les Vampires (Louis Feuillade)
Underworld (Josef von Sternberg)
The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett)
Made in U.S.A. (Jean-Luc Godard)
Battleship Potemkin (Sergei M. Eisenstein)
L’Age d’or (Luis Buñuel)
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (Frank Capra)
Le Chinoise (Jean-Luc Godard)

* Sixth journey

Dracula (Tod Browning)
Germany Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini)
The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock)
Week End (Jean-Luc Godard)
Arsenal (Aleksandr Dovzhenko)
La Règle du jeu (Jean Renoir)
Europe ’51 (Roberto Rossellini)
Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (Jean-Luc Godard)

* Seventh journey

Top Hat (Mark Sandrich)
Brigadoon (Vincente Minnelli)
Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones (Rollin Binzer)
New York, New York (Martin Scorsese)
One Plus One (Jean-Luc Godard)
The Lost Patrol (John Ford)
Alexander Nevsky (Sergei M. Eisenstein)
Open City (Roberto Rossellini)
Les carabiniers (Jean-Luc Godard)

HISTOIRE DU CINÉMA

La télévision fabrique de l’oubli. Le cinéma fabrique des souvenirs. – Jean-Luc Godard

As noted above, Jean-Luc Godard’s epic project Histoire(s) du cinéma began as a lecture series delivered at the University of Montreal, Canada. Having delivered the lectures but dissatisfied with the limitations of the lecture format, he began the video essay version in 1988, which was completed in 1998. It is always referred to by its French title, because of the wordplay it implies: histoire means both “history” and “story,” and the s in parentheses gives the possibility of a plural. Therefore, the phrase Histoire(s) du cinéma simultaneously means The History of Cinema, The Histories of Cinema, The Story of Cinema and The Stories of Cinema.

Histoire(s) du cinéma is Jean-Luc Godard’s most devastating accomplishment as filmmaker/critic/artist/poet/historian. Produced over a period of ten years, Histoire(s) has been heralded as a work of tremendous significance to the practice of both cinema and history; most famously by Jonathan Rosenbaum, who declared it to be “the culmination of 20th century film-making”. Whilst not technically a film, Histoire(s) undoubtedly represents the ultimate labour of cinephilic love, an intensive audio-visual retrospective ruminating on the multiple incarnations of cinema, its vital intersections with 20th century history and ultimately, its immanent death, as projected by the medium’s most studied, critically devoted and playfully intellectual independent figure.

Histoire(s) du cinéma consists of 4 chapters, each one subdivided into two parts, making for a total of 8 episodes:

* Chapter 1(a) : 51 min.
Toutes les histoires (1988) – All the (Hi)stories
* Chapter 1(b) : 42 min.
Une Histoire seule (1989) – A Single (Hi)story
* Chapter 2(a) : 26 min.
Seule le cinema (1997) – Only Cinema
* Chapter 2(b) : 28 min.
Fatale beauté (1997) – Deadly Beauty
* Chapter 3(a) : 27 min.
La Monnaie de l’absolu (1998) – The Coin of the Absolute
* Chapter 3(b) : 27 min.
Une Vague Nouvelle (1998) – A New Wave
* Chapter 4(a) : 27 min.
Le Côntrole de l’univers (1998) – The Control of the Universe
* Chapter 4(b) : 38 min.
Les Signes parmi nous (1998) – The Signs Among Us

Each episode is built on the same structure: an opening consisting of two dedications is followed by the producers’ credits (Gaumont / Périphéria…). The sounds and images are inter-cut by the eight titles of Histoire(s), in order, one after the other, and in Capitals, like a leitmotif that helps viewers to place what they are watching in the context of the project’s larger ensemble. It’s only at about the mid-point of the video that the number and title of the chapter are announced, and the episode ends with “to be continued” (all except the last episode, because Histoire(s) is finally achieved now).

- Further readings (Books, Articles):

Introduction à une véritable histoire du cinéma (Jean-Luc Godard, 1980, French language)
Einführung in eine wahre Geschichte des Kinos (Jean-Luc Godard, 1983, German translation)
Archéologie du cinema et mémoire du siecle – Dialogue (Jean-Luc Godard, Youssef Ishaghpour, 2000, French language)
Cinema: The Archaeology Of Film And The Memory Of A Century – Dialogue (Jean-Luc Godard, Youssef Ishaghpour, 2005, English translation)
Trailer for Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (Jonathan Rosenbaum, 1997)
On Painting and History in Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (Sally Shafto, 2006)
Histoire(s) du cinéma (Alifeleti Brown, 2008)
Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma or Memory of the world (a lecture) (Laleen Jayamanne, 2007)
Histoire(s) du cinéma (Marie-Anne Lanavère)

A skeptical afterthought

“Missing from this highly skewed view of the world is practically all of Asia and the Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa — not to mention most experimental cinema made everywhere. At least two major Japanese filmmakers, Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu, are given some recognition, and a still from Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen is seen, but the latter is the only fleeting allusion to African cinema, and the cinemas of Iran, India, and Australia (for instance) can’t be said to exist at all in this scheme. Even worse, adding a certain amount of complacent and (at times) neocolonialist insult are the references to Fritz Lang’s The Indian Tomb, George Cukor’s Bhowani Junction, and Marguerite Duras’s India Song that seemingly ‘replace’ Indian cinema (three great films, to be sure — but hardly adequate substitutes) and an even more dubious evocation of other ‘darker’ cultures in which Philippe Garrel’s Marie pour mémoire, Jean Gremillon’s Lumière d’été, John Coltrane’s jazz piece ‘Africa,’ White Shadows, Captain Blood, Glauber Rocha’s Antonio das Mortes, and Jean Rouch’s Moi, un noir are invited to rub shoulders with Yeelen. To be fair, Godard was among the first Europeans who recognized the importance of Abbas Kiarostami, and this recognition took place while he was still working on Histoire(s) du Cinéma. Nevertheless, it’s clear and perhaps also understandable according to his ‘closed book’ policy that he decided Kiarostami played no role in the (hi)story he had to recount. Here is only one clear instance of a collision between history as it’s written and the history that remains to be told, and it points to a much wider weakness and absence in much contemporary film criticism that attempts to generalize about the state of the art, past and present.” (Taken from a 2003 essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Godard’s Myth of Total Cinema”, commissioned by the Rotterdam International Film Festival.)