Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998): review 1A – the stories

Jean-Luc Godard’s Historie(s) du cinéma, released on Blu-Ray in a limited edition extras-packed set by Radiance, is many things, but one of the things it isn’t is a history of cinema. The title is one of the bilingual puns Godard always delighted in, not least because they exclude monoglots from fully comprehending his work. Chapter 1B, the closing half of the first of four interlinked pairs of episodes that make up the Historie(s) du cinéma project, spells it out: “You have a story here. Don’t treat it like history”. Literally translated, une histoire is “a story”, and the plural in parentheses signals Godard’s ambition to tell “all the stories, that which will be and could be”. In fact, one master narrative emerges from the series, one which is so personal to Godard that it provides a skeleton key to the second half of his career, but which may be maddeningly cryptic to anyone not well-versed in his later work.

There is, then, a lot to unpack – frankly more than one review can hold. I’m going to address Historie(s) du cinéma in two parts, followed by a review of the generous supplementary material that Radiance have also included. But to start with, it’s worth explaining what this is. In the build-up to the centenary of the Lumière brothers historic tech-demo Train Arriving at a Station, the venerable French studio Gaumont and the TV station Canal+ co-financed a series of video episodes in which Godard would explore the first century of cinema. The fact that this project was made in collaboration with a film studio and a television studio is significant. Godard regrets, in his voiceover, that a project this ambitious and multi-faceted can only be made on television, a medium which “reduces”. He even gets a jab in at one of his financiers’ illustrious founders, by noting that “if television has made Leon Gaumont’s dream come true, bringing the world into the poorest bedrooms, it’s by reducing the vast sky of the shepherds to the level of Tom Thumb”.

So far, so Godardian. Cheeky and critical reflections on his financial backers have been part of the director’s work since at least Week End, where two random wanderers responded to being asked who they were by saying “We’re the Italian extras!” – i.e., the ones Godard had to hire in order to get Italian production money. For all his misgivings about the small screen, Chapters 1A and 1B of Historie(s) du cinéma were broadcast on Canal+ in May 1989. The production of the next six chapters would continue off and on for the next nine years of his life, becoming in the process a summary of his thoughts on history, art and politics during the last decade of the twentieth century.

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The episode titles, like the overall project title, are designed to mislead. Chapter 2A is titled “Only the Cinema”, but by then we know that’s a false promise. The preceding chapter begins with allusions to Samuel Beckett, Paul Gauguin and Rene Descartes, as if Godard thought telling the whole of cinema history in eight parts was needlessly unambitious and decided to broaden his scope. As in a lot of his work, Godard’s sheer indifference to the viewer’s ability to keep up can be maddening or hilarious depending on your mood. Any standard stretch of Historie(s) du cinéma will include Godard’s voiceover, on-screen text, and a dense collage of images from film history, art history and documentary. Godard here favours a particular kind of intercutting which flickers back and forth at great speed between two repeated images; if you watch it on fast-forward, you realise he’s actually slowed down a standard superimposition to the point where the two images are disentangled. It also means that, rather than being merged into one ahistorical image, the two images can be set against each other in a shot/reverse shot rhythm that crosses time periods, genres and even mediums.

Shot/reverse shot editing has been a cornerstone of Godard’s analysis of film-making ever since Letter to Jane, the notorious 1972 short in which he and his co-director Jean-Pierre Gorin analysed a press photograph of their recent collaborator Jane Fonda. Their conclusion was that the photograph did not work as a revolutionary tool because it showed only the face of the white Hollywood legend, redefining the Vietnamese people she was actually listening to as a faceless audience. Historie(s) du cinéma gives us a little more context as to how this ended up being such a central concern for him. At one point, he recalls someone telling him that Sergei Eisenstein shot every image like an icon, and he excerpts some of the Soviet director’s work to prove the point. (Godard being Godard, he prefers the heroic failure of the banned, unfinished Bezhin Meadow to the canonical Battleship Potemkin) So at what point did cinema go from shooting ordinary people like icons – perhaps like the Greek statues Godard afforded such loving close-ups to in Contempt‘s film-within-a-film – to rendering them as the mute, faceless audience to an American star?

In order to answer this question to his satisfaction, Godard reaches back, far beyond the birth of cinema, to the nineteenth-century visual and literary culture that preceded it. He quotes Andre Malraux (who he seems to have softened on since he played one of the writer’s pro-De Gaulle speeches over a shot of a toy guillotine in Masculin Feminin) on Edouard Manet, opining that Manet’s women were the first women in the history of painting who seemed to be thinking about something unrelated to the viewer. Again, Godard matches this with a montage of close-ups showing Manet’s pensive models, and you find yourself agreeing with the point: these are the first movie-star close-ups. Other points are less immediately persuasive. I’m not wholly sure physicists agree that art is the fourth fundamental force of nature, but you know what, you do you, Jean-Luc.

The effect of all this is to define cinema not as a twentieth-century phenomenon, but as the last of the great nineteenth-century inventions. If that risks making it sound old-fashioned, that’s part of what Godard is getting at. Chapter 2A begins with Godard discussing the project with a producer. He is rendered as a figure in the shadows, alluding to but inverting the meaning of the shot of Fonda and the Vietnamese: the producer’s face is on camera, but Godard is driving. The conversation is one of the many he taped in the early ’90s when additional funding for the project came through, some of which show actors like Julie Delpy, Alain Cuny, Sabine Azema and Juliette Binoche reading out Godard’s choices of quotations. This one is not a star role. The anonymous producer (who may be an actor) butters Godard up by saying only a French New Wave director could make this project, as they straddle cinema and criticism. (Here, there is on-screen text from of one of Godard’s own 1950s articles for Cahiers du cinéma) He also ventures that no younger film-maker could do it because there are too many films now – it simply isn’t possible to know the whole of cinema any more.

This idea – that cinema, or culture in general, is now so big it’s irretrievably fractured – is one that still holds plenty of currency in our multi-screen modern world. For all it’s intended as flattery, the producer’s overtures to Godard all revolve around this idea of cinephilia as a lost world, a set of secrets we can’t recapture. Later on, the film quotes Ovid, saying that “the golden age was first, when man, yet new, knew no rules”. But Godard doesn’t believe his youth was the golden age of cinema. He may once have believed it, but now things are very different. He has come to suspect the whole medium was dead before he even learned to love it, and the reasons for this suspicion will be explored in the second half of this review, reasons that reach deep down into the subtext of Historie(s) du cinéma to reveal the series’ engagement with history, rather than just stories.

In producing this review, I’m indebted to two main sources that supplemented my own inadequate knowledge. The first is Richard Brody’s 2008 biography Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, which was controversial on its release for analysing Godard’s private life and beliefs with the same scrutiny Godard himself brings to bear on the likes of Irving Thalberg and Max Ophüls in Chapter 1A of Historie(s) du cinéma. It’s a great book, and one that’s outlasted the mostly silly criticisms levelled against it. The second is Felicity Chaplin’s additional subtitle track for this very Blu-Ray set. I’ll be discussing the other extras in the final part of this review, but Chaplin’s contribution deserves an earlier mention for indexing the many literary and historical sources Godard uses, mostly uncredited, in Historie(s) du cinéma. The audiovisual world of Historie(s) du cinéma is, as noted above, too dense for a non-French speaker – even most French speakers, actually – to understand in one sitting. But thanks to Chaplin’s work, you can start to get to grips with it in two.

GRAHAM’S ARCHIVE – HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA