Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998): review 1B – the history(s)

Among the many extras on discs two and three of Radiance Films’s Blu-Ray of Jean-Luc Godard’s Historie(s) du cinéma, there is a whole feature-length film. Chosen Moments from Histoire(s) du cinéma is exactly what it sounds like, a 2001 compression of the eight episodes into an eighty-minute film. Very good it is too; the most memorable bits of the parent series are present and correct, the unpicking and reworking of its incredibly dense montage forms new connections and associations, and the emotive power that some of the project’s admirers have claimed is present in the later instalments is more palpable at feature length. It’s certainly not dumbed down – it skips over the Golden Age Hollywood gossip of the first two episodes in favour of beginning with a discussion of Blaise Pascal’s theory of the hexagrammum mysticum – but it is an easier watch than the mammoth original. There is also something missing, however, and it’s a key part of the series’ intellectual project.

Viewers of Chosen Moments from Histoire(s) du cinéma will understand that Godard thinks cinema is dead, and that its death has something to do with the Holocaust. The technological advances cinema achieved from the 1940s onwards are specifically linked to the need to bring lightweight cameras into conflict zones. “If George Stevens hadn’t used colour 16mm in Ravensbruck”, Godard notes in a VoiceOver passage included in both versions of the project, “Elizabeth Taylor would never have found her Place in the Sun”. Both cuts contrast the flight of film stars from occupied France with the other trains leaving France for a much darker destination; the Holocaust, as Godard puts it in the final episode’s deliberate misquote of Courbet, is “the origin of the end of the world”. And of cinema: if we consider this whole project as a response to the centenary of the Lumiere brothers’ Train Arriving at a Station, this means cinema history began and ended with trains.

Episode 3A of Histoire(s) du cinéma hails the wartime photojournalist Robert Capa as a model of socially aware art, but both versions of the project dismiss the idea that wartime newsreels can be art. In the feature-length version, this seems like a straightforward exaltation of the artist’s role; the newsreel reports but does not judge, whereas cinema is a moral voice. But Godard also believes cinema has lost its voice. This is no surprise coming from someone who famously ended his apocalyptic 1967 satire Week End with the caption “Fin de cinéma”, but what is a surprise is that Godard now places the patient’s death date much earlier. If art is “like fire, born from what it burns” – as Godard claims over a fiery clip from Week End in Chapter 2B – then we should note that episode 3A states “That flame will go out in Auschwitz”.

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Part of what was on Godard’s mind here, and in a lot of his projects from the 1980s through to the 2000s, was Claude Lanzmann’s epic Holocaust documentary Shoah. Godard had been troubled for some time by the lack of filmic evidence for the plotting of the Final Solution, arguing that a cinephile like Goebbels must have tried to document it on film even if it had to be kept a secret. Now Lanzmann had made what many were calling the definitive chronicle of the Holocaust without a scrap of archive film – indeed, Lanzmann went so far as to say that if he found a new piece of documentary footage of the Holocaust, he would destroy it. It is not a coincidence that Godard’s hymn of praise to the image in the first episode plays just ahead of a clip from Shoah. He excerpts a clip from his own (great) recent film Hélàs pour moi, in which a character says “I don’t see it, and yet I’ve seen it”. Elsewhere, his voiceover restates this more sarcastically; “How marvellous to look at what we can’t see”.

The many references to nineteenth-century (and earlier) art and literature in Historie(s) du cinéma make more sense in this context. One episode begins with a long, attributed quote from Victor Hugo’s ‘For Serbia’, written in protest of the Ottoman Empire’s atrocities, played over then-current newsreel from Rwanda and Kosovo. The aggressors and victims have changed, but – more troublingly – so has the role of art. Art has been enmeshed with money since (at least) the days of the Medicis, but the nature of cinema as an industrial process means that, in the early 20th century, it could not avoid entanglement with the arms industry. “Kodak’s fortune was made with X-ray plates, not Snow White”, Godard notes. “It was logical that the film industry should first sell itself to the death industry.”

In this version of history, Godard came to cinema at a point when it was already over. The dynamism and youthful energy of the New Wave came from using the same lightweight, outdoor-friendly cameras developed for documenting the death camps. The spectre of Nazism haunts Historie(s) du cinéma in ways that may not be immediately obvious. At one point, Godard returns to the central theme of his bizarre 1987 version of King Lear by going on a quest for the first image. “It isn’t a fair image”, he notes as photographs of African tribespeople come up. He’s not wrong. The photos were taken by Leni Riefenstahl, the former Nazi propagandist who attempted a comeback in the 1970s. That attempt was the subject of Susan Sontag’s famous essay ‘Fascinating Fascism’, which accused Riefenstahl of simply transferring the Nazis’ cult of athleticism and physical feats over to Black subjects, rather than actually challenging her own racism and complicity. By excerpting the same images here, Godard is arguing that a cinema that has never interrogated its failure to confront Nazism will end up haunted by that ideology.

Episode 2B is perhaps the most sustained attempt to articulate this criticism, and it’s one where Godard’s skill with montage produces the most unforgettable effects. Hitchcock’s birds scatter ahead of an oncoming fighter jet, and the credits are replaced with a black screen and the sound of gunshots. The darkness haunts Historie(s) du cinéma. The title of Bunuel’s Belle du Jour attains an uncomfortable new resonance when it’s cited here; if beauty is by day, what happens at night? Godard declares his series is “an answer from the darkness”, and even before he’s unpacked his full thesis you know he means something darker than the cinema auditorium. Yet there is another meaning to that statement, one which is revealed in the final episode, and which is strangely beautiful and optimistic.

It all ends with the words “Shut up, Cassandra!”; Godard is well aware that no-one likes a prophet of doom. Yet there are shafts of light in the darkness. Despite punningly dubbing his original movement “Une Vague Nouvelle” – a vague novelty, rather than a new wave – Godard is sentimental towards his collaborators, not least using a clip of Breathless’s tragic star Jean Seberg playing a schizophrenic in Robert Rossen’s Lilith. A montage of intellectual heroines at the start of the final episode includes Virginia Woolf, Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt – and Godard’s own partner, Anne-Marie Miéville. Unlike Godard’s previous partners Anna Karina and Anne Wiazemsky, Mieville was not an actress, and as such is less widely recognised. Yet she stayed with him for nearly fifty years, up to his death in 2022, and had a colossal impact on his life and work. That impact can be felt in the other films in this box set, and this is what the third and final part of this review will consider.

GRAHAM’S ARCHIVE – HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA