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See Jean-Louis Leutrat

Histoireis) du cinema ou

comment devenir martre d un

souvenir Cinematheque no 5

(19941 pp 19-2 4 [on the first

part of Chapter 1AI Jacques

Aumont Beaute fatal soup

note sor un episode des

Histotreis} du cin&ma

Cinematheque no 12 (1998)

pp 17- 25 Ion Chapter 2B) and

James S Williams Beyond the

cinematic body human emotion

vs digita l technology in Jean Luc

Godard s Histoireisl du cinema

in Scon Brewster and JohnJoughin leds) Thinking the

Inhuman (Manchester

Manchester University Press

forthcoming 1999] (on Chapter

1BI On October 6 1995 Le

Monde ISupplement livres

pp x KI) published transcripts of

a round table discussion on

Histoiretsl held between writers

historians and philosophers such

as Jacques Ranciere and Giorgio

Agamben during the 1995 Lugano

Film Festival at which Godardwas present

among others in a vast flux of images and stills, sounds andsensations, culled from Hollywood and European cinema andnewsreels, from spoken and written texts, music, paintings, drawings,cartoons, computer graphics, and so on

At the risk of gross oversimplification, Godard's principal thesis inHistoireis) is that cinema reneged on its duty to represent reality

Originally conceived as a screening or 'projection' of the real,cinema was a democratic experience, since it allowed people thechance to project themselves into the world and so rediscover it in amoment of pure vision. Yet cinema quickly became obsessed withthe need for spectacle, abdicating its documentary power andpotential for engendenng new ideas and sensations in favour of twovery familiar stone s: sex and death Co mm erce soon took over and,with the arnval of the usurping, illegitimate tyrant known as thetalkie, cinema began to lie - even 'forgetting' to film the Naziconcentration camps. In Godard's way of thinking, it is a short step

from this moment of cnminal neglect to the current tyranny of masscommunications and 'culture', where the freedom and art of cinemahave all but been destroyed. The postwar movements of ItalianNeoreahsm (in particular Roberto Rossellini) and the FrenchNouvelle Vague, along with the exceptional figure in Amencancinema of Alfred Hitchcock (for Godard the 'absolute master' - seeJonathan Rosenbaum's exploration of Godard's critical view ofHitchcock in this dossier), provide rare moments of professionalpnde and nostalgia in what is essentially a tragic narrative of wasteand shame.

It is still too early to assess the full implications and complexitiesof Godard's histonographic work. Apart from a few close readingsof early chapters, much of the critical work onHistoire(s) producedthus far has been fairly general, as critics have tried simply to takestock of each new instalment of matenal and of Godard's extensiverunning commentary on the project5 The November 1998 specialissue of the French Art Press, intended as a 'guide' to the completedwork, brought together a vanety of French, German and US filmtheorists, philosophers and independent filmmakers, and demonstratedthe wide interdisciplinary interest in Histoire(s)

That said, it is clear that Histoire(s) invites specific theoreticalapproaches. An exclusively historical perspective would need tocompare Godard's notion of history with the methodologicalbreakthroughs of Fernand Braudel and Michel Foucault, whom heinvokes as kindred spints working in the fields of economic andepistemological history. It would show that by mixing cinema andfilm cnticism Godard is situating himself in a long and noble line ofFrench filmmakers who doubled up as historians of cinema (such asLouis Delluc and Rene Clair), as well as distancing himself from

traditional film histonans, such as Georges Sadoul, who tend toreproduce the same events in the same order, albeit with different

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found / this flower / in his hands / what's to say / then / I wasthat man)

See Gavin Smith s 1996 interview

wi th Godard in David Sterritt led )

Jean Luc Godard Interviews

(Mississippi Mississippi

University Press 19981

pp 179-93 188 Jacques

Aumont has explored at length

Godard s status as a painter in

i Oeil interminable cinema et

pemture IPans Seguier 19891

pp 223-47

El le Faure Histoire de I art

(Pans Livre de Poche 1964)

It is, in fact, the role and status of painting inHistoire(s) that Iwould like to consider now, for Godard has talked of the texture ofthe project expressly in terms of 'painting history' and 'purepainting' ' This will lead necessanly to a discussion of Godard'svideographic style.

Painting/history

The title and multiple structure ofHistoire(s) invites immediate linkswith Elie Faure's magnum opus,Histoire de I'art* and Faure, ofcourse, has always been a point of artistic reference for Godard,notably in Pierrot le fou (1965). However, Histoire(s) also forms a

direct relationship with Andre Malraux's four-part examination of theevolution of art, Les Voix du silence. The title of Chapter 3A, forexample, is taken from that of the final part of Malraux's study, 'LaMonnaie de l'absolu' (literally, 'The change [as in exchange, orbarter] of the absolute', although officially translated as 'The twilightof the abso lute') In addition , the long sequence in Chap ter 3B aboutcinema as the museum of the real harks back to the first part ofLesVoix du Silence, 'Le Musee imaginaire'. There are many points ofcomparison and difference between Malraux and Godard in terms oftheir relationship to art, and I will mention only the most pertinent to

this discussion Go dard , unlike Malraux , focuses almost exclusivelyon post-mediaeval art which he considers necessanly western becauseof its origins in the Church. Like Malraux, however, Godard seesPicasso as representing the end of one of the great chapters ofhumanity and artistic creation, and indeedHistoire(.s) treads nofurther into modern art than Nicolas de Stael and Francis Bacon,artists who still retain some notion of the figure and are on this sideof full abstraction It is G od ard 's view that once art entered therealm of abstraction and lost figurative contact with the histoncal real(a scheme familiar in art history), it was left to cinema to provide it.

Malraux puts this a little differently: that art became abstract oncecinema arnved and proceeded to usurp art's function of portrayingmovement and fiction (he makes a specific link between the filmicsuccession of shots and the style of the Baroque ) Either w ay,painting passed on to cinema a moral and ethical obligation, one thatdefined western morality itself, and an obligation of which cinemabecame the last representative. Hence photography first assumed thecolours of mourning - black and white - because it had effectivelyextracted life from the real (Techn icolor, in all its dazz le, wishedonly to forget that fact.) Yet cinema's moral imperative quicklydisappeared as the medium became subject to commerce. It was only


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For the best illustration of

Godard s views on the nature

and evolution of an and cinema

see Jean-Luc Godard rencontre

Regis Debray in Bergala led )

Godard par Godard II pp

423-31

10 See Philippe Sollers II y 3 des

fantomes plem I ecran

(interview wtth Antome de

Baecque and Serge Toubianal

ies Cartiers du cinema no 513

119971 pp 39-48 42

during those odd moments when the cinematic image recovered itsdocumentary status, as in the small amount of footage taken of theconcentration camps, that cinema honoured its moral dimension andredeemed itself, in the process acquiring the status of true art.Godard states in Chapter 1A, quoting Malraux. 'le seul art qui ait eteventablement populaire retrouve la peinture, c'est-a-dire ce qui renait

dans ce qui a ete brule' ("the only art which was truly popularregains painting, that is to say art, that is, what is reborn in what hasbeen burnt ' )9

In Histoire(s) Godard is in genuine awe of painting and art, and inparticular of certain works like Picasso's 'Guernica', inspired by realand traumatic historical events, because, in their 'thereness' and'completeness', they possess this resurrecting power at everymom ent Indeed, only exceptiona l filmmakers such as Dreyer andHitchcock can, according to Godard, be said to have filmed'mi rac les ' Part of the problem for cinem a, of course , is that it is too

connected to the real by virtue of recording it, and thus comesdirectly under the influence of death. It is death at work, and sincethe story of the twentieth century is one of war and the camps, thereis literally an overkill of death. The faces caught in early newsreelsare like disembodied ghosts in Godard's machine, and they set upthrough repetition, overlap and relay endless cycles of mourning, apathos only heightened by the fact that the very material of film,nitrate, is steadily decomposing

Yet it is Godard's central aim in Histoire(s) to privilege andcelebrate the resurrecting potential of film, the process wherebycinema, like the painting of Edouard Manet (the subject of a smallstudy in Chapter 3A framed in the context of Georges Bataille),sacrifices the real by putting it to death and then mourning it.Although 'killed off, how ever, the real does not totally disappea r,since the sacrifice returns the real to us and allows us to regainaccess to it The projected image is effectively resurrected into light,and this is perhaps the main significance of the statement attributedto Saint Paul which Godard repeatedly cites inHistoire(s) 'L ' imageviendra au temps de la resurrection' (The image will come at thetime of the resurrection'). Yet given that Godard is dealing explicitlywith history in Histoire(s), how can a wake for the real and the deadbe converted into rapture? Which is to say, how can Histoire(s)become more than simply what Philippe Sollers has called, withregard to the project, 'the barter of cinema', that is, a negativeillustration of the 'enormous fantasmagona' that must be undergonebefore a 'true', transcendent work of painting can be successfullycompleted '" The key here is montage, which for Godard constitutesstyle and, thereby, video's ethical and moral code.


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History/montage

Godard's online video editing in Histoire(s) has been well describedby Cynl Beghin as a poetics of fragmentation and animation that

11 cyni Beghm invention de embraces both the synthesis and analysis of movement." It rangesanimation Art fres* tw* senc j r o m the spotting and flashing of images to their supenmposition and

(November 1998) pp 52-7 . . . . i r i j

absorption through the uneven use of slow-motion, fading in andfading out, fast-forwarding and rewinding, often with equivalentprocesse s on the soundtrack Figures from different im ages underg osimilar motions and vibrations, and thus each image is opened up toothers, with the result that they lose their referential and mimeticforce The effect is enhance d by G od ard 's comple te disregard for theoriginal intertitles of the silent films which he cites (the only titlesused are his own), as well as by the overlay of his rhetoricalstructures, in particular the chiasmus, as in the repeated refrain,Thistoire de la solitude/solitude de Phistoire' ('the history ofsolitude/the solitude of history'). The typewritten titles have theeffect of being ideograms, a fact which serves to highlight the act ofenunciation rather than the statement itself, and encourages slippagefrom the seman tic level to the phoneti c Th e net effect is that theviewer is totally denied the chance to participate by means ofidentification in the extracted sequences of film because the originalprocesses of suture are never allowed to take hold.

One of the key motifs of Histoire(s), and indeed of much ofGodard's later work, is Robert Bresson's statement inNotes sur leanematographe that if an image expresses something too clearly andindependently (in the manner of a single painting), it will neithertransform itself on contact with other images nor exert a mutual

12 Robert Bresson Notes sm le inf luence o n them.1 2 In fact it is the almost magical , Surreal is tcmematographeiPamGaiiimard unpredictability of Godard's videographic montage that reverses the

otherwise overwhelming autonomy of painting and converts it ascinematic 'barter', thus creating a general equivalence and equality ofterms. This encapsulates the principle of collage which, whether fullymotivated and supremely modernist (the cubism of Braque andPicasso, the bncolage of Levi-Strauss) or postmodernist anddeconstructive (Derndean 'graft '), destroys notions of uniqueness,purity and hierarchy The video screen ofHistmre(s) becomes apalimpsestic space of inscription, with images acquiring the fleeting,material status of a trace and phantom. Hence, if Godard sometimeslikens his work to that of a painter due to the physicality ofmontage, it is montage as collage - operating on the boundarybetween word and image and attacking the 'integrity" of painting -that best defines the nature of his editing practice.

In short, Godard achieves in Histoire(s) what he has beenattempting for a long time: to dissolve the solidified word and so

arrive (to use the terms of Prenom Carmen/First Name Carmen[ 1983]), at a stage avant le nom (before the name) - pure sound -

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13 In Godard par Godard IIpp 401-7

14 Je

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15 See Resistance de I art

lintervie w with Gilles Perraultl in

Godard par Godard \\ pp 443-6

444

16 See Mar ie Jose Mondzam

Histoire et passion Art Press

Ihors senel (November 1998)

pp 91-8

emphasizes elsewhere that only a Christian country like Italy couldretrieve its identity so successfully in the image and be rebornthrough it." It is as though the history of a new cinematic movementmust necessarily enact a major transformation according to thenarrative of the Passion, whereby the incarnation of the imageconstitutes a redemption of the visible by God, who through His

Passion saves the fallen image This explains, perhap s, the attentionGodard gives here and throughout Histoire(s) to the agony in RomeOpen City of the Communist Manfredi's torture by the Nazis afterrefusing to speak. As Mane-Jose Mondzain has argued, the momentwhen Italy saw its own image was a cinematic gesture of historicalincarnation, one that also originally occurred in the USA (cinemaproviding the new country with an account of its history, the story ofits birth and industrial progress).16 But of course in today"scommodified, global hyper-present, the image no longer has thepun ty or power that once justified R oss elh ni's famous statement

'reality is there, why manipulate it?'. The only means left for videoto perform anything remotely like an equivalent style of gesture (Isay 'style' because the national scale of Italian Neoreahsm is againimpossible to duplicate) is through the development of historicalmontage. Indeed, Chapter 3A ends with a stunningly simple buteffective act of montage that brings together Pasohni (a black andwhite photograph) and the Italian Renaissance (a detail of Piero dellaFrancesca's fresco 'Legend of the True Cross') at the turning pointof a chiastic inversion: 'une pensee qui forme/une forme qui pense'('a thought that forms/a form that thin ks') G oda rd's insistence on

the transaesthetic dimension of montage as a form of absolute returnsus inevitably to Malraux, whose history of art is also specifically thehistory of the metamorphosis of forms and attempts to bring allartistic forms - secular and sacred - under the transhistoncalumbrella of the Absolute, defined by Malraux as any authenticconfrontation by human beings with a sense of their own finitudeand death.

17 Bernard Eisenschitz w ho was

asked by Godard to track down

the film references in Histoirelst

talks of his work and of the

creative errors and ruptures

produced in the video in Une

machine a montrer I invisible

conversation avec Bernard

Eisenschitz a propos des

Histoiretsl du on6ma Les

Cahiers du cinema no 529

11998) pp 52-6

Histoire(s) the 'book'

These, then, are the aesthetic, historical and even religious stakes ofHistoire(s), and they raise the question of the nature and status of the'boo k' which Godard propose s as an 'anti-art boo k' Certainly it isno mere reference work for the video, since the lists of films, writersand photographers provided at the back of each volume areincomplete and do not always observe the actual order ofappeara nce Mo reover, no attempt is made to identify the paintingsand other art works, which may illustrate again Godard's wish toneutralize the power of painting." Godard, who oversaw the wholeprocess of the book's production, preserves as much as possible of

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18 Jean-Luc Godard C es! le

cinema qui raconte I histoire Lu

seul le pouvail te Monde

October 8 1998 p 33

the original syntax and rhythms, although only the major voiceoverpassages and written texts are retained in their entirety, and certainsequences of images are sometimes shuffled out of order and lackcrucial elements. In Le Monde, Godard presented the book as aseries of 'archives' lifted directly from the video's 'archaeologicalenquiry', or 'ultrasound scan", of History " In fact, new patterns and

links emerge between images of varying size facing each other onthe double page, as well as between blocks of typewritten text whichare often fragme nted (notably in the case of poetic verse) It is clear,however, that the book completes the major levelling processundertaken in the video by rendering equally fiat all the variouskinds of image featured (film, photography, painting, video, archive,cartoon, newsreel, documentary, advert, book-cover, intertitle). Yetcan one not say, too, that these strangely calm, hybrid images ofdistilled energy retrieved from the noise of the machine - imageswhich cover the entire range of artificially modulated colour,

brightness, hue and contrast - represent another stage in the processof sublimation, of mourning and redeeming the real, that we havetraced in the video9 For have they not been liberated and, as it were,resurrected on to the page transhistoncally, if only in the sense thatthey all bear the mark of their impersonal history and evolution inGodard's memory machine9 In which case, might not the 'book' beregarded as a further stage in the continuing metamorphosis offorms, one that actually 'sacrifices' the video ofHistoire(s) just asthe latter 'sacrificed' cinema in order to recuperate it as aninstrument of thought?

The answers to these different questions are far from certain, butsimply to pose them is to acknowledge that Godard has now movedfar beyond the cliche of the death of cinema, and the position heheld in the 1970s and early 1980s on a deadly battle between videoand cinema, Cain and Abel (see Michael Witt 's dissection ofG oda rd's 'death of cinem a' discourse in this dossier) InHistoire(s)he reveals the radical potential of video as a transmutation of allimages and sounds combined, and thus as a privileged site ofexperimentation, creativity and philosophical reflection. To reviseDeleu ze, 'la video nous pense ' ( 'video thinks us') W hateveraesthetic status it may ultimately achieve (and this will be the subjectof much critical discussion and debate),Histoire(s) du cmemaalready offers a unique artistic and intellectual resource forunderstanding the signs amongst us

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