Director / writer / editor / narrator: Jean-Luc Godard
Photography: Pierre Binggeli, Hervé Duhamel
With: Alain Cuny, Sabine Azema, Serge Daney, Julie Delpy, Juliette Binoche
Probably the first thing to decide about director / everything Jean-Luc Godard's epic and deeply personal TV miniseries documentary is how you're going to look at it. It's another long one in total—four and a half hours. The first of eight parts is 52 minutes and was broadcast in 1988. The second is 42 minutes, broadcast in 1989. The next two parts, under 30 minutes each, were broadcast in 1997, and the last four in 1998. All of those are also under 30 minutes, except the eighth and last, which is 38 minutes. I don't recommend taking 10 years to look at it, to replicate the original. In fact, the way I did it the first time, a few years ago, now seems better: stick the first of two discs in the machine one day, hit "Play All," and let it roll for over two hours. Do it again the next day with the second disc. That way it's more trippy, undulating, and immersive. I could never even pick apart the individual episodes. Thinking that was somehow wrong, I wanted to be a little more rigorous for this write-up. I tried to get some sense of the integrity (or even specific point) of each episode, noted the titles and confusing numbering system, and avoided "Play All," spreading the eight pieces across three days.
That first time I saw Histoire(s) du cinéma I was surprised and delighted by the saturation of classic film clips, with memorable scenes from The Searchers, The Night of the Hunter, Bicycle Thieves, Nosferatu, etc., including a few from Godard's own pictures. They are recognizable, and often recognizable as wonderful, even as they may also be lost in the gloomy welter of other images, a muttering voiceover, floating words, clacking typewriter sounds, and editing effects such as flashing dissolves. In fact, the profusion of clips is all I remembered about it the first time. I thought that's what it mostly was. This second time I was more aware what a churning internal cerebral explosion it is, a kind of stroke event, personal and thus incoherent. I came away with the sense there was little point in even trying to separate the episodes, and this time the clips felt drowned in the rest, which actively resists understanding, a cacophony of words, literally words, and images, photographs, film clips, and some shots of Godard at work. Toward the end of Histoire(s) du cinéma, in the eighth part, Godard articulates his aesthetic in a throwaway line. It has actually been a constant across much of his career: "This is what I like about cinema, generally speaking," he grumbles like Henry Kissinger. "A saturation of wonderful signs, that swim in the light of their lack of explanation."
The "Play All" route was more entertaining and enjoyable so that's what I'll try next time and what I recommend for anyone approaching this strange behemoth. Despite my misgivings about such projects—and Godard—I do think there could be a next time. Godard's abilities as a filmmaker are as apparent here as ever, perhaps more so. He was in his 60s when he worked on most of it and in many ways it has the perspective of a person that age—marked by an obvious and natural understanding for what he has studied all his life, slightly bitter about public inattention or the way things have turned out, and with surprising bolts of nostalgia. He's like one of those Renaissance men in the 17th century, fuddled by the coming of science and the Enlightenment and the impossibility of knowing everything after all. Life was simpler when all you had to know was The Searchers and John Wayne scooping up Natalie Wood to take her home, a scene that recurs continually across these episodes.
There are also numerous scenes of Godard working at a keyboard that produces typewriter clacking sounds in a distracting time-delayed way (is that some early computer word processor?) and many more of him working at an editing console. The editing console seems to represent something almost sacred to Godard, it is as if he's at an altar worshipping as he works. He loves the scratch noises the film makes as the machine fast-forwards and rewinds to the frame he seeks. Some of these scenes are shot so we can make out the shadowy images themselves on the film being edited and somehow, infectiously, it's as thrilling to us as it is to him, like scenes from Blow Out.
On this second viewing, the miniseries felt unfriendly and alienating, more like Godard's throwdown at a kind of Rorschach test of cinema, with the confusing assault of words, usually in French, swimming in the light of their lack of explanation: film titles, subtitles for spoken words, subtitles for the floating words, and missing subtitles, operating with an inscrutable syntax. The title itself is a play on words and meaning, riffing off the similarity of the words "story" and "history" (fortunately for us it is paralleled somewhat in English, as the English word "history" reaches back to Greek by way of Latin for its origin) and coupling that in the parenthetical with the indeterminism of singular and plural. I'm not sure it works. The story / history thing (which he really hammers in this) has seemed clichéd since feminism reminded us at least a century ago it's "his story" and the parenthetical reminded me of the insurance industry locution "(re)insurance," which seems like a ridiculous way to say "insurance or reinsurance."
This baffling wash of language is also a constant in Godard's movies, these swirling concatenations of image and words and dialogue, often all three on separate or even multiple tracks each. Perhaps it grew even worse (or more intense, to be generous) over time, as his contemptuous so-called Navajo subtitles for the 2010 Film Socialisme would appear to suggest. I got the sense the Olive Films DVD I looked at was made specifically for an English language audience, that there are unique edits for other languages. I also have the sense Godard feels anyone who doesn't understand all the languages he uses cannot possibly understand his work. In some ways he's probably right—he's a bit like Ezra Pound that way (who IMDb says is in here somewhere). At this point I'm often sorry I don't have more languages. So in that way Godard often feels heartless to me; I feel the charge of his contempt. In that way, Histoire(s) du cinéma feels almost like a matter of being good enough to see, rather than the usual other way round. Is it worth seeing? That's the wrong question. Are you worth seeing it? I think this may be a key reason I'm never quite comfortable with Godard pictures, and even resent them a little, but at the same time, with equanimity, the challenge may be good for me too. Or maybe that's just the Calvinist in me talking.
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