1989 ‘Histoire(s) du cinéma 1a : toutes les histoires’ Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
A very personal look at the history of cinema directed, written and edited by Jean-Luc Godard in his Swiss residence in Rolle for ten years (1988-98); a monumental collage, constructed from film fragments, texts and quotations, photos and paintings, music and sound, and diverse readings; a critical, beautiful and melancholic vision of cinematographic art.
Germany
Berlin International Film Festival
Switzerland
France
France
Germany
Switzerland
“If George Stevens hadn’t used the first 16mm color film in Dachau, Elizabeth Taylor would never have found a place in the sun.”
Godard’s films say so much to me. They speak clearly, sometimes in an obscure and incomprehensible language, but they always make an impact. I’ve liked (or better) everything Godard so far for the earthy mystery, the foggy clarity and warm ‘Je ne sais quoi’ that he brings to the frame. A man without a clue, or a clue without a man perhaps?
This one on the other hand... I feel like I must have been asleep at the wheel, as no matter how I tried I just could not join the dots. Maybe that’s the point though. Maybe he was just messing with his audience.
Fooling around just for shits n giggles.
Oh, and there wasn’t nearly enough Anna Karina.
Please don’t revoke my cinephile card yet. I’ll keep trying.
Only the hand that erases has the power to write. Commerce tried to destroy the cinema, but the cinema was too resilient. Truth resurrected the cinema and it will keep resurrecting the cinema for all time.
Jean-Luc Godard died today. It's a real loss. I've loved his films; I've hated his films; I've been enamoured with him; I've been frustrated by him. He's a fixture. He's an icon. An iconoclast, also, but really just an icon.
As silly as it sounds, he just felt like a voice about and of cinema that would always be there. He put out The Image Book in 2018, a far from retired filmmaker with, seemingly, more to give. But it was not to be.
What better time to start this series, then?
Maybe I'm feeling overly generous to Godard at the moment, but this borderline-incomprehensible-montage-essay hit just right. For me, it's the style. I love the typography and I love…
the whole history of cinema - both in its content and its production - is sex and war. which is to say eros and thanatos. which is to say a girl and a gun. every story that has been, is, and will be.
(God)ard
Okay I take it back, THIS is the finest instance of intertextuality in all of cinema. The purest philosophic experience that cinema has to offer: a beautiful, melancholic, haunting, elegiac odyssey through cinema and by extent the history of the 20th. This is I dunno know maybe my 5th watch of this and I still haven't unpacked every reference and point that Godard is trying to make. You could argue that this is detrimental to a film that's supposed to be about telling the audience things but you're not supposed to get everything. This is a history of all the stories that were and weren't: everything is probable and everything is open to new and exciting interpretations.
First chapter of Godard's epic about the story of cinema. Story, instead of history, because his intent is to re-mythologize art, give it back the power it had for the greek. They talked about a "Holy terror" that art aroused in them, the fury of the Gods could be awaken through real poetry. Platon even wanted them out of his city because artists had the power to destroy it. Godard laments that art has fell out of the interest sphere and fights back with all of his force. If Kant thought of art for the public and Nietszche wanted art for the artists, Godard creates art for everyone.
Film as an art form is more expansive and more capable than any other that came before it, more than theater, more than painting, more than everything. Film contains within it every story that has ever been made and every story that will be made, every ideology and every opposition, and the power to immortalize and the power to forget. Because of this, the films that are not made are just as important as the films that are, as they both contain these infinities of possibility.
I think it's easy to see how this could be construed as pretentious, but "pretentiousness" assumes that someone is batting above their means in search of a meaning that has no communicability. This is certainly opaque, yes, but Godard is at the top of his fucking game here. I have no idea how you would edit this together in the analog age. That's vision, man. Unfiltered, unadulterated.
Not going to really try to untangle this until I watch all of them, but I wanted to note that I absolutely lost my shit when Godard put “CINEMA OF THE DEVIL” over that shot from Shoah - such a reductive provocation in the middle of a complicated investigation into cinema’s ability/inability to grapple with terrible human atrocity. I gotta respect it.
could not make it past 15 minutes. godard goes for the infamous french obscurantism here without realizing that at least those famously accused of such at least had the rhetoric. perhaps something occurs later on besides banal repetition but the very form of this film was killing me.
