"If a man walked through paradise in dreams," says Jean-Luc Godard at the tail end of this magnum opus, "and received a flower as a sign of his visit," (quoting Borges, who was quoting Coleridge) "and found the flower in his hand when he woke up, what can we say? I was this man."

Baffled though I am about where to begin with this Brobdingnagian autobio-essay-doc, I did find that coda pretty affecting. It's immediately preceded by text reading "USINE DE RÊVE" ("dream factory") which renders the story's cine-metaphor fairly explicit. (I recall "USINE" cropping up repeatedly in Numéro Deux, too. Handy word for critiquing capitalism, that.) In Histoire(s) du cinéma, the audience is made to dream along with Godard,…

Finally got through all of it. Too much to even process at the moment but, like Joyce (to whom this is inevitably, correctly compared), total comprehension is, I expect, impossible while an overall effect slowly worms its way into those who see it through. (And I imagine what one gets from it the first time will change with every viewing.) On this first go, I was most stuck by later chapters, mainly because I'd started to work out (or at least theorize) the meaning of some recurrent imagery, plus the episodes narrowed in focus. I was especially taken with Fatale Beauté (with its imagistic excoriation of the dominant male gaze of cinema, suggesting that femmes are fatalities in movies far…

This eight-part series on the history/story of cinema/the 20th century would have been less than opaque if I spoke French--the subtitles covered much of the spoken parts (but not, infuriatingly, all) but none of the text that appeared on screen. I took to keeping Google Translate open to try to follow along with some of the collage of word and image, but I'm not fast enough. It might also have been more clear if I understood every reference Godard was making here. This suspicion came to me as the words "Rebel Without a Cause" appeared on screen juxtaposed with images from The Gospel According to St. Matthew, a connection that I realized I would not have necessarily gotten prior to…

Episódio 3A, La monnaie de l'absolu:

Tudo isto para dizer: o que faz com que em 40, 45, não tenha havido cinema de resistência? Não que não tenha havido filmes de resistência, à direita, à esquerda, aqui e ali. Mas o único filme, no que diz respeito ao cinema, que resistiu à ocupação do cinema pela América, a uma certa maneira uniforme de fazer cinema, foi um filme italiano. Não é por acaso. A Itália foi o país que menos se abateu, que muito sofreu, mas que traiu duas vezes, e que portanto sofreu por ter perdido a identidade. E se a reencontrou com Roma città aperta, foi porque o filme foi feito por pessoas sem uniforme. Foi a única…

I have had this film on my watchlist for ages but have been hesitant to commit as friends have told me it was almost impossibly dense and impenetrable (and long). However, I am getting close to being able to tick off on the complete Jean-Luc Godard filmography and a very old and wise friend (i.e. her views on films pretty much align with mine) suggested approaching it as I would James Joyce's Ulysses or, more relevantly, Finnegan's Wake. A couple of days after we had that conversation, it was on the returns trolley at my local library and I can recognise an omen when it jumps up waving its arms in front of me.

You could tie yourself up in…

Godard, recibiendo el Premio Adorno en 1995: «Mi idea, ustedes la adivinan, súper ambiciosa, que Michelet no consiguió, incluso cuando hacía su grandiosa Historia de Francia -esa Sixtina de la historia-, mi idea es que la historia está sola, está lejos del hombre. Fernand Braudel menciona algo de este tipo cuando dice que hay [...] una historia lejana que nos acompaña a pasos lentos...». Y Braudel ha escrito en un libro: «la historia es la suma de todas las historias posibles: una colección de oficios y de puntos de vista, de ayer, de hoy y de mañana». Histoire(s) du cinéma es la tentativa cinematográfica de hacer la historia total, el conjunto de historias. Los 266 minutos que la componen son incomprensibles…

It has been a long time since I spent those many hours in my formative cinephile years with Godard’s earlier films, but I believe I am now much more drawn to Godard’s late-period collage work than many of his beloved 1960s films. Often, the elements I remember from Godard’s earlier films revolve around his own playful historicizing of (often Hollywood) cinema. Something remains invigorating about those early narrative films and their attempts to both reproduce and subvert the cinema he loved as a young critic, but his later work – especially his archival filmmaking that he is beginning to explore here – allows Godard’s interests as filmmaker, critic and historian to begin to more explicitly merge.

With Histories, Godard is…