"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…

As Godard grew older, it seems that his cinema grew mor abstract. His early films were already unconventional but what he is doing recently is definitely not the norm.

"Histoire(s) du cinéma" follows this trend. It is not a documentary for those looking to understand the evolution of cinema as an art. It is full of references to other films, it explores their meaning but it is not clear. Images from different films are juxtaposed next to each other. Dialogues, music, etc..., everything is bungled upo in a single work. Is there any meaning to Jean Cocteau's "The Blood of a Poet" followed by "Snow White"?

I'm not sure if I found any meaning, other than the fact that for…

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…

March Around The World Challenge 8/30 France

I thought it wasn't going to happen again, but it did. Histoire(s) du Cinema is in my sincere opinion one of the absolute greatest films ever made; top tier, top shelf! I thought I was never going to have another experience with a film in which it immediately made it's greatness apparent and stormed my top 10 by force. But voila!

How fitting that the first film to completely knock me over like that in a long time is a film about film. Histoire(s) du Cinema though isn't merely a film about film's, nor is it a film about film in the same way something like 8 1/2 is or Adaptation.; no this…

The “inner monologue” as a literary method of abolishing the distinction between subject and object in the exposition of the hero’s experiences in crystallised form is first observed in literature and dated by researchers to 1887 in the work of Edouard Dujardin, Les Lauriers sont coupés.

As a theme, as a world-view, as a “feeling”, an object of description but not a method of it, one can of course find it even earlier. “Sliding” from the subjective to the objective and back is especially characteristic of the writing of the Romantics: E.T.A. Hoffmann, Novalis, Gérard de Nerval (on the latter see René Bizet’s La Double Vie de Gérard de Nerval).

But as a method of literary style, rather than plot…

Rewatch. Previous review here:

Jean-Luc Godard’s eight-part film essay on the 20th century and the story of film is very much an experimental piece of work, less Mark Cousins and more Chris Marker. That being said, this is quintessentially Godardian; a beautifully mediative, metaphorical and ambitious technical and academic poem, brimming with the youthful innovation of his earlier work, particularly in the 1960s, and devoid of the bland pretentiousness that populated some of his later efforts, like Film Socialisme (Goodbye to Language and The Image Book are a step forward in the right direction). My favourite section is in part seven, in which Godard muses about the purpose of film, whilst Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic film images fill the screen.

N.B.…

As Godard grew older, it seems that his cinema grew mor abstract. His early films were already unconventional but what he is doing recently is definitely not the norm.

"Histoire(s) du cinéma" follows this trend. It is not a documentary for those looking to understand the evolution of cinema as an art. It is full of references to other films, it explores their meaning but it is not clear. Images from different films are juxtaposed next to each other. Dialogues, music, etc..., everything is bungled upo in a single work. Is there any meaning to Jean Cocteau's "The Blood of a Poet" followed by "Snow White"?

I'm not sure if I found any meaning, other than the fact that for…