Purchase here: https://www.caboosebooks.net/true-history-of-the-cinema
In 1978, Jean-Luc Godard improvised a series of talks for a projected video history of cinema. These talks, published in French in 1980 and long out of print, have never before been translated into English. For this volume, the faulty and incomplete French edition has been entirely revised and corrected, working from the sole videotapes of the talks.
Godard screened for his audience his own famous films of the 1960s - watching them himself for the first time since their production - alongside single reels of some of the films which most influenced his work (by Eisenstein, Rossellini, the American directors of the 1950s and many others). Working at the dawn of the video age, a technology…
Purchase here: https://www.caboosebooks.net/true-history-of-the-cinema
In 1978, Jean-Luc Godard improvised a series of talks for a projected video history of cinema. These talks, published in French in 1980 and long out of print, have never before been translated into English. For this volume, the faulty and incomplete French edition has been entirely revised and corrected, working from the sole videotapes of the talks.
Godard screened for his audience his own famous films of the 1960s - watching them himself for the first time since their production - alongside single reels of some of the films which most influenced his work (by Eisenstein, Rossellini, the American directors of the 1950s and many others). Working at the dawn of the video age, a technology essential to his completion of the project many years later, as the visual essay Histoire(s) du cinéma, Godard projected pieces of 35mm film in an auditorium to approximate the historical montage he was groping towards. He then held forth, in an experience he describes as a form of 'public psycho-analysis', on his personal and professional relationships (with François Truffaut, Anna Karina, Raoul Coutard), working methods, aesthetic preferences, political beliefs and, on the cusp of 50, his philosophy of life.
The result is the most extensive and revealing account ever of his work and critical opinions. Never has Godard been as loquacious, lucid and disarmingly frank as he is here. This volume is certain to become one of the great classics of film literature, by perhaps the wittiest and most idiosyncratic genius the cinema has ever known.
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PREFACE
In the fall of '78 Serge Losique, director of the conservatory of Cinematographic Art in Montreal, which had hosted Henri Langlois the year before, suggested that I continue the work Langlois had begun.
Rather than giving a course like those found in every university in the world today, I proposed to Losique we look at the affair as a business affair, as a kind of co-production that would be a sort of script for a possible series of films entitled: introduction to a true history of cinema and television. True in the sense that it would be made out of images and sounds and not texts, even illustrated ones. All the more so because I had had this project with Langlois.
The script was thus divided into several chapters or voyages (ten) with a budget of 10,000 Canadian dollars per chapter, divided between the Conservatory and the film company I am a part of, Sonimage.
On each trip I brought with me a little of my story and plunged back into it at a rate of two of my films at the end of each month. But often the bathwater brought out something other than what my memory had recorded. The reason for this was that in the morning we screened pieces of films from the history of cinema which back then were connected for me with what I was doing. And I commented on it all on the spot in front of three or four Canadians who were just as lost as I was in this history.
Then everything came to a halt, as Losique had financial difficulties and was writing Sonimage rubber cheques and then none at all. But just the same, he was bold enough to break new ground, and nobody's perfect.
Jean-Luc Godard, 1980
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