Histoire(s) du cinéma Toutes les histoires (1989–1999) Online

This is the first of eight short works which make up Histoire(s) Du Cinema, all of which are available in one box set in England and France. I am going to discuss all eight of the shorts as one unit, so my comments may be about any in the series.

First off, I am not a cheerleader for Godard. Some of his films are wonderful but too many of them are overflowing with his ego. Histoire(s) Du Cinema consists of a collage of film clips (mostly unidentified), art prints, and quotations from literature cut together with shots of Godard sitting at a typewriter, perusing his library, endlessly smoking, and muttering his long-winded comments, most of them not related to what we are watching. I have always felt that Godard is not as clever as he thinks he is and someone who really was that clever would nail Godard. I'm not such a person although I did spot one incorrect statement (Lot's wife was turned to a pillar of salt, not his daughters). As for most of Godard's commentary I had to contend with just not being on his intellectual wavelength. Whether that is his fault or mine is open to debate. Quick quiz: what do, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Blood of a Poet, Au Hasard Balthazar, and Salo, the 120 Days of Sodom, all have in common? Got me but Godard strings their images together, one after the other.

Reservations aside, Histoire(s) Du Cinema is worth watching. Godard clearly loves films. The first couple entries didn't grab me, but the middle portions are well done. The third ("Le Seul Le Cinema") and the fifth ("La Monnaie De L'Absolu"), in particular, stand out. The uses of Open City and Night of the Hunter made me want to watch those films again. The fifth episode builds to a loving montage of Italian cinema which would be hard for a cinephile not to love. There are other moving excerpts throughout the series: Major Ambersons' dying speech, the woman climbing the stairs to Destiny, the superimposing of hallways from Paisan and Beauty and the Beast. The only problem with these clips is that I often wished I was watching those films instead of Histoire(s) Du Cinema.

A potential viewer should not expect the linear (or entertaining) quality of the Martin Scorsese film documentaries. These are experimental films and not a collection of short documentaries. Histoire(s) Du Cinema is certainly full of itself and, yet, despite that, I was glad to have watched it. If nothing else, the film gave me recommendations for other films that (at least in their clips) appear to be stunning. Of course, tracking them down would have been easier had Godard included their titles. Oh well.

More will follow as I unravel the tangled web, for now I write this about the first two entries: Histoire(s) du cinéma: Toutes les histoires (1988) Histoire(s) du cinéma: Une histoire seule (1989)

We find several premises here, but let's begin with this. Cinema as successor of photography, that inherits its right to depict reality but also the duty. With time we tend to forget or forgive, our memory of what was real is altered by the experience of the present, but something captured on celluloid is true as it was. Holocaust images shake as profoundly as they did, if not as vividly. When I wrote about Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera, I talked about the beginning of time proper, of the present narrative. We can cobble together a view of the historic past from disparate sources, but never before the invention of the photographic lens did we have the living document. People, places, life, we see them as they truly were.

However much we mull this over, we understand the filmed image can shape worlds, for better or worse. On the subject I share Godard's wonder, is the camera morally complicit to what it sees and does it merely reproduce or originate reality. For Dziga Vertov this was a mostly political concern, how we can escape the troublesome fluctuations of the soul and transform into machine-like precision. The devoted workers of his Symphonia Donbassa were model heroes of this, the film was their paean. For me, it's mostly a poetic issue, is what I see what I see or is there better way of seeing.

Godard attempts to untangle the thread from the beginning.

In Toutes les Histoires, he contrasts Hollywood, the beast of Babylon, the dream factory, with Soviet Russia, the system that crumbled trying to imagine too many dream factories. The American starlets with the faces of peasants, the airy and sexual with the solemn. A girl and a gun is enough to make a film, that is sex and death are the primal urges. My question, do we come to the movies to exorcise them are to be further numbed? In the subsequent film, he revolves around the axis that "cinema is not art, it's hardly even a technique". To this extent, he shows us clips from those silent stag films, perhaps the first blow job captured for all time on celluloid. This may seem contradictory, utterly ridiculous, especially considering the importance he places on making movies, which he seems to elevate to the position of a surrogate raison d'etre. "Ergo, cognito, cinema" as he says elsewhere in the film. It is, likely, a Socratic interrogation.

I like that Godard subjects cinema to completely contrasting viewpoints, cinema that shapes realities and cinema as a disposable object, that he examines it from all angles to see if he can discern a full outline. Posing these questions, we can formulate a better evaluation but also fine-tune the very process of evaluating.

Where does all this get us after 1,5 hours then, how are we any wiser for watching the films? The answer for me is none at all, and part of the problem is again Godard himself.

He can be seen quoted or quoting from books the most vacant banalities, for example "change nothing, so that everything is different". He conflates the tired thought that TV killed cinema with the realization that it brings the world inside our living-room yet paradoxically narrows our horizons. He tells us that almighty producer Irving Thalberg was "the founding stone, the only son", because he had so many movies at his hands. Now and then, footage of Hitler or Mussolini creep in, James Stewart in Vertigo, dedications to John Cassavetes and Glauber Rocha. A photo of Hitchcock with arms extended cut with footage of damsels in distress, a devious puppeteer plying his trade.

I touched on this again in one of my previous Godard threads, this sense of dichotomy I get from Godard, between a feverish intellectual who places too much importance in cinema to completely abandon it and a satisfied bourgeois who really has little incentive to keep making it.

The importance here is of almost spiritual proportions. Seeing the powers of his intellect circling and burrowing in search of meaning inside the very limited field of cinema has an almost comical effect for me. It seems that for him every small truth about life can be discovered in something that is related to movies.

I mean, the two reels of film in a projector, one that spools and the other that unspools, are called the "slave" and the "master". Can't you almost sense the gleeful satisfaction when Godard was first told, how satisfying it must be for him as political metaphor?

A work of breathtaking vapidity and exemplary foolishness, this is the PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE of the "Art Cinema," sans the unintentional humor. But HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA is terribly silly and, like all the directors' films not nearly as intelligent as it assumes itself to be (remember that we're speaking of a man who once took Maoism seriously - for years!). So, let's see... a series of random images - old still photos, grainy video of classic films - coupled with mumbled voice-over, grating sound effects, and so many flashing title cards that prove that Godard can spell. Those who would seek the meaning and profundity here are on a fool's errand. Anyone who hopes to learn a single thing about the history of cinema will find no hope in this four and a half hours of remorseless buffoonery.

Tragically, in this life people very often simply refuse to see what's in front of them. Anyone with any common sense and a genuine love for the medium can see that this series is shoddy, narcissistic, incoherent, and more than a little insane, within the first ten minutes of the first episode. In the span of HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA one may find: images of Nazi death camps edited together with photographs of Charlie Chaplin and Hitler cut with not a little bit of hardcore pornography cut with (but of course!) some stray references to the war in Vietnam, Francis Bacon and Arthur Rimbaud. One must "read meaning" into this. Take your pick.

The series shines from the get-go: in Episode One we find video of a seemingly senile Godard rooting through his library, mumbling to himself ("Le cinema" mumble mumble, "Irving Thalberg" mumble mumble), along with grimy VHS footage of a few classic movies, and the amplified noise of his ancient word processor clicking, clicking, clicking for the better part of the first half hour. That's right, an annoying clicking sound and a mumbling balding old guy for a long, long time.

All this is of course "genius," which is above coherence.

Godard has for decades made movies that shine with his contempt for his audience as well as his magnificent opinion of himself. I admit that I do not hold the "New Wave" in very high esteem, and find most of Godard's films, even the early ones, pompous, intellectually shallow, and dull. I think a genuine history of cinema would reduce JLG to little more than a footnote. Yet he really has reached a stage where he can do whatever he wants and hear the cries of bravo oh great one! in the background. I suspect his fans prevented him from ever becoming a great filmmaker. Certainly there are flashes of talent in many of his early works, and CONTEMPT - the only one of his films where a producer reined him in - is a great picture. At this stage in his life he just comes off as bitter and weird. Better off skipping this set and watching one of the numerous truly fine movies that have the misfortune of being included in Jean-Luc Godard's pornographic Hitlerian navel-gazing extravaganza HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA.

Histoire(s) du cinema {Toutes les histoires} (1988)

** (out of 4)

It's funny to think that one of the most loved and respected filmmakers is also one of the most hated. When Jean-Luc Godard announced that he was going to be doing a documentary on the history of cinema most people got excited but when the film eventually premiered it was greeted with some calling it a masterpiece while others wanted to kill the director and drag his body over stakes. I'll admit upfront that I'm not one who finds Godard to be a genius even though I've enjoyed a few of his films. For the most part I don't buy into his "genius" label so it would seem like I'd hate this picture but I didn't. Those wanting a straight documentary structure are going to be disappointed because we basically get 52-minutes worth a film clips that are sped up, slowed down, edited over art photos and we even get various sound effects added. The "art" in the film comes from the strangeness that Godard uses in bringing them images to the screen and I'm sure some will find a meaning to them but I personally didn't see one. I'm not sure what the director was trying to say and I'm really not certain if he was trying to say anything. Either way, this film kept me somewhat entertained because I do find the idea of someone given all the movie clips he wanted and trying to do something with them. This is certainly a Godard picture as the thing moves all over the place and while it really doesn't teach you anything about the history of cinema it's at least fascinating to see. I enjoyed, somewhat, what Godard did with the material as it was like some sort of surreal visual that you kept waiting to see what it would eventually add up to. Like the first portion of the film ends up being about Irving Thalberg, which was rather interesting considering how many movies that the young producer actually took away from the filmmakers and edited himself to give a more commercial touch to the film. I was a little surprised to see Godard's view on him but it was interesting. We are given thousands of film clips ranging from Griffith to Hitchcock to Huston to Welles. Just about every genre and sub-genre is shown but just don't expect clips adding up to some sort of story. There are some rather bizarre and to me pointless images including some of Chaplin from THE GREAT DICTATOR, Hitler and then images from concentration camps.

It is easy to dismiss Jean-Luc Goddard's history of the film medium, Histoire du Cinema as an exercise in pretentious excess. There is no narrative to speak of. It is a total film montage consisting of sound bytes; sight bytes; short excerpts from notable movies. What narrative exists is brief and truncated. More like sound messages giving the briefest of commentary on the films presented. Goddard fiddles with the sound and sight bytes, slowing them down or speeding them up. It is easy to get lost watching this documentary; it is not easy viewing. Many times the images, sound bytes and sight bytes are superimposed one over the other. Sometimes, there are more than two snippets superimposed at one time. After two hundred and twenty minutes, the length of the documentary, you, the viewer are exhausted, confused, and dismissive - that is, of course, if you last that long.

Yet, I think I know where Goddard is trying to do.

First off, how do you summarize one hundred years of cinema in two hundred and twenty minutes? Goddard wanted to be complete, and this disjointed, non-linear story-telling literally is the only way the shear amount of history can be presented in a complete manner. It is complete in a very essential level. The images, the sounds act on a very subliminal level. They are flashed in front of the viewer's eyes to create the greatest effect and force the power of film to sink in deep in the viewer's psyche. Finally, although unconventional, Goddard's documentary style is not unknown, was influenced by, and has influenced subsequent, documentaries, all to a great effect.

This is essential, but not comfortable, viewing.

Godard's career was never accessible, but by the time he reached the 80's his inaccessibility kind of went off the deep end and he eventually got to making his strange experimental documentary mini series 'Histoire(s) du cinema', which is a study of film and it's various histories (the plural in the title comes across as rather important and is one aspect among many of this overall work that is highly unique). This is the first episode and it really shows us that Godard is not afraid to immediately disorient and potentially alienate the viewer. It's a collage of sound and film w/clips from all sorts of films and the occasional rambling, semi-philosophical narration by Godard himself, mixed in w/some footage of Godard going through a bookshelf and typing up what I gather is the script of the very work we are watching. The editing is wild, Godard not only discusses cinema but also war, Nazism, sex, communism, and it's all peppered w/playfulness and darkness in equal measure. Godard is clearly having fun with his insanely experimental approach, and it makes for what is definitely a real experience that goes above and beyond a majority of most experimental cinema even. It can be annoying, but it never fails to be fascinating, and it has compelled me quite a bit to dive into this mini-series of his and see where it takes me.

Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinéma immediately intrigues just based on the title alone, which suggest that Godard will approach the enormous idea and medium of film by looking at multiple different countries and the differences between their films versus films from other countries and perhaps work off of that to illustrate the idea that film has many written and unwritten histories. It's an unbelievably ambitious concept, and after viewing the eight-part series' "a" part of the series' first chapter - titled All the (Hi)stories - I'm not sure Godard was ready to tackle the idea, at least in a clear, coherent way.

Godard's nonlinear filmmaking style is ever-present in Histoire(s) du Cinéma, but in a way so alienating I wasn't anticipating at all. Godard narrates most of the first chapter, constantly chomping and puffing on a cigar, while furiously typing on a rickety typewriter his rambling, disjointed thoughts, ideas, quotations, and perceptions of cinema, some taken from his own personal thoughts, others quoted from philosophers, filmmakers, poets, and others. Plastered on the screen haphazardly along with English subtitles are stray text, colorful dialog, randomly-placed letters inside words, and jumbled phrases, already crowding frames that would be plenty crowded if they simply stuck to showing the images from films.

The biggest frustration, however, is the lack of seriousness present with this project thus far, all by Godard, who seems to just be using such an ambitious idea of laying out the histories of cinema by showing off his skills with primitive video-effects software. Most of the film clips he uses are never said which films they come, actors are scarcely mentioned by name, and directors' impacts and legacies seem shortchanged because of how jumbled the structure of this series is. The overall design of everything is messy and maddening, and it's sad to say that I exited the first part of the first chapter, which runs about fifty minutes, confused, frustrated, and worst of all, not any smarter or any brighter on the history of cinema than I previously had been.

All the (Hi)stories seems to concern numerous different genres and different types of films that are all combined together to show the diversity amongst cinema as a whole. The most significant moment in this first part, for me, was the quote "The world for a nickel," which flashes on screen about three times in a fragmented state before the aforementioned phrase finally appears. The quote essentially illustrates a time in American history when a person could spend just a nickel at the local cinema or Nickelodeon and be greeted with wondrous, limitless pictures that further showed and emphasized on worlds you probably didn't have the means to explore. It is this reason, precisely, that I find cinema to be the closest thing to magic and wonder that I have personally experienced in life.

It's just sad to note that Godard doesn't seem to be treating this project with any of the respect it deserves, from overloading the screen with needless text, cutting and pasting images with no apparent rhyme or reason, and incoherently narrating over the images, never circumventing to a discernible point. One could simply say, "but that's Godard," to which I will simply reply, "but that's disrespectful."

Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard.