Before being invited in 1978 to the Conservatoire d'Art Cinématographique in Montreal to give fourteen conferences on the history of cinema, Jean-Luc Godard had already unsuccessfully proposed a project on the subject, in collaboration with Henri Langlois, to Italian television. To understand Histoire(s) du cinéma, it is important here to mention the considerable role played by the Director of the Cinémathèque Française (who died in 1977) in the training of the filmmakers in the Nouvelle Vague. Through Henri Langlois's programming, which built up a history of cinema based not on chronology but on stylistic or thematic comparisons between films, Jean-Luc Godard had already viewed cinema through associations of ideas. And he constructed his conferences in Montreal using extracts from films. On his return, he gathered them together in a book, Introduction à une véritable histoire du cinéma, "veritable in the sense that it was made up of images and sounds rather than texts, albeit illustrated" 1. In this work, he proposes a confrontation between his own films and those which are already part of History, by means of a montage of texts and photograms, enlarging their frame so that it resembles video. This series of experiments seems to be the origin of the project Histoire(s) du cinéma, which came to fruition in 1987 with French television (ten episodes were then planned).

The first two chapters, Les histoires toutes and Une histoire seule, were presented at Cannes in 1987 and broadcast on television in 1989. Through their unusual matching of sound and image, they inaugurate a specifically Godardian mode of expression, a sort of recognisable trademark which is found in each chapter of Histoire(s) du cinéma, eventually finished in eight episodes.
Since Numéro deux (1975), the director has been exploiting the editing possibilities of video: text inserts, flashes, slow motion sequences and freeze-frame techniques, combined with an increasingly sophisticated, autonomous soundtrack, have become the necessary syntax for the elaboration of reasoning. Although Jean-Luc Godard had already been using such methods, which cause meaning to emerge from confrontation, for a long time, they are the form that exactly corresponds to Histoire(s) du cinéma. Like Fragments d'un discours amoureux by Roland Barthes 2, which sees the work as resulting from a subtle montage of acknowledged literary sources, Histoire(s) du cinéma is an essay on the cinema through cinema via video, which only exists by the reorganised appropriation of quotations which have become the property of everyone, as implied by the indication "NON(C)JLGFILMS". Extremely daring, when you think of the poor consideration given reproducible works of art, particularly since here it involves reproduction of reproductions, this work in progress shows history being written (punctuated by the recurrent sound of the typewriter) and being seen (the sound of the editing table). When he reminds us in the first episode that "video" means "I see", Jean-Luc Godard explains how much "video has taught [him] to see cinema and to rethink cinematic work in a different way" 3.
Histoire(s) du cinéma is the result of an ambitious project: to make individual histories and collective History meet. Jean-Luc Godard confronts his own history - giving the Histoire(s) an autobiographical dimension - and anecdotal stories (Irving Thalberg married to one of the most beautiful women in the world, for example) with archive pictures, making cinema a witness of History. If Histoire(s) du cinéma is a monument, in the sense of a place of memory, which tries to tell "all the stories there have been", the work is not just a magnificent procession of cinematic images through the video player. It is the place where Jean-Luc Godard's obsessive questioning meets a technique which, through slow motion, enables the very essence of cinema to be attained in an archaeological way, until it reveals "all the stories of the films that were never made", as the first episode announces, or in other words, "seeing the invisible" 4. The slow motion sequences are a subtle way of seeing between the different strata of cinema, the fades and superimpositions are ways of glimpsing the apparently incongruous connections between the films, and the freeze-frames and photograms take us back to cinema's earliest years.

Although Histoire(s) du cinéma 1A and 1B have been widely seen and have featured in many articles since their broadcast by Canal+ in 1989, a ten-year gap of silence separates them from their long awaited sequel. Obviously the first fruits of a 'work in progress', the first two episodes were finished in an official manner in 1995 with episodes 3A and 4B. They were shown at the Locarno festival and then at Cannes that same year.
In addition to the time that Jean-Luc Godard spent as a historian, the protracted negotiations with Gaumont for the indispensable broadcasting rights added lengthy delays. In a historical context of criticism, it is interesting to note that, in order to make up for the lack of information during this waiting period, a network of transmission of the written word grew up to replace the non-existent visual material. This phenomenon – and one wonders if Jean-Luc Godard didn't anticipate this himself – has played a significant part in making Histoire(s) du cinéma a living legend. What happened during this period was that some of the episodes were shown to close friends of Jean-Luc Godard, who were given the task of reporting the experience. That is how the first major article on the subject, by Jonathan Rosenbaum, came to be published in issue n° 22 Trafic, closely followed by an article from Dominique Païni, in issue n° 221 of Art Press, in May 1997.
Finally, 1999 saw the publication of the four books, faithful to the project described in the 'Introduction à une véritable histoire du cinéma'. This was followed a few months later by the four videocassettes and, more recently, by the soundtrack CD's. Apart from the commercial aspect of the operation, these media show the triple-entry possibility of 'reading' Histoire(s).
Histoire(s) du cinéma is now offered in the form of four pairs of two chapters, making a total of eight episodes: 1A, 1B, 2A, 2B, 3A, 3B, 4A, and 4B. Each episode is built on the same structure: an opening consisting of two dedications is followed by the producers' credits (Gaumont / Périphéria…). The sounds and images are inter-cut by the eight titles of Histoire(s), in order, one after the other, and in Capitals, like a leitmotif that helps viewers to place what they are watching in the context of the project's larger ensemble. It's only at about the mid-point of the video that the number and title of the chapter are announced, and the episode ends with "to be continued" (all except the last episode, because Histoire(s) is finally achieved now).
Even if the first two episodes have been slightly modified since the original version, Histoire(s) conserves its recurrent traits of the Godard style that were already present in 1988: the sound of the type-writer (like the "chatter of a machine gun), the title table with its typography in capitals, there to temper the flow of signs and the film turning at the editing bench. Super-impression, slowed images and the superimposition of sounds are still the syntactic matrix of Histoire(s). The more one watches Histoire(s), the more they come to resemble an ultimate proposition, in this conclusion of the 20^th century 5, of the possibility of bringing the arts closer together on the lines of Malraux and Langlois. Yet once one has admitted the critical and historical importance of Histoire(s), and its standing as a unique work, one can't help being surprised at the lack of contemporary references – literary, cinematographic and artistic. The illustrative use of works, the absence of artist's beyond Nicolas de Staël and Francis Bacon 6, an almost complete silence on today's writers, the weakness of the contemporary cinema in Jean-Luc Godard's eyes, all contribute to the expression of eventual reserves on the aesthetic scope of Histoire(s) in the context of contemporary art. This is even more relevant as Godard has adopted a rather withdrawn position on this subject. Outstandingly subjective and coloured by nostalgia, Histoire(s) du cinéma is a work that is primarily addressed to its author, who directs (bare-chested and wearing a cap, or miming an orchestral conductor…) the production of his own mémoire. In the end, in spite of appearances, Histoire(s) du cinéma talks relatively little of the cinema but rather in terms of archive images. One gradually notices that the author shifts the focus of his study: the real subject is not so much the cinema as it is contemporary history as seen by Jean-Luc Godard.

1 Jean-Luc Godard, preface to Introduction à une véritable histoire du cinéma, Paris, éd. Albatros, 1980.
2 Roland Barthes, Fragments d'un discours amoureux, Paris, Le Seuil, 1977.
3 Jean-Luc Godard, in an interview with Alain Bergala on 12th March 1985 at Rolle ("L'art à partir de la vie", Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, les années Cahiers, Paris, Cahiers du Cinéma / éditions de l'Etoile, 1985).
4 Expression by Jean-Luc Godard taken from Scénario du film Passion (1982).
5 Gilles A. Tiberghien has quite rightly compared Histoire(s) du cinéma to Victor Hugo's La Légende des siècles: "Histoire(s) du cinéma is a vast visual poem, an epic poem, the legend of a century that has listened at history's door. It's this Hugo-esque aspect of Godard of which Elie Faure and Malraux, his mentors in criticism are the direct descendants." (Art Press, Hors-Série "Jean-Luc Godard", November 1998)
6 "The images of works of art are 'exploited' in just the same way as the other images – cinematographic, documentary or advertising images. In fact, his choice is very 'classic', barely contemporary – there's nothing more recent than Picasso and Bacon and nothing on figurative art […]. As an art historian, what do you feel about this lack of respect?" ("Histoires d'images", an interview between Hans Belting and Anne-Marie Bonnet, Art Press, Hors-série "Jean-Luc Godard", November 1998)

4B Les Signes parmi nous, 38'

This last episode of Histoire(s) starts, like all the others, with two dedications. But this time, the dedication, "For Anne-Marie Miéville And for myself", brings Histoire(s) back to the personal history of Jean-Luc Godard – closing the circle of the autobiography. Les Signes parmi nous opens with the topic of love and faithfulness, with twin targets: Anne-Marie Miéville whose name has just been presented, and the cinema itself. Returning to the parallel he established between women and the cinema in Fatale Beauté, love-scenes and portraits of actresses (Marylin Monroe, Romy Schneider) are juxtaposed. Like women, the cinema ("the other cinema") is impossible to describe: "It was something else. There isn't another word for that. You can't write it down in sentences". Then the invisible part of the cinema is compared to the ghostly matter of the Milky Way. This mystery of the cinema is accompanied in Godard's case by a new question: "Where and why start a shot and where and why end it?" and we can now state with certainty that doubt is a leitmotif in Histoire(s). In other episodes, there is often a question of "the impossible film", of the "unfilmable shot". In this part, we are given a further opportunity to experience the association of confused ideas, as if Jean-Luc Godard wanted to say everything, simply by bringing sources closer together. After four hours of viewing, of trying to make sense of the quantity of images a counter-effect of saturation can take place. The profusion of images of war, the camps and torture proves this, giving Histoire(s) a touch of "see-too-much" (trop-de-voir), to paraphrase Alain Badiou's expression "plus-de-voir" 1.

When the episode's title, Les Signes parmi nous, finally arrives, we understand that Jean-Luc Godard concentrates on the signification of the cinema, "a saturation of magnificent signs". As he explains about this episode, "the cinema is a sign and its signs are among us. It's the only one to have sent us a sign. The others are orders. The cinema is a sign to be interpreted, to be played, and to be lived with "2

He underlines the power of cinema's transmission of stories (stories this time, not History). He speaks of a peddler who told stories in a village: like the villagers with the peddler, the audience has an ambiguous relationship with fiction in the cinema, which it wants to be true even though it knows that it's false. Les Signes parmi nous seems to be a summary of Histoire(s), taking up the topics previously developed and giving certain 'keys' to interpretation. Histoire(s) du cinéma pivots between little stories and big History, and Jean-Luc Godard continues the episode with the theme of History's memory. He quotes some of the major references who have given their pronouncements on History: Jean-Paul Sartre, André Malraux, Fernand Braudel and Charles Péguy ("Clio"). And while Anne-Marie Miéville's voice-over tells us: "We live in a system where you can make or do anything, except the history of what is done. We can achieve anything, except the history of this achievement ", Jean-Luc Godard reaffirms the founding principle of Histoire(s) du cinéma: "Bringing together things that have never been brought together before and never seemed disposed to be brought together" (a painting by Heronimus Bosch and a text by Charles Péguy, Israel and Palestine, Eisenstein and Docteur Mabuse).

The last part of the episode gives us a negative report on France ("the ever-changing teams of the same dishonest incompetents"), and on his position as a French film-maker (for me, the privilege is to film and live in France as an artist. There's nothing like a country that slips down another degree every day on the path of its inexorable destiny"). Only art can save us from this decline. Les Histoire(s) du cinéma bring together the rare forms of art capable of saving the world from catastrophe. Jean-Luc Godard pays them a last tribute: some writers (Arthur Rimbaud, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Emily Dickinson) and the cinema, which alone "feared nothing from others, not even from itself.". The episode finishes with a portrait of Godard photographed as a young man, appropriating a text by Borges, as if to draw up his own life's balance-sheet: "If a man were to go through paradise in a dream, and if he received a flower as proof of his visit and if he were to wake up and find this flower still in his hands, what would you make of that? I was that man."

Marie-Anne Lanavère

1 Alain Badiou, "Le plus-de-voir", Art Press, Hors-Série "Jean-Luc Godard", November 1998.
2 Interview with Alain Bergala in 1997 ("Une boucle bouclée", Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, Paris, éditions Cahiers du Cinéma, 1998, tome 2, p. 16).