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5. Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma or Cinema Surpasses Itself Céline Scemama Abstract This text, which constitutes the introduction to Céline Scemama’s book Histoire(s) du cinéma de Jean-Luc Godard: La force faible d’un art, is a double tribute: to Céline, who scrupulously deciphered the multiple artistic references contained in Godard’s masterpiece and to JLG who, from the start of his oeuvre to Livre d’images (2018), sought in the obstinate invention of a post-cinema the very essence of this art. Halfway between Montaigne’s essay and Rembrandt’s self-portrait, Histoire(s) du cinema is also halfway between the origin of cinema and its destiny as post-art. Keywords: History, cinema, self-portrait The prejudice is dryly and violently expressed as follows: Godard is impos- sible to comprehend, he actually has nothing to say, it’s all just blowing in the wind. The public recognized and crowned Godard as king of the New Wave, but it was perhaps because his films still bore the traces and the visible cannons of the Old Wave. What is disturbing about his last work is the absence of stitching on the fabric and of main (filmic) threads.1 More and more words, more and more images. But also more and more mystery. By positioning himself on the fringe of all possible categories, Godard exposes himself to different kinds of criticism: he is a ghost speaking an unknown language, an impostor illuminated by his media aura, or a living legend that one hardly dares to contradict. Filmic experiments, self-portraits, film concepts … Godard is accused of complicating his discourse. It is true that he himself 1 In the French source text: “fil(m) conducteur.” Editorial note. Chateau, D., and J. Moure. Post-cinema: Cinema in the Post-art Era. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463727235_ch05 86 CÉLINE SCEMAMA gives his detractors a stick to hit him with: “Why make it simple when you can make it complicated?,”2 he writes on the screen of Histoire(s). After the screening of a Godard film, it is difficult to make the connection between the floods of images, sounds and words, or to link them to a possible subject. Some viewers are afraid of misunderstanding, think they are not up to the task and overestimate his reasoning, while others suspect him of pretending to be a virtuoso thinker, while being no more than an empty shell. That is why he is sometimes a cult object and sometimes demonized. We tend to think that Godard should be taken seriously, or that he takes himself seriously. The fact is, however, that we mistake the object: it is not about the filmmaker and his sometimes dogmatic discourse on the world, it is always and only about cinema. What Godard takes seriously is cinema and more generally the question of image in a world where we learn to read and write, but never to see. The very title, Histoire(s) du cinéma3 with its plural “s” is already an enigma and the subject of a misinterpretation. Histoire(s) du cinéma and not “les Histoire(s) du cinéma:” the plural in the title is only visual. The title suggests that the film is about cinema, and yet it is about all the (hi)stories: it is not a history of cinema, but about the Histoire(s) or (hi)stories told by cinema. The article in “du” (“of the”) makes the title even more equivocal: our understanding is that the object of the film is to tell the story of cinema, but cinema is firstly the subject. It is not Godard who tells us the history of cinema because the only storyteller is cinema. And yet, the filmmaker is omnipresent in his works, although he does not expose himself in his own name: the filmmaker has been replaced by the cinema. From Descartes’s “cogito ergo sum” to Godard’s “cogito ergo video,” the transformation is not a rhetorical one: he actually thinks what he sees. In other words, he thinks, i.e., he sees. Godard’s thoughts do not exist outside the images that meet on the screen. Before Histoire(s) du cinéma, Godard’s films, however marginal, could always be generically identified: for example, JLG/JLG, autoportrait de décembre / Self-portrait in December (1994) or For Ever Mozart (1996) could be called self-portraits or film experiments. Here, we are dealing with something completely new: neither fiction nor documentary nor 2 The quotation is from a cartoon, Les Shadoks, which was popular in France in the late 1960s. It was the motto of a group of funny, plump and anthropomorphic birds, perched on very thin legs, who were nasty and stupid, and spent their time building complicated and useless machines. Editorial note. 3 Translator’s note: in French, “histoire” means both story and history; the “s” in the plural “histoires” is silent. The closest equivalent to the original title was Cinema (hi)story/ies. JANLCE - U GODARD’S HISTOIRE(S) DU CINÉMA OR CINEMA SURPASSES ITSELF 87 experimental film. Histoire(s) du cinéma is not really linked to any place: neither film location nor screening space. Histoire(s) du cinéma does not fall into any category: it is a wandering work of art. The author is usually behind the camera. Not here. Or not really. Almost all the images come from somewhere else. Except for a few quotations read by Alain Cuny, Sabine Azema, Julie Delpy or Juliette Binoche, the interview with Daney, and lastly, a few images of Godard himself. With its chapters, film is similar to books, but it is not a book. Two book series complete the film: the Livres blancs (or White books) from Gallimard’s White Collection and the Livrets bleus (or Blue booklets) which accompany the discs of the film’s complete soundtrack. Since Godard could not show everything, why this particular length? Why four hours and twenty-five minutes, and not one hour and thirty minutes or two hours, i.e., a more traditional format? The length of the film puts it in the category of monumental works. This monument-work does not tell a story, it makes history. History is usually associated with a succession of dates. In Histoire(s), however, periods of history have been dispersed, and the only dates between 1940 and 1944 that are actually mentioned, perpetually return in incantatory mode. Godard’s view of the twentieth century is articulated and but- tressed across these years. The repetition provides emphasis in the film by reminding, rejecting and commemorating at the same time. The repetition in the work obliges the analyst to return to certain figures, fragments of sentences, images and recurring sounds to grasp the convolutions of these (hi)stories unleashed by the jolts and spasms of a past which has been buried alive. The fact that the film is a-chronological does not prevent it from find- ing an arrangement and from putting together its vision of history. Any chronological expectation is already a misunderstanding. The historian’s work is no different from his formal research: the principles of dispersion and coming together are not distinct from his theses on history. These are the gestures by which Godard fashions a work: a work of history. This unclassifiable work resists any convenient summary, any systemati- zation in one overview. The dispersion assumed by the filmmaker’s gesture must not be circumvented but, on the contrary, confronted. The mode of approximation, collision, counterpoint, friction, superimposition, intertwin- ing and confusion begins with the genesis of the work, with its heterogeneous material awaiting questioning, i.e., to come together. What posture and what gaze should one adopt to look at an oeuvre for which our analytical tools are inadequate or insufficient, and how should we talk about it? 88 CÉLINE SCEMAMA Music, photography, painting, engraving, sculpture, literature, archives, philosophy, poetry, discourses, history and … cinema. Godard added an “s” to his Histoire(s), but not to be trendy. With its scintillating array of references, the work sometimes seems to push the spectator toward some sort of concentrated, active and erudite attention. Even the most attentive viewers will quickly be knocked over by a mighty wind which unremittingly dislocates bits of history and culture in a kaleidoscope of permanent electro- shocks. We are tempted to try and organize this abundant and fragmented material and to draw immediate conclusions from it; similarly, we are tempted to channel this flow of incessant and apparently chaotic move- ments, these layers of overlapping sounds and words with their continuous interferences and flickering. The eye and ear can never rest on anything stable, everything is always immediately transformed, and within such a short period of time that it is often impossible to grasp the object of this transformation. If nothing can be done in a truly autonomous way: the text on its own, the images on their own, the soundtrack on its own, and if only the film can bring everything together, it finds no harmony, however: its order remains disorder and dissonance. However, some images, some notes or some words do escape the flood of Histoire(s) and are suspended for our attention for the duration of a mirage. But outside the deluge from which they were taken, they persist for a moment in a void and then vanish, evaporate and disappear. During the time it took them to disappear, countless ocular and auditory cataclysms occurred on-screen that we saw and heard, almost in spite of ourselves, but of which there are only traces left, like a persistence of vision.

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