Notes Taken While Watching a Pirated Copy of Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinema (1988)
“The theater is too familiar. The cinema is too unknown.”
Shots of films slowed down. The camera shows the film strip through a dutch angle, we see each shot one after the other in one shot only, as Godard manipulates the delay of the film in front of us. He reveals.
The blinking of the film at the start. Epilepsy, seizures.
It is a film in the making. The frames are synced with the typing of the machine, which is activated after he thinks.
He repeats his sentences like poetry but the images are new. In the flicker they move because the frames are not the same.
The slowing down of the films shown by Godard become frames in sequence rather than illusions. They beg to be seen, studied and reflected upon.
—So the gap between frames is individual. Each thought created or hidden in each may be united with the appearance of a black in the film’s diegesis, uniting the gaps in a space, a length rather. Like the passing of days in cuts to black in Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson—
And as I watched Histoire(s) du Cinema I thought a lot.
Godard says that film needs two spools: one that is filled and another that is emptied (“Master and Slave” but I think he could have stopped the sentence on the emptiness).
I am also bored watching this film, so i think, a lot. I think mostly about what is going on in my life, but I wouldn’t call that memory yet.
I start to think, often, about Martin Scorsese’s similar film about American cinema which I haven’t watched. Godard’s film was made solely by himself, using mostly VHS tapes, some of them damaged. It reminds me of YouTube and people wanting to talk about films, but it feels like Godard does not want to speak about them. And then I think if Godard ever used YouTube, maybe to look for a scene from a film or a trailer.
The sounds, besides the use of soundtrack, are most often mechanical: the typewriter, the sound of war machines, the reel turning. But the film is visually far from being mechanical, frames are blending into one another all the time.
Episode 2A starts, it is titled Only Cinema. I feel like film rarely measures length in frames. If I was Godard I would be thinking about the shots of myself writing and the films super imposed, everything blinks, but not for one frame, maybe twelve (half a second). I would think “half a second” to myself editing this in Adobe Premiere. Godard did not have to right click on any clips using my state of the art Logitech MX Master 2S wireless mouse.
“They suspected they were in a history.” I am unsure of the translation of these downloaded subtitles.
It seems the films Godard uses serve no purpose other than to be remembered. There is one film I want to watch and don’t know what it is called. It’s in episode 2A and is super imposed on Julie Delpy’s face, the words “IT’S ALL TRUE” on top of a photograph of Orson Welles at sea follows. And then Julie Delpy again, reading something poetic.
Godard, talking to someone, says that the Histories of cinema are written with a capital H because they are the only history which can project themselves. Other histories can only be reduced.
Next episode. They are playing one after the other because we set them up like so on VLC. Before each episode starts, the Gaumont animated DVD logo appears, oddly shaping this as a mass media product, giving away that we are watching a digital file ripped by a stranger from a DVD set.
“VIENDRA POUR NOUS DISTRAIRE.” Images of films super-imposed on an image of Godard looking up thoughtfully. An image frozen from a shot of him writing and smoking we had just watched. He questions himself on how to tell these histories which are now his. Show them, maybe.—It seems to be what he is doing.
“Cinema is for the words stuck in the throat.” Or something like that.
Most of what Godard says is unintelligible. And then sometimes he adds an echo filter to his voice. This lady comes in with a turtle neck and says a lot of seemingly complicated things.
We’re moving forward in time, I just saw a shot of John Hughes’ Sixteen Candles.
I remember the Gaumont DVD logo and try to think of how someone would talk about this if it were an actual TV show. Were there ever any water cooler conversations about Historie(s) du Cinema? “People who watch Television all day have no tears left to cry,” Godard answers.
The sound of the typewriter behind the images attests to something. That there is writing behind cinema we all know, we also know that there is a language of cinema on cinema itself and maybe behind it too. What I hear with the typewriter is that cinema always hides something. We are never sure of what Godard is typing, but we are led, forced to believe that it is that which he is saying. And then I am interrupted by Godard calling cinema a form which thinks, he concludes that we forgot that cinema was a medium made for thinking, but that that is another story.
Godard speaks of the way Italian films were not recorded with direct audio. That the language of Dante, Virgil and Ovid made its way into the images. Again, hidden, projected by Godard. A montage of Italian films set to a song. Histoires du Cinema is a funny film out of context, badly made.
I am falling asleep with two chapters left to go.
Godard no longer makes the film by the last hour of Histoires du Cinema. We don’t see him anymore. It is as if in the last episode history is written, no more research needed. Rather, maybe history is happening. We see many clips from his films.
The last parts move more than the beginning. It is as if the film had found itself, or more like it remembered that cinema WAS a form for thinking, but no longer. This film invites analysis, it is complicated, I think.
No longer a film in experimentation.
But the films are still slowed, chopped, in frames, framed.
“Yes, I no longer remember. I imagine.”
The frame in between is not accessed solely by slowing down the movement. Although the frames stagnated and halt their advancement, the difference in movement between one and the other is imperceptible to the naked eye. Rather, the in-between frames are accessed in time, or in the allowance given by time.
If cinema is a form that thinks it is because it has the space and length to do so. It goes forward even when it stagnates.
At the end Godard speaks of film being a shelter of time, that its power resides in nothingness. I am too tired to think about nothing.
My first dog, a German shepherd, was named God(d)ard, after Jimmy Neutron’s mechanical dog.