Moments Choisis des Histoire(s) du Cinema
Godard’s eight-part, 264-minute video Histoire(s) du Cinema (1998), conceived and made over 20 years, has fared better, but it’s still pretty hard to come by. The only version ever sold in France is a lousy mono video transfer; a package of CDs and books in several languages transcribing major portions of the stereo sound track came out here years ago. The only decent copy of the entire work that’s available is a set of subtitled Japanese DVDs. The distributor, Gaumont, has periodically announced the upcoming release of DVDs subtitled in English, but they’ve yet to materialize.
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Histoire means “story” as well as “history,” suggesting an ambiguous and very Godardian overlap of fiction and nonfiction. The film’s major exhibits come from his own work as well as many film classics, newsreels, paintings, and still photographs, making the overall story autobiographical as well as historical–and above all mythical. As English critic Michael Witt notes, Godard so fully identifies his own life span with cinema’s that for him his death and the death of cinema have become almost interchangeable. It’s easy to mock this solipsism, which takes on additional pathos if seen in the context of Godard’s self-imposed isolation. But the audiovisual poetry he’s able to extract from this premise–and others–is much more important than whether it happens to be true.
