Une histoire seule

After the borderline-abysmal first part of French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard's first chapter of Histoire(s) du Cinéma, I was very much hesitant to watch another part. For a filmmaker that has made films that were rebellious to convention and to French filmmaking norms throughout the entire 1960's decade, it wasn't unexpected to see Godard's unique and unconventional style crossover to his eight-part series on the history of cinema. However, it was surprising to see how maddeningly incoherent and jumbled the first part felt, as if Godard was simply trying to shortchange and disrespect the medium in every way he could, from not giving depth or analysis to the film clips he chose, to hardly even explaining why he felt some incredibly diverse clips went together.

With A Single (Hi)story, the conclusion of chapter one of four chapters in Histoire(s) du Cinéma, Godard continues the heavily alienating style to a similar middling effect. All of the issues I took with the first part are still here, from the disgusting abundance of text, some of which is completely illegible since no effort was made to distinguish the white-colored text from equally white-colored backgrounds, to the redundant and purposefully vague narration provided by the cigar-chomping, constantly-typing Godard himself. What saves A Single (Hi)story from being just as bad as the first part is Godard's inclusion of scenes from films like Charlie Chaplin's The Kid, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and early film clips from the iconic Lumière brothers, which keep one in tune with the work, despite its almost compulsive attempt to completely distract and irritate at every turn.

On top of that, surrealist cinema is shown somewhat here, and while no analysis is provided - something you think would kind of be included or emphasized in a lengthy documentary trying to elaborate on the history of cinema - it's nice to see Godard recognize these clips and make an attempt to string several clips along to showcase what a certain chapter in cinema was about.

Aside from that, A Single (Hi)story suffers from the same problems as its predecessor All the (Hi)stories; if this keeps up, I wouldn't hesitate to name Histoire(s) du Cinéma one of the biggest, most ambitious letdowns I've yet to experience.

Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard.

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?

Dedicated to John Cassavetes and Glauber Rocha--thus moving beyond the Hollywood productions excoriated in the preceding episode, with these icons of US independent film and the attempt for a tricontinental Third Cinema (Rocha's debate with Godard, his cameo at the crossroads in Vent de L'Est sampled here). Scepticism about the possibility of cinema as medium was built into it from a start: its pioneers thought that it was a trick form, a parlour game, a fairground show. They were right and not right. The story of cinema alone, a history alone--cinema's connection and disconnection to world history--the role of newsreel. George Stevens filming the European camps in 1945--cinema as record; but is filming alone cinema? Reality and illusion. Cinema's aim to be more real than life. Godard looks up, off screen, at the screen, reads two books at once, at times types out a script we neither hear nor see with the exception of grunted words.

Histoire(s) du cinéma: Une histoire seule (1989)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

I found this second entry in Jean-Luc Godard's series to be a slight bit better than the previous but if you're expecting some sort of straight-forward look at the history of cinema then obviously you've never seen a Godard film in your life. It's funny but after watching this I went back and read my review to the first film because it had been quite a while since I had watched it. I easily could have copied and pasted it over to here because both films really struck me the same way but this one here did feature a few more items that made it more enjoyable. Once again Godard pretty much just takes various clips of movies, music and pieces of art and throws them together creating his own "art" that is pretty crazy but if you're a fan of cinema then you should at least be mildly entertained just by trying to spot the films you know. WAY DOWN EAST, THE KID, NOSFERATU, THE WIND, KING KONG, CAPTAIN BLOOD, THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI, REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE and CONTEMPT are just a few of the films that are shown here but I think my favorite bit deals with the PSYCHO score being used as the background music to several of the films but the best being behind the ending to DUEL IN THE SUN. This film will obviously drive many people mad, which appears to be Godard's goal in life when it comes to his cinema. I'm sure many will look at this film and say they understand the "meaning" of it but personally I don't buy into any of this. I'm sure anything can speak to anyone but I'm really not sure what Godard was trying to say with this and to be honest I have no interest in trying to figure it out. As it stands, this second entry at least kept me entertained enough to where I didn't want to reach for the remote.

The first two episodes of 'Histoire(s)' are closely tied together, and the second just feels like no more than a logical continuation of the first. That is not to say Godard doesn't delve into any more topics, as he does, it's just that the style is very much consistent w/the episode previous. The second episode may be somewhat easier to comprehend only b/c at this point Godard has made the viewer more used to his wildly experimental antics, but Godard still refuses to make his film any less difficult to penetrate and even remotely understand. It's the closest thing I've seen to a collage on film, w/sounds layered atop music, all of it fading in and out, some of the music including songs by Otis Redding and Leonard Cohen, as words, often quotations, film titles, or the names of various famous cinematic figures, are layered atop images of things that range from images of the Lumiere Brothers and Natalie Wood to images of Adolf Hitler and warfare, and there's all these constant clips playing from all sorts of movies, lots of transparent imagery, some shots of Godard near the bookshelf and smoking a cigar, rambly voice over work by Godard, it just takes what the first episode did and gets perhaps even more dense and confusing. It seems, however, that the following episodes may lead to some sort of change of pace considering how many years later they were made, and I'm honestly extremely curious to see where Godard takes me next. As difficult and dense this journey has thus far been, it's also been oddly enjoyable and, for me, extremely, and surprisingly, compulsively watchable.