The Dream of the Nineteenth Century

What is cinema? Nothing.
What does cinema want? Everything.
What can cinema do? Something.

—Jean-Luc Godard,
Histoire(s) du cinéma

In Histoire(s) du cinéma (France, 1988-98), Godard explores the "nothing" that cinema now is, and the "something" that it could do. ¹ Cinema is nothing in its present form because in the early years of the 1940s the "great directors of fiction" turned their cameras away from Auschwitz. Although some narrative filmmakers, like Steven Spielberg, later made films dramatizing life and death in the camps, these dramatizations only magnified the original betrayal, since they took place within the parameters of the Hollywood star system. "Suffering is not a star," Godard says in part 1A of Histoire(s) du cinéma, "nor is it a burned church, nor a devastated landscape." Only the documentary camera worked to "save the honor of reality." ²

The notion that cinema might be capable of saving the honor of reality contravenes one of the founding assumptions of poststructuralist thought—the assumption that representation alienates us from the phenomenal world. It is also at odds with many accounts of the Holocaust. For a number of historians and theorists of World War II, what happened in the camps was so traumatic and extended so far beyond the cultural pale as to be utterly unrepresentable. ³ But from the very beginning of his filmmaking career, Godard has stubbornly gone his own way on this issue—as on every other. In early interviews, he speaks both of the constant "coming" and "going" between representation and reality and of the support that his fictions find in the actuality of those who enact them. ⁴ In Histoire(s) du cinéma, Godard changes the metaphor, but not his theoretical position. The relation between a film and what it depicts should be fraternal—a kind of brotherly "give" and "take." ⁵ The filmmaker makes this relation possible when he puts reality into his work and then uses the work itself to realize the real (4B). This last formulation has radical implications for our understanding of art, since it implies that actuality can only become "itself" by means of a representational intervention.

Godard's clarification of the "something" that cinema can do is a considerably more protracted affair. It requires the full length of Histoire(s) du cinémaand an exploration of the nature of history itself—not just the history of cinema, but also of what Godard at one point calls "the big history." The French word histoire(s) conventionally signifies two different things: "story" and "history"—or, in the plural form in which Godard uses it, "stories" and "histories." The title Histoire(s) du cinémathus seems to promise to the uninitiated viewer either stories about or histories of cinema. But when Serge Daney, with whom Godard conducts a lengthy conversation at the beginning of part 2A, voices this view by distinguishing between the histories of cinema and the big history, Godard immediately takes exception. The big history, he maintains, does not remain external to cinema; it is, rather, cinema itself, or at least what cinema could be if it were to confront the "nothing" that it now is. "To me," he says, "big history is the history of cinema." The rest of Histoire(s) du cinéma comes as a clarification of this astonishing claim. From it we learn that cinema is not just the primary place of historical representation, but also the primary place where history happens. ⁶

On three different occasions in Histoire(s) du cinéma, Godard suggests that those who inhabit the domain of cinema derive from an anterior world. Their "reflections, their sensations, are from before," he tells us through a female voice-over. The first time he makes this claim (1A), he seems merely to be invoking cinema's capacity to provide "a delayed reflection" of the past. ⁷ The second time, though, he equates the "before" about which...