Jean-Luc Godard, Cinema Historian

Notes

225 Introduction 1. Godard in conversation with Noël Simsolo on À voix nue: Grands entretiens d’hier et d’aujourd’hui, France Culture, 31 March 1998. This is the second in a series of five dialogues between Godard and Simsolo about Histoire(s) du cinéma that were broadcast on À voix nue from 30 March to 3 April 1998. These were transcribed by Nicole Brenez and Alain Philippon, with a view to their publication as a book entitled L’humanité du cinéma: Jean-Luc Godard, entretiens. This volume was also to have included a transcription of a previous series of ten dialogues between Godard and Simsolo about Histoire(s) du cinéma, which had been broadcast on À voix nue from 20 November to 1 December 1989. This earlier series had also been transcribed at the time, by Nicole Brenez, Cécile Carrega and Alain Philippon, again with a view to its publication in book form. That neither of these projects came to fruition is highly regrettable, since these interviews are undoubtedly among the richest contextual documents relating to Histoire(s) du cinéma available. I am very grateful to Nicole Brenez for having made a copy of the unpublished manuscript of L’humanité du cinéma available to me. When citing from these interviews , I will henceforth refer to the individual episodes of À voix nue. 2. “Godard fait son cinéma” (1998), 76–77. 3. Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, 80. For Godard’s use of this phrase in the series, see Histoire(s), vol. 3, 62–63. 4. Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, 41. Godard cites this phrase in the final episode of the series (Histoire[s], vol. 4, 265). 5. Godard, “Les cinémathèques,” 287. 6. À voix nue, 20 November 1989. 7. Godard, Histoire(s), vol. 2, 159. 8. Godard’s discussion with Hobsbawm, chaired by Marc Ferro, took place on Histoire parallèle, 6 May 2000. 9. “Le regard s’est perdu” (1987), 123. 10. “Propos rompus” (1980), 463. 11. The Book of Kings, also known as the Morgan Bible, Maciejowski Bible, and Crusader Bible, is a thirteenth-century picture bible made up of paintings depicting scenes from the Old Testament from Genesis to David. Its title is among those spoken by Godard on the soundtrack of 1A. 12. Warburg, Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. 13. Agamben, “Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science ,” 90. 14. I would like to acknowledge the pioneering research into Godard’s sources conducted by other students of Histoire(s) du cinéma, especially Jacques Aumont, Bernard Eisenschitz, Roland-François Lack, Jean-Louis Leutrat, Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues, Céline Notes 226 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 5 –1 4 Scemama, Michael Temple, James Williams, and the team of researchers who worked on the Japanese DVD/ DVD-ROM of the series instigated by Hayao Shibata and supervised by Akira Asada: Junji Hori, Tomoo Karube, Katsuhiko Sugihara and Erimi Fujiwara. The very impressive “score” of the series drawn up by Scemama (La “partition” des Histoire(s) du cinéma de Jean-Luc Godard, criimage .univ-paris1.fr/celine/celinegodard.html) is an extremely useful research aid, but has to be treated with care, since it includes a significant number of omissions and misattributions. 15. Godard attributes the title to Malraux in “The Future(s) of Film” (2000), 26. 16. “Dialogue entre Godard et Daney” (1997), 53. 17. For a discussion by Godard of The Great Sinner in relation to the title of 2B, see À voix nue, 28 November 1989. 18. Malraux’s study was published initially in three volumes: Psychologie de l’art, vol 1, Le musée imaginaire (1947); vol. 2, La création artistique (1948); and vol. 3, La monnaie de l’absolu (1949). It was published in English translation by Zwemmer in 1951, and republished in French by Gallimard the same year in a revised, less expensive single volume under the generic title Les voix du silence, which included an additional section, Les métamorphoses d’Apollon. Subsequent references are to the English translation of this second expanded version: The Voices of Silence. 19. Ramuz, Les signes parmi nous. 20. “Jean-Luc Godard: Une longue histoire” (2001), 32. 21. On the few occasions where I have found fuller citation to be preferable, I have translated directly from the soundtrack, and used the French-language transcription available in the ECM books for comparison. The latter is particularly valuable due to its relative fullness, and for the...