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10 Prehistory of the Project Looking back on the early stages of his film history project from the perspective of 1979, Godardsuggestedthathisdesiretoactivelyinvesti gate cinema history had originated in a growing confusion he had experienced around 1967 or 1968 regarding how to proceed artistically. He realized that what he needed to sustain and renew his creative practice as a filmmaker was a deeper and more productive understanding of the relationship between his own work and the discoveries of his predecessors, and felt a thorough dissatisfaction in this regard with written histories of cinema: Little by little I became interested in cinema history. But as a filmmaker, not because I’d read Bardèche, Brasillach, Mitry, or Sadoul (in other words: Griffith was born in such and such a year, he invented such and such a thing, and four years later Eisenstein did this or that), but by ultimately asking myself how the forms that I’d used had been created, and how such knowledge might help me.1 His approach to the making of history through the bringing together of disparate phenomena as the basis for the creation of poetico-historical imagescanbetracedbackasfarasthelate1960s. In the course of a 1967 televised discussion of the relationship between people and images, for instance, he was already starting to think about cinema from a historical perspective and to formulate the central principle of his later historiographic method: I’m discovering today that Griffith was the contemporary of mathematicians such as Russell or Cantor. At the same moment that Griffith was inventing the language of cinema, roughly the same year, Russell was publishing his principles of mathematical logic, or things like that. These are the sorts of things I like linking together.2 Histoire(s) du cinéma: A History 1 H i s t o i r e (s) d u c i n é m a 11 Moreover, even in his early work, he had in manywaysbeenaconceptualmontageartist.As early as 1965, Louis Aragon, we recall, had perspicaciously characterized him, as a “monteur” in the manner of Lautréamont: “What is certain isthattherewasnopredecessorfor[Delacroix’s] Nature morte aux homards, that meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissection table in a landscape, just as there is no predecessor other than Lautréamont to Godard.”3 His theorization of the task of the historian, his approach to cinema history, and his reflection on history more broadly, all flowed directly from this longstanding experimentation with montage. The earliest trace of Godard’s film history project dates from 1969, when he and JeanPierre Gorin sketched a brief history of cinema through a collage of images, quotations and handwritten text, as part of an abandoned book projectentitledVivelecinéma!orÀbaslecinéma! (Longlivecinema!/Downwithcinema!).4This was also the year of Vent d’est, which, as Alberto Farassino has suggested, can be read not only as an experimental political film, but also as an historical interrogation of the Western, of the costume drama genre, of Hollywood, and of the birthofphotography.5Godard’sdrivetoinvestigate cinema history was fueled in the early years by an acute awareness of the profundity of the changes to cinema brought about by the spread and effects of television, coupled with a concern for what he considered growing amnesia in relation to cinema’s past artistic achievements, and a loss of understanding regarding the methods and techniques that had made them possible. While shooting Tout va bien in 1972 with Gorin , for instance, the duo attempted to model a shotonthesequencedepictingVakoulintchuk’s death in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), and discovered that the secrets behind the insights of the great poet-filmmakers of the silentera,inareassuchasframing,montageand rhythm, appeared to have been forgotten. Their attempts to reproduce them resulted in a sense ofungainlyimitation:“[W]erealizedsomething verysimple:thatwedidn’tknowhowtomakean angle in the way that Eisenstein did; if we tried to film someone with their head bent slightly forward looking at a dead person, we had absolutelynoideahowtodoit .Whatwedidwasgrotesque !”6 By 1973, Godard’s venture, known at that point under the working title Histoire(s) du cinéma: Fragments inconnus d’une histoire du cin ématographe([Hi]storiesofcinema:Unknown fragments of a history of the cinematograph), already included a spread of themes–debated with Gorin over the preceding four years–that would recur throughout much of his ensuing work: How Griffith searched for montage and discovered the close-up; how Eisenstein searched for montage and discovered angles; how von Sternberg lit Marlene in the same way that Speer lit Hitler’s...

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