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99 7 7 Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma Brings the Dead Back to the Screen Céline Scemama the monumental film Histoire(s) du cinéma opens the way to the final period in Godard’s works. The film, four hours and twenty-five minutes in length, comprises eight chapters containing images that by and large predate the production. It is a work of montage and mixing. Everything— photography, painting, engraving, sculpture, literature, archives, philosophy, poetry, discourse, history, and … cinema—is edited and mixed. The voice-over of Godard over a large portion of the film is sepulchral in tone, and the work as a whole creates an apocalyptic effect and yields a hopeless vision of all things. Since the appearance of the production, the films of Jean-Luc Godard have been like tentacles of Histoire(s) du cinéma. Indeed, the form Godard invents for the film invites the use of a morbid, animal-like, and monstrous lexical field. And yet, what beauty in the horror! This horror is not in the form itself, but in the fact that the form is apt to evoke horror, to bring back the worst of what is held prisoner Dans le noir du temps.1 The film’s beauty lies in the invention of a form that is able to bring back to the screen all that is buried in the darkness of history. Histoire(s) du cinéma forces the viewer to delve into the darkness. This beautiful and complex film does not allow itself to be summarized and, worse, it does not allow itself to be seen. The film’s heterogeneous content appears by way of interferences, flashes, or continuous digression. The form brings about moments of indescribable beauty, but what is perceived cannot be directly translated into discourse. In view of such a flood of superimposed, clashing, or intertwined references, it appears that a discursive and unifying “reading” is no longer appropriate. Godard dares to offer up a complex film that refuses to be consumed. This daring is part of the immense and hopeless enterprise of the work. Godardian Politics of Representation: Memory/History 100 One can endure not immediately understanding a text and not mastering all of its references. Cinema, for its part, seems to be constrained to perform an entertainment role. Histoire(s) du cinéma, on the contrary, defends the idea that cinema is “primarily for thinking” but that “this will immediately be forgotten.”2 It shows and demonstrates that cinema is made for thinking through all of its available forms: images, sound, voices, texts, everything, and even everything combined. It is thus in a literal sense that Histoire(s) du cinéma resists viewing. It resists viewing because there is too much to hear and too much to see. This excess can be likened to an infected wound, an abscess. But the most dreadful thing is that the abscess will not burst; it reveals itself, but nothing is released. Calm is never restored because whatever comes out only comes out in image. And the image, together with the audio track, undertakes to show that all the pain and injustice suppressed by time remains a prisoner of time, forever in suffering. What explodes on screen does not escape the screen; the explosions are therefore implosions. The screen brings no relief, saves nothing—it only shows the way things are and how they fall back in time. Their only way to return is to come back in the form of images. And so they come back however they can, in terrible convulsions. The sounds and images of Histoire(s) du cinéma are like electric shocks, audiovisual bursts, groans, convulsive jolts. The overall effect is a ghastly impression of agony without end, eternal agony. Nothing really begins or ends; eyes and ears are unable to follow anything stable because it is all in continual, lightning-fast transformation. The images and sounds are, as it were, breathless. The sounds, images, and words momentarily capture the viewer’s attention, only to evaporate like mirages. And as they disappear, other visual and auditory cataclysms are already produced, flooding the viewer’s memory, so that most often it is impossible to make out everything that takes place in a given shot. The shot itself as a unit of cinema loses its contours and its unity. In fact, nothing creates unity: dispersion, explosion, overflow, and tearing away are all forms consistent with Godard’s vision of history. This...

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