Video, the Cinematic, and the Post-Cinematic: On Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinéma

Video seemed to me one of the avatars of cinema, but it's become something rather different in broadcast television where there's no creation at all any more, just broadcasting. But video's going to be overtaken by information technology or some sort of hybrid mixture which will get increasingly remote from cinematic creation as it can still just about exist today. I'd say there was no very big difference between video and cinema and you could use one like the other … Video came from cinema, but you can't say now that IT comes from cinema.

—Jean-Luc Godard (Godard and Ishaghpour 32)

in his article "shapeshifter," michael witt deems Jean-Luc Godard "as much a multimedia poet in the manner of Jean Cocteau as a feature-film director in the lineage of Hitchcock" (75), in that he has channeled his creativity into diverse media outlets, such as video, TV broadcast, conceptual graphic collage, sound art, criticism, public performance, and installation art, to create variations of the cinematic. The ostensible variety of the media with which Godard has worked validates both that cinema is a volatile medium prone to conjugating with and being influenced by other media and that cinema's formal and expressive properties can be migrated to other media. For instance, the books affiliated with Godard's major films since the 1990s—including Allemagne Neuf Zero (Germany Year 90 Nine Zero, 1991), JLG/JLG—Autoportrait de décembre (JLG/JLG—Self-Portrait in December, 1994), 2X50 Ans de Cinéma Frans~ais (2X50 Years of French Cinema, 1995), the four-volume Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98, hereafter Histoire(s)), and the second volume of Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard (Jean-Luc Godard by Jean-Luc Godard, 1998) as edited by Alain Bergala—all contain a flurry of images and texts that serve as extensions of his long-standing concern with montage. Godard's collaborations with ECM Records for the digitally remixed soundtracks of Nouvelle Vague (New Wave, 1990) and Histoire(s) demonstrate his keen reference to contemporary music as the expansion of the sound–image combinations that began in the 1980s. Finally, in his new venture into installation art, as shown in a large-scale exhibition coupled with a film retrospective and publication (Voyage(s) en Utopie: Jean-Luc Godard 1946–2006, May 11–August 14, 2006, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris), Godard appeared to envision that cinema would now survive both through its journey into integrated multiple platforms and through the reconstruction of the museum as a multidimensional repository in which numerous artifacts and extractions manifest "the qualities discovered but forgotten by cinema" in the "revelatory connections between disparate elements" (Witt, "Shapeshifter" 88). Succinctly stated, Witt's account of Godard's variegated practices points to a kind of double helix in which one spiral illustrates an investigation into cinema's own historical and ontological specificities, while the other spiral shows its expansion into other media and art forms. These two spirals can then be referred to as the "cinematic" and the "post-cinematic," respectively.

This article argues that video technology plays a decisive role in Godard's double movement toward the "cinematic" and the "post-cinematic" as demonstrated in his videographic essay Histoire(s). By investigating the polyphonic dialogues between cinema and video, along with a close analysis of the work, this discussion demonstrates that Godard believed video should be considered as a medium to reinvent cinema in two ways: first, by renewing the methods of montage that he has pursued since the 1970s and by realizing his ideas on audiovisual cinema history, as well as on the cinematic modes of thought and memory; and second, by viewing the world as "metacinema," as implied by Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. At the same time, this article also claims that Godard's videographic refashioning of cinema in the technical, ontological, and philosophical manners necessarily involves bringing cinema to its limits. As this article will discuss in the ensuing two parts, video's material and technical elements transform the methods...