Histoire(s) du Cinema, screened at Rio Cinema on 28th September 2008

This is the second time this text was begun, the first time it was lost by some computer malfunction. I have tried to recall it as best I can, but know as I write it is something slightly different. This became the case the moment I began this text with: ‘This is the second time this text was begun, the first time it was lost by some computer malfunction.’ Anyway, the text was (and is) or is (and was) a response to seeing (or even, experiencing or better still, enduring (but not enduring as if to suggest a negative)) Jean Luc Goddard’s Histoire(s) du Cinema. ML and I saw a 315 minute screening with two intervals presented by the Rio Cinema on Kingsland Rd on 28th September. It was on this day the newspapers announced the death of Paul Newman and featured multi-page tributes to him. Tonight, the 29th September, the night I began writing this text, the BBC screened The Color of Money, directed by Martin Scorsese, starring (and in tribute to) Paul Newman, a very young Tom Cruise and Elizabeth Mastrantonio. The film is notable for Paul Newman reprising his role as ‘Fast Eddie’ from the 1961 film The Hustler, based on the book with the same name. This interconnection of the two films released 23 years apart, reveals what movies are, but rarely stress and often hide: a network of relations which extend beyond the duration of the movie itself, encompassing the narratives of their performers’ careers (both previous film roles and those yet to come), the politics of studios and their distributors, the aesthetic not just of the director but her or his production team, the practice of studios buying novels for exclusive rights to their material and the ever shifting role of technology in the aesthetic of the films themselves and so on and so on.

Early on in his ‘Histoire’ Goddard traces the genealogy of American cinema making special mention of one its biggest studio bosses Irving Thalberg, he narrates the various films that Thalberg produced, stressing how different they are from one another (Greed, Ben Hur, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Foolish Wives, The Big Parade, Mutiny on the Bounty) while observing they come from the same source. This is a dispassionate but incisive way of drawing our attention to the connection between films born out of the same stable and financial system, suggesting a tightly orchestrated economic web not superficially apparent in the films themselves. We are left to ask for ourselves what impact this might have on the content of the films - as to what questions they might (not) ask of their society and the context of their manufacture. This strategy becomes a form of institutional critique of cinema itself, the scale of movie production is such that it is intimately involved and complicit with the machinations of big-end business from whose perspective it is a product like any other.

Histoire(s) du Cinema is distributed by Gaumont, a French film production company (and the oldest still running company of its kind in the world). Therefore the distributor and holder of rights to this film is itself a vital part of film history, the market place disseminator of the ‘Histoire(s)’ is also a contributant to that same history and its future, not dissimilar to Goddard himself. These associations serve to emphasize the ‘constructed nature’ of what is casually referred to as ‘history’ and can be identified as one of the film’s ongoing concerns and be read as purposeful.

Gaumont’s animated ident crops up intermittently throughout the presentation of the parts of Historie(s) du Cinema, that of a small boy initiating a celestial arrangement of stars in a midnight blue sky. Not with the intention of being part of the film itself but as an end credit to its various sections. Nonetheless such is the structure of the film, that this animated logo can be read as part of the flux of imagery of which the film is composed. It says something of the film’s free range sourcing and harvesting of other films to make its content that even unintended filmic material can slip into its stream without disturbing its flow.

My recollections of the imagery is indicative of the intertextual strategies at play, this is a tiny fraction of what was included:

Jean-Paul Belmondo driving through the night cigarette in mouth, detail of Masaccio’s Adam and Eve in a state of despair being exiled from the garden of Eden, a photograph of a pensive Marilyn Monroe, a contorted figure in white shirt and dark trousers by Francis Bacon, detail of an ominous Vincent Van Gogh cornfield, Cary Grant in North by Northwest, scenes from Rome Open City, clips from the work of Visconti, Pasolini and Rossellini, a still from The Battleship Potemkin, footage from Marnie, a black and white headshot of Sergei Eisenstein, a head shot of Bert Brecht, Jean Harlow, Brigitte Bardot, footage from Greed, works by Howard Hawks, Un Chien Andalou, Rear Window, Broken Blossoms, Abel Gance’s Napoleon, Nanook of the North, detail of a head by Piero della Francesca…

It is not uncommon for the UK broadcasters, Film 4 or BBC to announce a forthcoming series of televised films, with a series of film clips, often with an ending title like ‘The best of cinema this Winter’ or ‘Bringing you the best from the big screen to the small one’… and so on. It is interesting that the parade of images Goddard presents doesn’t create a similarly entrancing reverie. He presents the flurry of images in such a way that they are evocative without being emotive.

The avoidance of trance is achieved by numerous means: the length of the clips is long enough to be recognizable and no more, Goddard disallows us the opportunity to delve into what’s happening in the clip itself, often we are offered a half a physical gesture of a character – the action not allowed to reach completion - before moving on to something else - Goddard is not interested in granting us a readable unit of information, the assembly of clips is the information; we are also continuously wrong footed in unraveling (or searching for) the logic of the sequence of images they are never simple contrasts of content or form, perhaps they are tangential in relationship, nor can we underestimate how much is demanded of us, our personal knowledge of cinema is called upon to find the sense in the editing. There is a moment where a photographic portrait of Thalberg looms large - only to dissolve into the roaring lion of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Thalberg reappears and dissolves again: not only is visual connection made the between the individual as subset of an institution, but it is also an biographical reference of sorts, Thalberg moved from Universal Studios to MGM in 1924. This particular dissolve is formally similar to the many that occur. The heaviness of the dissolve draws attention to its dissolving, it does not happen in a smooth singular direction: the oscillation of the imagery is a manifestation of larger argument: that no image is alone, as no film stands alone, so each image, is constantly invaded by another image, sometimes a fade, other times a contrasting images pulses from behind the image or spreads over it, we have a sense that behind one image is many others, as though all the films ever made were a microscopically thin gauze - each laid over the other, with the potential to elucidate each other, once we allow their simultaneous presence.

The spectre of Brecht hovers over this aesthetic; this can be seen in the refutation of sensory pleasure at the expense of argument, the jarring and varying modes of communication and the typographical games which become an equivalent of the ‘scene titles’ used in Brecht’s self-directed versions of his work. These jarring typographic intrusions, often overlay the image, tattoo it or bump it off the screen altogether. These methods reinforce the flatness of the screen (an equivalent of Brecht forever drawing our attention to our being in the theatre) the use of the titles sees cinema asserting itself as a platform for ideas without being woven into (or disguised by) ‘entertainment’: this is achieved by using the screen like a protester’s placard, the delivery of bold statements in sans serif font and primary school colours. In the jostle of voices and ideas - we are asked to regard the medium like a political rally.

A section of the Histoire(s) du Cinema, sees the date 1944 expand across the screen over the image of a boy, or young man, perhaps Goddard (b.1930, therefore aged 14) himself. At the same bells ring ominously, during which his voiceover begins (translated): “I was alone that night, with my dreams. Fifty years later we celebrate the Liberation. Television, because power has become spectacle, is organizing a huge show. No decoration for Guy Debord. French cinema never shook off the Germans or the Americans…”

[Goddard transposes French political history, its militaristic defeat by Germany and liberation by allied forces, to the narrative of cinema itself, suggesting that although both these parties physically retreated; intellectually French cinema had been colonized.]

He continues: “…Why is it from ‘40 to ‘45 there was no resistance cinema? There were resistance films, left and right, here and there, but the only film, in the true sense, to resist America’s occupation of cinema and uniform way of making films was an Italian film. It is not by chance. Italy fought the least. It suffered greatly but having betrayed twice, it suffered to have lost its identity, it found it again with ‘Rome, Open City’, because the film was made by men without uniform, it was the only time…”

What follows this voiceover is an extended, sumptuous, luxuriant montage sequence of Italian cinema with a stirring musical accomplishment. Here we are enveloped by the devices that had been assiduously avoided to this point. The entire arc of a shot is allowed to run to completion: a hug, the wiping of a tear, a woman stumbling down a street - this is very different from the ‘fragments of fragments’ approach to source material used elsewhere. This change of style is a jolt because by this stage the durational and immersive quality of the film so far had temporarily reversed the normative language of movie editing, the shard and half-clips have become our standard – so that one becomes hyper-aware of the purposely persuasive editing that is so common.

One of the few identifiable categorizations of film Goddard makes is that of nationality… The current dominance of American cinema, the absence of German cinema post war, the emphasis of martyrdom in Russian cinema in the early 50s and his salutation and celebration of Italian film, all point to a discussion of film that follows the modes of 19th and early 20th century thinking about painting and literature: identifying the ‘schools’ and recurring motifs of different countries’ traditions. This categorization complements Goddard’s comment in an interview, when he disagrees with the simplicity of the statement ‘cinema is a 20th century artform’, he corrects saying, ‘no, cinema is a 19th century artform that came to life in the 20th century’.

The instance of this exchange between Goddard and interviewer looks like something done for radio which was also filmed. The insertion of footage portraying Goddard offsets any stylistic depersonalization of other passages in the work. At the core of the film is Goddard himself - even if this presence is not necessarily direct and instantly readable - he takes many guises: we meet him sat at his desk, cigarette extending from mouth, tapping at a typewriter as though in the process of scripting the ‘history’ we watch, it chimes with the image of the detective-writer (so beloved of American film noir) making his notes for the case, casting himself as a private eye of sorts, which suggest he is uncovering something hidden or not immediately on the surface - he is not a police officer - so he becomes the unofficial bringer of truth, it reminds and reinforces that history is a constructed affair, not an organic unrolling of one thing after the other. Another guise of Goddard’s is his voice without image, his voice as signature, it wafts in and out of the film over the hours, alternately, bitter, accusatory, professorial, laconic - another thread on which the footage can hang. However other voices are often heard, passages of Hitchcock theorizing, a recurrent woman’s voice - I can’t identify, questions from others, much of it multi-lingual. This polyphonic assemblage destabilizes the singularity of Goddard’s presence without completely refuting him. The sound of Goddard at the typewriter becomes a soundtrack of sorts, the hammering of keys becomes a kind of percussive music, or military tattoo - in the process underscoring that all the choices of clips are Goddard’s: this is his journey. The diaristic elements of the work complicate any reduction of the film to polemical essay; it is as much poem as call to arms.

The dense interiority of the film is its most consistent feature, we are given no help in unpicking the logic behind the sequence of film clips, if indeed there is one… it is like an old fashion swimming lesson, you’re just chucked in the water and it is hoped that in your thrashing you might swim. As Chris Marker puts it, some filmmakers deliver sermons, but "the greats leave us with our freedom." Strangely the interiority is born not out of self-referentialism but by looking beyond its own borders, so much so it could be described as a film without borders with out a limit, its chains of associations extending multi-directionally. The time the film took to make (part one completed in 1988, the final part in 1998) bespeaks a high seriousness of purpose, a willful desire to communicate on the part of its maker, and yet what we are given is gnomic and cryptic. This is partly the consequence of Goddard’s refusal to relate to us in a popular and recognized mode of the sort we are accustomed to find on adverts and the mainstream cinema. This refusal is one of the foundations of his critique. That is not to suggest we engaged with an unemotional, cerebral exercise; Chris Petit, the filmmaker and critic who introduced the work suggests it has a penitent tone, that Goddard who in his youth was rejective of cinema’s history, now acknowledges that previously undisclosed debt by honoring it. Within the Histoire(s) an interviewer comments that Goddard was fortunately positioned as a chronicler of the art form: coming of age midway through the century, a mid point concurrent with that of cinema itself, uniquely placed like Janus to look forward and back simultaneously. Perhaps Goddard could be considered an incarnation of Benjamin’s Angel of History, through the prism of film’s history… “Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet…The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.” - I suggest this with the anachronistic presentation of his selected images in mind and his identification, diagnosis and articulation of the destruction of a school of cinema (French) while finding himself unable to act against (in this case socio-political) forces larger than himself.

However that’s not to say Goddard takes up a defeatist stance, I’d like to think of Histoire(s) du Cinema as a trailer. It may seem strange to think of a 5hr magnus opus as trailer, but in its assault on the representation of a linear history it becomes propositional as to how we might represent the past. A representation acknowledged as individualistic. Goddard could be said to be arguing there is no such thing as a communal history. The ‘history’ as taught via many a text book in schools, presents a seemingly ‘communal history’: this was experienced by them as a result of that - but like everything else, although others may be present and integral to what happens and how - we process what happens individually, despite it often being usually communicated otherwise. The presentation of history by the eye-witness, i.e. Goddard, is necessarily different from those who were not there. Therefore he becomes ‘the witness who sways’ - who openly recognizes his agenda and position in his recounting of events.

Having lost my first version of the text I am more anxious than I was previously to ‘save’ what I have written at regular intervals. The fear of loss and the urge to preserve, (it is almost too banal to write) go hand in hand. It is significant that Histoire(s) du Cinema, is a film constructed towards the end of Goddard’s life. It bears the hallmarks of the late works of many artists in disciplines ranging beyond film… The straining for the masterwork - that both contains and delimits all previous work, ths summation and networking of the previous films makes the project comparable to Velasquez’s Las Meninas, or Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, in its scope and ambition. It is a filmic and literary cliché to depict your life flashing before your eyes at the approach of death but none the less a comparable experience to watching Histoire(s) du Cinema. It can be considered a re-enactment of the Louvre scene in Bande à part, the difference being we the audience replace Odile, Arthur and Franz - and rather than hurtling past paintings it is the corridors of Goddard’s mind we are dragged through, a death wail, a cascading fountain of footage.. the last efforts of firing synapses.