Godard's History(ies) of Cinema (original) (raw)
Related papers
Godard Counts: Histoire(s) du cinéma and Historical Evidence
Critical Inquiry, 2007
A discussion of Jean-Luc Godard's magnum opus, Histoire(s) du cinéma, understood as an essay in the constitution of historical knowledge in, through and as the discernment of formal affinities between artifacts (in this case, film clips). Specifically, Godard investigates the rules by which artifacts are combined—a practice he identifies with montage, and which he describes variously as a form of mathematical sequencing and an exercise of the self.
Video, the Cinematic, and the Post-Cinematic: On Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinéma
Journal of Film and Video, 2018
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) du Cinéma. It 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 of cinematic montage and the ontological status of the films extracted from disparate sources extensively. As a result, video in Histoire(s) ultimately serves both as a tool for the postcinematic expansion of montage and as a “synthesizer” of discrete images (films, paintings, photographs) and soundtracks whose affiliated media are originally distinct from each other.
Just an image: Godard, cinema, and philosophy
Critical Quarterly, 2001
When you become older, the analysis of the structure is part of the novel itself. It's the difference between James Joyce and Erle Stanley Gardner. In Perry Mason, the mystery is only the mystery of describing [whereas with Joyce] the mystery of the writing itself is part of the novel. The observer and the universe are part of the same universe. It's what science discovered at the beginning of this century, when they say you can't tell where an atomic particle is. You know where they are, but not their speed or you know their place but not their speed, because it depends on you. The one who describes is part of the description.' 1 Godard's films are a metacritical and philosophical analysis of the image, taking as an object of reflection two important hypotheses often expressed in aphoristic fashion. The first hypothesis is that cinema is not a reflection of reality but the reality of a reflection, thus turning on its head traditional conceptions of mimesis and representation. The second hypothesis, also an aphorism and related to the first, is that there is no`just image', there is onlỳ just an image'. In this essay, I explore how in his films Godard takes on in broad strokes the question of representation and explores the proposition that reality cannot be understood apart from cultural, political, and social practices or apart from`the one who describes [and who is] part of the description'. What does it mean to invert the meaning of the image, reducing it to`just an image'? What is the character of Godard's`pedagogy' so often alluded to by critics and different from our conventional expectations of the pedagogical? What is the role of history and memory in this pedagogy? And how appropriate is it to adopt the idea of pedagogy to describe Godard's critical/cinematic mode? James Roy MacBean, in his chapters on Godard in Film and Revolution, has written that in Godard's films,`truth is no longer understood as immanent in things and beings; as if lying there waiting to be revealed (like God's grace: it is nothing more and nothing less than the significations and moral transformations we produce in social practice'. 2 Can it be, contrary to MacBean, that cinema is more than knowledge produced in social practice?
Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2021
The beginning of Jean-Luc Godard’s essayistic practice is intrinsically linked to the use of the diptych device. Thus, a previous work is the cause of an essay film that aims to reflect on the cinematic practice carried out. This article aims to analyse the use, function, and evolution of this device in the beginning and consolidation of the Godardian essay film. While Camera-eye (1967) offers a prefiguration of this new filmic form in relation to La Chinoise (1967), Letter to Jane (1972) results in its first realisation concerning a previous fiction, Tout va bien (1972), in order to continue the reflection on the intellectuals’ role in revolution. Thanks to the decisive arrival of video technology, essential for the essay film practice, Ici et ailleurs (1976) takes up the material of the never released film Jusqu'à la Victoire to generate self-criticism in militant practice. Finally, with Scénario du film Passion (1982), Godard offers a new subsequent essay film that generates both temporalities, before and after the creation, in order to embody an essential self-portrait of the audiovisual essayist. This series of diptych works reveals a hypertextual audiovisual thinking process that rethinks cinematic practice.
Jean-Luc Godard: Making Cinema on the Page
Writings, images and "l'adieu au langage" that doesn't come : https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2022/forms-that-think-jean-luc-godard/jean-luc-godard-making-cinema-on-the-page/ Senses of cinema, n°100, January 2022, special issue "Forms that think: Jean-Luc Godard".