Godard began work on his monumental survey of the cinema in 1988. Turning to video technology to tell the story of the century of celluloid as it rapidly drew to a close, Godard took the next ten years to construct a sustained montage of film clips, music fragments, sound effects, on-screen text and voice-over, not so much a history of the cinema as a critique of it. The resulting eight-part, 260-minute work washes over the viewer in surging waves of quotations, references and autobiographical reflections. Magisterial and mercurial, overwhelming and intimate, HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA finds a giant of the cinema surveying the myriad intersections between the larger history of the 20th century and a life spent embroiled in the meaning of the moving image.
The genesis for HISTOIRE(S) was a series of lectures that Godard gave at the University of Montreal in 1978, but its structure and themes reach back to the influence of Henri Langlois' pell-mell programming at the Cinémathèque Française and Godard's own early criticism in Cahiers du Cinéma. Returning repeatedly to images of war and the Holocaust, Godard moves between documentary and fictional modes to strike an elegiac tone over the cinema's failure to recognize the urgent, ugly truths of the century it helped to shape. Acknowledging and probing the cinema's fall from grace, Godard nevertheless struggles to commune with the medium's ineffable allure.
Since its completion in 1998, HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA has been broadcast on European television, released on VHS and adapted into a book accompanied by a collection of audio CDs. However, until recently, it has been rarely screened in this country. The Archive is proud to present the local premiere of Gaumont's fully subtitled video restoration of HISTOIRE(S) over two nights. More than a summation of a career or an era, HISTOIRE(S) is, like all of Godard's best work, a vital call for a new kind of cinema.
Presented in conjunction with the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and its program, "The Films That Got Away."
Special thanks to: Laurent Morlet, Mathilde Caillol, Lise de Sablet—Film and Television Department of the French Consulate, Los Angeles.
Friday February 10 2006, 7:30PM ( Online Ticket Sales Ended )
HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA - CHAPTERS 1 AND 2
(1988, France) Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
(1988-1998)
Chapter 1(a), "Toutes les histoires" ("All the (Hi)stories")
Chapter 1(b), "Une Histoire seule" ("A Single (Hi)story")
Chapter 2(a), "Seule le cinema" ("Only Cinema")
Chapter 2(b), "Fatale beauté" ("Deadly Beauty")
Presented in French dialogue with English subtitles. Beta-SP, 148 min.
Sunday February 12 2006, 7:00PM ( Online Ticket Sales Ended )
HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA - CHAPTERS 3 AND 4
(1988, France) Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
(1988-1998)
Chapter 3(a), "La Monnaie de l'absolu" ("The Coin of the Absolute")
Chapter 3(b), "Une Vague Nouvelle" ("A New Wave")
Chapter 4(a), "Le Côntrole de l'univers" ("The Control of the Universe")
Chapter 4(b), "Les Signes parmi nous" ("The Signs Among Us")
Presented in French dialogue with English subtitles. Beta-SP, 117 min.
Both evenings introduced by Robert Koehler, film critic for Variety and Cinema Scope.