To
say that Godard’s magnum opus Histoire(s) du Cinéma – the 8-part video
essay conceived while he was on lecture tours during the 80s, 10 years in the
making, and clocking at a massive 266 minutes – is a monumental treatise on
cinema is stating the obvious. It’s a dense, daunting, discursive, digressive, deeply
self-reflexive, incredibly metatextual, unabashedly polemical, and radical
reimagining of what cinema is and can be. And in turn this freeform, kaleidoscopic
and demanding work – filled with hyperlinks, reflections, juxtapositions,
dizzying montage, and intricate interplay of images, sounds and words –
manifested everything that Godard was and remains – viz. a pioneer, a
pathbreaker, a prophet, a subversive pun artist, a romantic, a rebel, a
staggering intellectual, a profoundly progressive critical thinker and someone
for whom history (and story) of cinema – as the wordplay in the title alluded
to – and its form and dialectics, were inseparable from the history, story,
interpretation and politics of the 20th century. His complex and
sprawling meditation on the medium, therefore, encompassed everything from the
American studio system to Soviet montage, from Italian neorealism to French avant-garde,
and from wide-ranging impressions of other artforms (literature, painting,
music) to auto-portraiture. These in turn were overlayed with his wry and weary
commentary on fascism, imperialism, capitalism, consumerism, tyranny, exploitation
and devastating wars that the century was besieged with, along with stirring
espousal of revolutionary ideas and melancholic elegy on cinema. While it was
impossible to make note of the slew of films that he referenced – which led to
inevitable copyright issues, though, ironically, Godard exempted his own work from
copyright restrictions – I managed to count 65-odd films that I’ve watched,
though I’m sure I missed a few.
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Genre: Documentary/Essay Film
Language: French
Country: France
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