From Film Comment (September-October 1998). This is a restructured and substantially revised, updated, and otherwise altered version of my "Trailer for Histoire(s) du cinéma," which appeared originally in French in the Spring 1997 issue of Trafic. Among the more important changes are a suppression of virtually all of my multiple comparisons of Histoire(s) du cinéma with Finnegans Wake in the original (which, paradoxically, seemed more appropriate in a French publication than in an American one), an expansion of much of the interview material, and an extended quotation from Godard's review of Rob Tregenza's Talking to Strangers.

My apologies for some format irregularities that I wasn't able to fix. -– J.R.

Part of the following derives from two film festival encounters — a panel discussion on Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma held in Locarno in August 1995, and some time spent with Godard in Toronto in September 1996. I participated in the first event after having seen the first four chapters of Godard's eight-part video series; unlike my co-panelists, I'd been unable to accept Godard's invitation to view chapters 3a and 3b, devoted to Italian neorealism and the New Wave, in Rolle a few days earlier. A little over a year later, Godard brought these chapters and a still more recent one — 4a, on Hitchcock — with him to Toronto, where he was presenting For Ever Mozart and Rob Tregenza's Talking to Strangers (the latter in Toronto's "Talking with Pictures" series), and showed me these three videos in his hotel room over two consecutive evenings. We also had some opportunities to talk; some of our conversation was recorded, along with Godard's press conference, but much of it wasn't.

Then, in mid-December, for an article I was writing about Histoire(s) du cinéma for the French quarterly Trafic (portions of which are recycled below), Godard generously assisted me by sending me copies of all the completed chapters to date. More recently, he completed the final chapter, then went back and made revisions on all eight parts before declaring the work finished.

I should admit here to a bias that I was reluctant to express quite as directly to Godard, given his friendliness: Nouvelle Vague and Histoire(s) du cinéma strike me as being two of his greatest works, Hélas pour moi and (to a much greater extent) For Ever Mozart two of his weakest, at least since his embattled "Dziga Vertov Group" period (roughly 1968-72). This isn't to say that all of Godard's work isn't interesting and important on some level, only that the gains and losses that come from his increasing solitude deserve to be examined rather than merely patronized. (Part of what I found most affecting about this solitude in Toronto was Godard's clear desire to communicate, which clearly went beyond his usual desire to provoke.)

At least since Passion (82), Godard's work has been obsessively concerned with beauty in a way that few of his Sixties films were, even the most beautiful. My preference for Histoire(s) du cinéma, Hélas pour moi, Nouvelle Vague, Germany Year 90 Nine Zero, and 2 x 50 Years of French Cinema over Les Enfants jouent à la Russie, JLG/JLG, and For Ever Mozart has a lot to do with how much this impulse connects with something beyond self and hermetic metaphors –- namely the history of both cinema and the 20th century, the life of privilege, the collapse of Communism, and the history of French cinema. It's a matter of engagement versus disengagement — the same thing that makes me prefer the politics of the Seventies works Godard made with Anne-Marie Miéville to those of the films made just before with Jean-Pierre Gorin, which smack of attitude and academic posturing (or is it "positioning"?).

"War — the theater of operations — follows theater," he writes it the For Ever Mozart pressbook. "And cinema follows war. In both instances, actors are gotten cheap and will have to pay for it." Again and again in the film, theater is viewed as war and war is viewed as bad theater — both put together by open casting calls and brutal auditions: a Musset play that's never performed when Camille's theater company gets wiped out en route to Sarajevo, a film called Fatal Bolero that's shot by her father but then gets shown in empty theaters. Amy Taubin wrote last July, "I have no doubt ... that it's the most straightforward and profound of the films Godard has made about war, beginning with Les Carabiniers," but I beg to differ. Les Carabiniers (1963) is scruffier and funnier and goes much deeper because it's more in touch with the world in front of the camera: muddy wasteland, grubby and anonymous actors, even the war films it mocks and periodically emulates; consequently it's more in touch with the audience. For Ever Mozart, featuring another cast of unknowns, prefers to stage its own metaphors in glossier terms — classical music, compulsively well-lit images of bad actors barking quotations at one another. Shooting the decorously arranged lower half of a female corpse lying in a doorway, Godard can't resist asking us to admire the shape of her ass.

***

In the following, all quotations from my conversations with Godard in Toronto are indicated by the abbreviations JR and JLG; those from his press conference in Toronto — some of which I've stitched together from separate answers, hopefully without misrepresenting him – are labeled Q (for question) and JLG; all these quotations are italicized.

GODARD AS HISTORIAN

JR: Whenever you recount a history there's an implication that something is over, and it seems that one implication of Histoire(s) du cinéma is that the cinema is over.

JLG: The cinema we knew. We also say that of painting.

In Godard's first phase as a filmmaker (roughly 1959-68), he functions very much as a historian of the present, literally as well as figuratively — a major dimension of his work that becomes diminished once he forsakes Paris for Grenoble and then rural Switzerland. Arguably, it is only when Switzerland functions as Switzerland in his films of the Nineties, as in Nouvelle Vague — or when Germany functions as Germany in Germany Year 90 Nine Zero — that the Godardian sense of both place and period survives intact. In Hélas pour moi and, even more, For Ever Mozart, by contrast, there is a sense of relative "placelessness" that also seems to locate both films outside of time, in spite of their many topical references. Interestingly enough, this ceases to be a problem in most of his videos; in Histoire(s), the only ongoing "place" that counts is cinema, not Switzerland, and perhaps for this reason, it has recently been in video, not film, that he functions most comfortably as a historian. [JLG:...For Ever Mozart is shot on the property belonging to my grandfather when I was young, and, it's so destroyed today, it fits very well for Yugoslavia.]

Q (JR at press conference): Why is For Ever Mozart three words instead of two?

JLG: "Forever" in America is one word? Because it's a French movie. (Laughter.) In France, there is a joke [i.e., pun]: "Il faut rêver" -– one must dream.

Q (Al Milgram at press conference): Why was there no criticism of the Bosnian war at all in the film like you had in the Vietnam-era films with the U.S. in Vietnam?

JLG: Because the movie has nothing to do with the Bosnian war. The title [of the play Camille speaks about] isn't Sarajevo or The Tragedy of Sarajevo, it's One Shouldn't Play With Love in Sarajevo. In Europe, intellectuals are so guilty for having done nothing, they always ask me about Sarajevo. No one there or in New York or in Toronto asks me about One Shouldn't Play With Love.

Q: Why did she want to produce the play?

JLG: Because she was Camus' granddaughter. It's reason enough. It's an image, and it corresponds in my opinion to the Camille of Musset, a character who is a very soft, crazy girl, very proud, of herself, but in the inside feeling she wants to do something for herself – not for the Bosnians. She doesn't even know where it is, Sarajevo.

Q: Do you feel that the U.S. government and other governments have used images of suffering in Bosnia for their own selfish reasons?

JLG: Yes, of course. These are not innocent people; TV networks are not charity. It's funny, their idea of storytelling. They say that happiness is no story. In Hollywood, when there's a story they always want to finish with happiness, a happy end, but they can get there only through catastrophe. They think that if you show happiness, people get bored. Not me. It's a huge contradiction. It's like in painting — movies too. I can look at only a flower for ten hours if it's well shot. So I think the aim of the use of terrible pictures is, the more you see them, the more you don't even look at them, unless it's a picture of your own mother.... The image of a movie when we began was in order to remember, TV is done to forget, and, that's what we are doing. We forget in two seconds. At the same time we're looking, we forget. We say it's terrible, and at the same time we forget. This is the way we want it, because if not, it would be like me, we wouldn't look at TV. It's like the way I can't stop smoking. Some people can't quit looking at TV.

JR: Why don't you live in the city now?

JLG: Too noisy, too dirty, no water, no lake...terrible. When we were in the New Wave, we were glad to shoot in the streets, because it was the first time. At that time it was forbidden, but today it's no longer interesting.