Histoire(s) du Cinéma

Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinéma was made for French television between 1988 and 1998, in eight episodes (1A, 1B, 2A, 2B, 3A, 3B, 4A, 4B) running to about 266 minutes. It places high in every Sight & Sound poll that covers television and avant-garde work, and it is Godard's most ambitious late work outside his theatrical features.

Across the eight episodes Godard builds a vast video essay on the twentieth century in cinema, and on the cinema's failures and complicities within it. He uses a montage-overlay technique he had been refining for more than a decade: superimposed images, layered sound, fragments of dialogue and music from hundreds of films, his own voice-over commentary, and video effects made possible by the Sony BVU systems of the early 1990s. Henri Langlois, Sergei Eisenstein, Howard Hawks, Robert Bresson and dozens of other filmmakers appear in archival fragments throughout.

There is no story to follow. The work moves by association and polemic, by turns furious and elegiac, and each episode takes up one strand of cinema's twentieth-century history: Italian neorealism, the Holocaust as the cinema's failure of witness, the silent era as the medium's peak, the New Wave's failure to change the cinema's institutions. Over the decade he spent on it, Godard assembled his accumulated argument about what the cinema had been and what it had failed to become.