Histoire(s) du Cinéma

Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinéma was made for French television between 1988 and 1998, across eight episodes (1A, 1B, 2A, 2B, 3A, 3B, 4A, 4B) totalling approximately 266 minutes. The work is widely placed at the upper tier of every Sight & Sound poll covering television and avant-garde production, and is widely considered Godard's most ambitious late-career work outside his theatrical features.

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

The work is not narrative; it is associative, polemical, by turns furious and elegiac. Each episode is a sustained meditation on a particular aspect of cinema's twentieth-century history — Italian neorealism, the Holocaust as the cinema's failure of witness, the silent era as the medium's apex, the New Wave's failure to transform the cinema's institutional commitments. Godard's project was to assemble, across the decade he spent on the work, his accumulated argument about what the cinema had been and had failed to become.