The Flickering Flame
Earn this," Tom Hanks said to Matt Damon in Saving Private Ryan. The human sacrifice in that comment relates to what Jean-Luc Godard proposes as the value of movies. The Museum of Modern Art is currently showing Godard's video series Histoire(s) du Cinéma, the complete four-part monument, in its entirety. Critic-filmmaker-savant, Godard combines intellectual rigor and esthetic taste into an extended essay on cinephilia (complete with direct quotations). He juxtaposes film clips with reproductions of paintings while citing 20th-century political events. That movies are pleasurable is implicit in his endeavor, but most important, Histoire(s) du Cinéma insists that the work filmmakers did to express human consciousness during the past century deserves our respect.
Histoire(s) du Cinéma proves that the pop- culture war initiated by Godard and his colleagues in the 50s-60s French New Wave is not fini. Every year, truly original film releases challenge moviegoers to rethink why they go to the movies. (As Bertolucci reminded viewers in The Dreamers, for some, moviegoing isn't a habit; it's a pilgrimage. For Godard, it's always an inquiry.) This series isn't a nostalgic recall, like one of the American Film Institute's 100-Best tv roll calls of the same old Hollywood junk. Instead, many of its film references are unidentified and are presented to be mysterious. Godard takes perverse enjoyment in teasing the cognoscenti but also in simply insisting that the images have pleasure and significance in themselves. (For uninitiated viewers, Histoire(s) du Cinéma should still be a banquet.) His cataloguing is not out of context; it's all big-picture context-The Story of Mankind in images that move, and in popular art, that is the equivalent to its fine-art predecessors.
In the age of television, digital video and David Fincher (in which the proliferation of images seems to mean nothing), Godard's abiding movie faith is radical. The collective parts of Histoire(s) du Cinéma are like a semester of what universities used to call "Film Appreciation." Each chapter, about one hour in length, equates to a course in film study and orgiastic art consumption. Godard packs a lot of ideas and images into short episodes.
Chapter one is in two parts: Toutes les Histoires (All Stories) and Une Histoire Seule (A Single Story). Not an introduction to Godard's thesis, it plunges viewers into the depths of film storytelling. Chapter two's sections are titled Seul le Cinéma (Only Cinema) and, my favorite, Fatale Beauté. Here Godard examines film as dark revelation. Chapter three is divided into La Monnaie d'Absolu (Absolute Currency) and Une Vague Nouvelle. These look at film and art as global languages. Chapter four's sections are titled Le Controle de l'Univers (Control of the Universe) and Les Signes Parmi Nous (Our Signs). These essays conclude without finalizing the series' overall concept of movies as timeless signs of cultural expression.
The series centers on a supposition that "Cinema is the shelter of time." Godard is seen sitting in the dark, before an editing console, rifling film footage through that hands-on antique, a Steenbeck moviola. His custodial position-the key image of the series-suggests a miser counting jewels and coins in a treasure chest, except that Godard's gruff-whispered narration and bespectacled squint is assessing the philosophical value of his bounty. The clips are time capsules; the film strips themselves are numinous materials that preserve imagination. This week's individually scheduled screenings are ideal, but because each chapter is so rich, MOMA's January 16 marathon exhibition of the whole thing is like a super-intensive summer- school course. You could catch up on chapters you missed, but to see it all at once is simply cheating yourself. It was conceived for periodic viewing in installments; the history of what Godard calls "the miseries and splendors of cinema" requires moments of reflection.
If you've ever enjoyed a movie, then Histoire(s) du Cinéma is for you. MOMA's showing amounts to a great cultural event because the presentation of this rare series (still not on DVD) testifies to why movies matter. The catholicity of Godard's taste-exhibited by the series' range from Eisenstein to Van Gogh, Rembrandt to Hitchcock-encourages one to apply esthetic sensitivity to worthy work regardless of arbitrary social distinctions. He could help you bridge The Passion of the Christ to Goya, Hero to Albert Bierstadt, thus rising above the chaos of 2004 movie discourse.
The passion of Histoire(s) du Cinéma is based on the feel for pop art that distinguished Godard as both scholar and artist. He characterizes the objective of every great filmmaker as "How to build the imperishable from what perishes." Sentiments like that prove that Godard is a poet more than a maker of conventional (prose-like) narrative. But it also expresses his ardent interest in movies, which any buff might share. The procession of images in Histoire(s) du Cinéma becomes a way of recognizing that this art form isn't merely about escapism; it can deliver audiences into a deeper appreciation of the world. Godard intones, "How marvelous to look at what one cannot see." He understands how film art reveals. This recalls Robert Frost's command, "See what is invisible and you will know what to write."
Godard knows that movies-even fantasies as baroque as Hitchcock's or Dovzhenko's-can make up for our lapses in perception and understanding. That's what separates Histoire(s) du Cinéma from last year's epic-length meta-cinema essay L.A. Plays Itself. California scholar Thom Andersen's film is a doctrinaire round-up of movies related only by their diegetic location. He applies a Mike Davis-style political gloss, pointing out Hollywood's distortion of actual Los Angeles history, but Andersen's appreciation of "stories" (the near-homonymic similarity to "history" that Godard's title cleverly invokes) is rather banal. He lumps schlock with refinement, blurring guilty pleasure with tough-scrutiny (and underrates both Altman and Demme). Though Andersen was obviously inspired by Histoire(s) du Cinéma, the parochialism of L.A. Plays Itself winds up furthering the Hollywood mystique that Godard subverts. ("Forms tell us what is at the bottom of things," Godard says, explaining genre as a reflection of reality.)
As part of Godard's dark period, Histoire(s) du Cinéma is also a lament that movies will never be what they once were. The most self-examining of Europhiles, Godard grieves, "The cinema was made for thinking. The flame went out in Auschwitz." That's poetic overstatement. Godard's most recent films prove the flame still flickers. Because it must.