Histoire(s) du Cinema
JEAN LUC GODARD, 1989-1999
3.5 STARS OUT OF 5
E.T. and I go back for as long as it and I have existed. E.T. are my initials, both my birth and E.T.’s release went down in 1982, and crucially, I often feel I’m on an alien planet and would just like to go the CINECAST! home. I don’t have any urge to destroy you all, I just don’t belong here, and belonging is so crucial. It’s that final point that makes E.T. more than pop culture iconography to me, and maybe it all seems too arbitrary and superficial, but it has stuck for 38 years. It stuck so much that I got the E.T. tat in like 2012(?):
(I share. It’s what I do.)
I also know the problems with and limitations of E.T., and could write a convincing one-star review of the film that would make it seem that I hate it. I could go lukewarm on it, throw out a 3/5, which angle should we try? “It generally fulfills Spielberg’s vision and critique of modern suburbia, but never transcends the kid-and-creature trope it portrays.” Or…”It’s a stupendous ride that will make you feel like a kid again, but nothing more than that.” Obviously, I can do five stars.
To penetrate even further, E.T. in and of itself is a piece of Hollywood entertainment that falls enormously short of the promise of cinema, a blockbuster in growing era of blockbusters leading to the homogenization and status quo-maintaining cinema that continues unabated to this day and seriously separates people who love cinema as art and people who are just mesmerized by overstimulating sounds and moving pictures that are so simple morally and ethically so as to mean basically nothing. No one sees themselves as being of the “Dark Side”, everyone imagines themselves a Jedi master or Han Solo, although Hong Kong is falling and George Floyd is dead for no good reason. You might not want to speculate on why most people go to the movies, but just look at the box office numbers, IT IS ESCAPE! With maybe just a side of the confirmation that the viewer is just as righteous as the characters they so love. Some legit good crossover movies are making some bank, too, just look at how Parasite or The Grand Budapest Hotel performed at the worldwide box office, something I don’t know that Jean Luc Godard could have seen happening in the decade he spent of Histoire(s) du Cinema, but also, maybe he’s more of a curmudgeon than I am. Actually, if you just look at my Letterboxd ratings of films, for sure he is, but for the duration of his 8-episode, 4-part dissection of cinema and the 20th Century by extension, I felt where he was coming from. I can simultaneously hold his passion and hang-ups in one hand and agree with plenty, while also holding a broader view of cinema that encompasses films that really can be seen as merchandise ads and reap the value there, whatever I perceive it to be, too.
Histoire(s) du Cinema is a difficult work to sit through, and its ultimate meaning can only be known by its creator, Jean Luc Godard. The confluence of still and moving images from an array of films, text, music, poetry, Godard at the word processor organizing his thoughts with a cigar in his mouth, all often superimposed on top of each other, is truly sensory overload, especially since it does not follow any solid audiovisual grammar that we would recognize. Yet for me, it facilitated further reflection on cinema, even if I only can be said to have processed - in some way that I can write down or can just understand in the more abstract sense - maybe 15% or 20%. It also challenged me to keep up, get on its wavelength, soak it in, figure it out, which I love, because if I agree with one of the more explicit points of the film - if it truly can be said to have any - it’s that the same films get made over and over again. While experimental docs and deep dives on the art certainly exist, I would think it unlikely that Histoire(s) du Cinema is derivative of anything except cinema itself.
Something to be appreciated is how openly personal and subjective this exploration is, and yet how convincing it is in its purpose. Godard brushes away the low-hanging fruit with simple statements, while exploring the core of the issues surrounding beauty, exploitation, truth, time, and annihilation with the wealth of audiovisual information organized in a very impressionistic manner, full of seemingly free associations that are, at second blush, just a bit more coordinated than that. One of the more challenging sequences comes in Episode 2, where Godard confronts cinema that portrays childhood with images from The Night of the Hunter (among others, that goes without saying) and a girl reciting poetry (don’t blame me for not knowing the half of what’s cut in here), seemingly contrasting the beauty of youth with unyielding time, playing into a phrase used often in this series, “Fatal Beauty”, sometimes seemingly translated to “Deadly Beauty”. From my point of view, it is a warning against falling into the trap of beauty and youth, or to understand what beauty and youth are to time.
In a sense, Godard’s crafted perspective exhibits simultaneously both great love and skepticism toward cinema, and he moves between both states (and honestly, many more between, but these are major) even when he thinks about humankind itself. His love can be seen to turn to preciousness to turn to snobbishness. In the context of Histoire(s) du Cinema, you can see his disposition as all three simultaneously without conflict. Maybe they’re a package deal and this is no real observation, maybe not. But even as he flashes images early of “a girl and a gun”, he expresses his love for Hitchcock as (paraphrasing here) one of the true poets that was able to crossover into the mainstream. He emphasizes cinema as giving voice to the poor and suffering, while also lamenting its failure to revolutionize human civilization. He certainly had lofty ideals of what cinema could accomplish, further qualifying the offhanded remark about Spielberg and film-as-pure-entertainment in America, whatever you personally feel about it. He takes films incredibly seriously, as can be seen within the interweaving of snippets from religious films repeated over a lot of the series, likening the creation of film to the creation of the world itself. When you take that perspective, how can you not be precious about the subject?
There are so many more themes to explore, but making a laundry list isn’t all that useful. Perhaps it’s important to mention that he often compares film to literature, photography, theater and (bitterly, despite it being the format for this miniseries) television, often calling it (paraphrasing again, maybe) not a technique and not an art. Herein lie further contradictions, because he continuously compares it to art while saying it might not live up to that label. But ultimately, either you watch it or you don’t, and only if you do see it can you fully comprehend the experience. It’s like a lot of modern art - and the MOMA indeed has a description of it on its website - in that your reaction will likely be based on impressions and experience, where the object itself and its meaning don’t take the path of logic or grammar. In my opinion, that is what makes it fun! And I think you have to approach Histoire(s) du Cinema that way if you’re going to get anything out of it.
So I hold onto E.T. while knowing what E.T. is, and knowing that the deepest depths of cinema are far deeper. As I continue through the Sight & Sound 100, I do rather worry that certain big and ambitious projects done out of passion and humanity never get made because the only films that are really profitable known are the major blockbuster franchise films, MCU and the like. A lot of indies are starting to blend together as just pictures of people talking together in apartments and restaurants likely because they’re cheap to make and resonate with enough people to make sense profit-wise. (Some of them are also quite good, don’t get me wrong). But then, I stop and think on the art of Jafar Panahi, Andrea Arnold, and Bong Joon-ho, on the daring cinema that still makes it out, that is visionary in its perception of time, death, humanity, misery, and struggle, and maybe even some beauty, fatal or otherwise, recognize that my own Sight and Sound ballot would be comprised primarily of films of the 21st Century, and I don’t feel too terribly worried. The art house is still there, the little multiplexes off to the side (at least in big markets) are willing to spare a few screens to art. And maybe even one or two pictures of the big, colorful, overstimulating stuff manages to emerge from the muck and seem worthwhile. Maybe. Therefore no, I’m not as curmudgeonly as Godard, but I appreciate his preciousness and his vision, and think it is well-expressed in the at-times confounding, ever-fascinating Histoire(s) du Cinema.