There is no way to really summarize this "history." Most of these mini-narratives or essays are attempts to come to terms with the images relation to life (film images primarily but considerable attention is also given to painting and photography) and most of these mini-narratives or essays are more suggestive of possible and often contradictory meanings than of literal ones. Although sex and death are by far the most iterated themes of this history just as they are the most iterated themes of most histories, it's Godard's artful way of representing these themes (using other people's images) that make them so interesting.
Visually, Godard provides us with a collage of clips from Chaplin, Hitchcock, Rossellini, Vigo, Renoir, Cocteau, and countless other films intermixed with art history stills & all is accompanied by both a musical soundtrack and a poetic "narrative" (sometimes in Godard's voice, sometimes in a kind of Alphaville distorted voice & sometimes the narrative is read by select actresses who perform the narrative as if it were a script they are learning). This multi-media collage is ripe with suggestive juxtapositions but any stable or solid meanings dissolve as quick as each image. In telling these histories, Godard allows himself more than a margin of indefiniteness.
Certain phrases nonetheless resonate:
"We are one another."
"The myths by which we live are contradictory."
"Cinema has always yearned to be more real than life."
At one point Godard is interviewing a film historian who claims that the New Wave filmmakers were perfectly situated to tell the history of cinema because they arrived at a moment when film had a history that was rich but short enough to be absorbed by a single generation. Godard agrees somewhat, but adds that film history is connected to other histories and that for each filmmaker that history is a personal one based on that filmmakers own selection of influences. Godard claims that for some filmmakers like Truffaut, it was immediately apparent what their version of that history was and in what way they were adding to it. But Godard claims that for him it has taken many years to figure out film history and his relation to it.
What resonates in my mind after a single viewing is that Godard views cinema much as Lou Reed views rock n roll in the song "Rock n Roll." In that song, rock n roll offers release from the tedium and uncertainty of actual life and of actual living. For Reed (or Reeds character in the song) rock and roll is a kind of salvation, a kind of redemption. Because it offers a new kind of energy, a new kind of release, and because it lasts, its the one thing that makes this transitory existence tolerable. That seems to be Godards view of cinema (or at least one of his views of cinema).
But thats merely a summary of one of Godard's moods, there are many Godard's at work here. The beauty of this history is that no two viewers will likely translate these Godards and his myriad-minded histories in their own way.
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