Repositorium für die Medienwissenschaft

Céline Scemama
Jean-Luc Godard’s HISTOIRE(S) DU CINÉMA: Cogito
Ergo Video
2014
https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/13688

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Empfohlene Zitierung / Suggested Citation:

Scemama, Céline: Jean-Luc Godard’s HISTOIRE(S) DU CINÉMA: Cogito Ergo Video. In: Annie van den Oever (Hg.):
Technē/Technology. Researching Cinema and Media Technologies – Their Development, Use, and Impact. Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press 2014, S. 196–206. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/13688.

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Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du
Cinéma: Cogito Ergo Video

Céline Scemama

Fig. 1: Chapter 1b, A Single Story, 1’45’’.1

On Technique, Thought and Beauty

When viewing Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1988-1998), one necessarily asks one-
self how, technically, Godard succeeded in bringing such a vast selection of
sounds and images into this impressive and infinitely beautiful work. One also
wonders from where the bits and pieces of images, phrases, and melodies were
taken, even as they vanish and are replaced by others – but this is another matter.
We cannot begin to consider the film’s poetics – a film about History, which, for
Godard, means a film about all stories – without taking into account how God-
ard, as a filmmaker, puts the techniques of cinema to the test.
Long before this highly atypical film, Godard had always attached great impor-
tance to film techniques. In À Bout de Souffle (1960), he used highly sensi-
tive film generally reserved for photographers and the making of documentary
films; in La Chinoise (1967), he already thought of using a video camera; he
used high-definition video for an unprecedented color treatment in Éloge de

196
L’amour (2001), and is considering using stereoscopic 3D technology in his
next film (Adieu au Langage). In Histoire(s) du Cinéma, strangely en-
ough, the innovation does not lie in the adoption of any technological novelty
but in the way Godard uses methods and processes that are in fact very old –
which also lends the film a melancholy and tragic dimension.
What is important here, however, is not Godard’s relationship to any state-of-
the-art technology. According to him, he had thought of using a video camera on
La Chinoise, at a time when Sony had no interest in such cameras: “When La
Chinoise was being made, I’d seen a camera and a video recorder in Philips’s
window, and said to myself that the discussion in the room between the Maoists
could be filmed on video by them and they could then make their autocritiques, as
the fashion then was.”2
What matters is not so much whether his interest in new technologies put
Godard ahead of his time, as is the way in which he instantly thought of using
them to serve his outlook on the times; more than one year before the May 1968
events started in France, he had already made La Chinoise. The young revolu-
tionaries he depicts in this film “play at” revolution and, as Shakespeare and To
Be or Not to Be3 have taught us, there is no incompatibility between “playing”
and “doing.” Therefore, the kind of theatricality one observes in La Chinoise is
in fact the most vivid expression of a certain social reality as the artist saw it.
Godard was well aware that representation was an integral part of the revolution-
ary process, and his video camera project – whereby the characters would have
been shown filming one another – was meant to emphasize this essential fact.
In Histoire(s) du Cinéma, Godard uses old cinematographic techniques –
“a wonderful legacy of the past”4 – and thus experiments in an unprecedented
way of conceiving a prophetic work of History, a kind of funeral announcement.
For Godard, this means going back to the infancy of cinema as it lays dying. Iris-
ins, iris-outs, fast motion, slow motion, superimpositions, old-fashioned fade-
outs: Histoire(s) du Cinéma integrates all the outdated effects and cinemato-
graphic tricks that Epstein used to theorize and experiment with, and that Élie
Faure already regretted: “Superimpositions and slow motion effects, which
played a fundamental role in the development of our rhythmic and visual educa-
tion, have disappeared from most contemporary films.”5 Godard is neither con-
servative nor backward-looking; however, he has never refused a new technical
possibility and has always been infatuated by machines.6 In the manner of pio-
neers such as Méliès, Lumière, Griffith, and Vertov, he has always experimented
with the technical potentialities his art offered. “Technological inventions bring
the idea of a new art form. But once the idea exists, [...] it inspires technology in
turn, gives it a direction and a specific mission.”7 In this case, Godard entrusts
the art of film with a mission that has often been denied: to think – and, more
particularly, to think “all the stories.” And to think, for Godard, means to see...
and to see implies to hear. Consequently, such audiovisual thought cannot be

jean-luc godard’s histoire(s) du cinéma: cogito ergo video 197

Fig. 2: Chapter 1a, All the Stories, 44’55’’.

dissociated from what is objectively – and hence technically – happening on

screen. Even though his transformation of the Cartesian phrase – “Cogito ergo
video”8 – is sometimes considered humorous, it is nevertheless a founding prin-
ciple, a discourse on method.
Are thought and beauty two separate entities? It seems not, as Godard uses
techniques to forge his audiovisual material into beauty and thought at the same
time: “Few pan shots – maybe one high-angle shot, but because a mother is cry-
ing over her murdered child”9 – a phrase that reminds us of Godard’s statement
from the sixties: “Tracking shots are a matter of morality.”10 What is beautiful is
not the represented thing itself, but a form’s accuracy with regard to its object –
which is why Godard repeats no less than eight times in the film: “neither an art
nor a technique: a mystery.”11
The thought and beauty present in a work of art essentially depend on the
employed techniques: technique is everything. On the other hand, technique is
nothing without the use one makes of it. An artist makes do and invents new
forms with whatever comes to hand: therefore, technique is nothing. Thought
and beauty, in a work of art, are the result of a coincidence between materials,
techniques and the various ways in which the artist uses them: a mystery, that is,
which this article does not pretend to solve but to explore – notably through the
analysis of certain film extracts.

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Fig. 3: Chapter 1b, A Single Story, 0’14’’.

Associated to Greenberg’s line in To Be or Not to Be,12 when quoting Shy-

lock in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (act III, scene 1): “If you prick us, do we
not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?”

Cogito Ergo Video

Godard’s version of Cartesian certitude – “Cogito ergo video”13 (Fig. 3) – means: “I
think, therefore I see.” Consequently, Godard thinks what he shows – that is,
what he sees. In other words, his thought never precedes what he sees: “Never
decide anything in advance,”14 Bresson writes. Godard’s thought exists only be-
cause his sight is focused in a very specific way, and inasmuch as “a mechanism
gives rise to the unknown, and not because one has found this unknown in ad-
vance.”15 Histoire(s) is entirely based on this principle. We can see Godard’s
thought take form on screen, as it were, from one shot to the next – although not
in the way we see and grasp objects that surround us, as ideas cannot be sepa-
rated from their mode of appearance: the combination of images, words and
sounds. This principle is very much in keeping with another Bressonian precept:
“Your film is not readymade. It makes itself as it goes along under your gaze.
Images and sounds in a state of waiting and reserve.”16 Godard follows Bresson’s
teachings and respects “the precept: find without seeking.”17 Once in contact

jean-luc godard’s histoire(s) du cinéma: cogito ergo video 199

with the associated images, sounds and words, the screen, thus impacted, re-
veals the unexpected: “It is profitable that what you find should not be what you
were expecting. Intrigued, excited by the unexpected.”18 The whole difficulty –
“hoc opus, hic labor est” 19 – implied by this method is to “Provoke the unexpected.
Expect it.”20 To provoke and wait at the same time: a fine paradox, for the artist,
which ties in with the other great principle upon which Histoire(s) is based: “A
thought that forms a form that thinks”21 – “to provoke” being the equivalent of
“a thought that forms,” and “to wait,” of “a form that thinks.” This phrase is not
more rhetorical than Godard’s transformation of Cartesian certitude, as God-
ard’s thought does not exist independently from the images that appear edited
together on the screen – which amounts to saying it does not exist without the
syntax Godard uses to work with his material, a syntax which wholly depends on
the instruments of cinema and, in this particular case, of video.
Are video and cinema here considered as two separate art forms? Generally
speaking, they may be – and sometimes quite vigorously –, but Godard himself
implies no such thing. According to Youssef Ishaghpour, “[…] For cinema to
turn in on itself in this way, in this sort of reflection on itself and its History –
for that to be possible and for the result to become a Scripture, cinema squared so
to speak, a great work – it seems to me that the existence of video was neces-
sary.”22 And to that Godard answers: “Video seemed to me one of the avatars of
cinema […] I’d say there was no very big difference between video and cinema
and you could use one like the other. […] Video came from cinema, but you can’t
say now that IT23 comes from cinema.”24 However, Godard explains that what he
realizes in video could not be done through cinema. He also says that,

Histoire(s) was cinema. Technically it was textbook stuff, very simple

things. Of the forty possibilities in the list I used one or two, mostly overprint-
ing to help retain the original cinema image, while if I’d tried to do the same
thing with film I’d have to use reverse negative copies and that causes a loss of
quality; above all you can alter the image easily with video, while with film all
variation has to be preplanned. […] It was an act of painting. The overprints,
all that comes from cinema, they were tricks Méliès used.25

Godard’s answer is highly significant, especially in its paradoxical aspects. He

explains that Histoire(s) is at once cinema and an act of painting, and that
video is cinema, even though all that video enables could not be done with film.
Two points may be singled out: according to Godard, video is cinema’s daughter,
or one of its avatars, but the immediacy of the mixing and combination of images
is – as such – only possible with video. The potentialities of video are compared
to an “act of painting” because, in both cases, the artist works with his hands,
and, furthermore, the screen may be compared to the painter’s canvas receiving

200 céline scemama

Fig. 4: Chapter 4a, The Control of the Universe, 7’19’’.

shapes and colors. Before the form itself begins to think, the artist must think
with his hands, whether in the art of film, video or painting.

The mind is only true when it manifests itself – and in the word “manifest,”
one hears the [French] word “main.” [...] It is time that thought becomes what
it truly is: dangerous for the thinker and capable of transforming reality.
“Where I create is where I am true,” Rilke wrote.[…] It is said that some
think, others act. But man’s true condition is to think with his hands. […] I
shall not denigrate the tools we have, but I do wish they were functional – […]
if it is generally true that the danger does not lie in the tools we use but in the
weakness of our own hands.26

Thinking with One’s Hands (Fig. 4)

Video enables Godard to make a film in a more visible and immediate way: the
editing, fast and slow motions, superimpositions, fade-outs, and so forth, are
directly made on a set of screens and in a sound control room. It is Godard’s
hands that think and try out new rhythms and associations, and with his eyes
and ears that he apprehends the outcome of this “form that thinks” in its turn:
“It is manual work,” Godard says. This clearly appears in the film, notably in the

jean-luc godard’s histoire(s) du cinéma: cogito ergo video 201

Fig. 5: Chapter 3b, A New Wave, 5’26’’. Eisenstein cutting film and Anna
Karina:1 “Beauty. Montage my beautiful care.”

passages using reverse, fast or slow motion effects: when Capitaine de Boïel-
dieu,27 in slow motion, miraculously rises from the ground after having been
shot, for instance, or when a young woman28 runs toward a door in fast motion
and does the same movement in reverse and in slow motion.29 The latter shot is
caught between two shots showing edit benches, which further emphasizes the
manipulative process at work. In the film as a whole, Godard shows 31 times the
image of a spinning film reel on an edit bench – a film in the process of being
edited –, thereby using video to show the potentialities of celluloid film and de-
monstrate the essential manual dimension of cinema. The most significant shots
in that respect are those that show Eisenstein manipulating film30 – an icon of
cinematic thought at work (Fig. 5).
This enables Godard to try out the effects an image, a sound, a word, a title
and a bit of dialogue produce when they are brought together. From an infinite
number of possible compositions, Godard chooses only one, leaving the fabrica-
tion process partly apparent in the completed work. This is particularly obvious
when the word “error” appears on the screen:31 at one point, when alluding to
the founder of Universal Studios, Godard first mentions Erich Pommer, but in
the next shot, a written phrase appears: “Error – Carl Laemmle” (Fig. 6). He also
says:32 “and Tyrone Power in a romance set in the South Seas – never mind the

202 céline scemama

Fig. 6: Chapter 3a, The Small Change of the Absolute, 6’53’’.

story, so long as it is entitled Birds of Paradise.”33 And then, “error” appears on

screen again, followed by “Virginia Mayo.” And Virginia Mayo herself appears.
This happens three other times in the film: Godard leaves the traces of this trial
and error, because they show the way he proceeds and how his thought pro-
gresses on screen. However, among all the possible solutions and compositions
he tried out, he kept only those that appear in the film – highly complex compo-
sitions on which are based both an individual thought and a specific art form.
For instance,34 the expression “dream factory”35 – which reflects the duality of
cinema itself – has a double meaning in this context: the factory one has been
dreaming of, a beautiful factory, and, on the other hand, an industrial machine
designed for the mass production of dreams. “SUDDENLY”: the Russian title
card from Battleship Potemkin (1925) creates an interruption similar to the
inversion of power represented in Eisenstein’s film. The battleship retaliates by
shooting at the palace. Eisenstein’s three stone lions – one asleep, one sitting,
one rising to its feet – symbolize, in three shots, the uprising of the people with-
in a very short period of time, hence mirroring the revolutionary process. Within
a few seconds, the people have taken power. But immediately afterwards, Godard
says “the Gulag Archipelago” and thereby announces what will follow: the death
of Lenin, and the collapse of a dream. “Communism has worn itself out dream-
ing such factories,” Godard says a little later. Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony – as

jean-luc godard’s histoire(s) du cinéma: cogito ergo video 203

Fig. 7: Chapter 1a, All the Stories, 15’37’’. Lenin and a shot of The New
Babylon.1

unfinished as the communist ideal itself – accompanies the images of Dziga

Vertov’s Kino Pravda until the roll of the timpani announcing Lenin’s death.
Superimposed on Lenin’s inert face – and while the Unfinished Symphony still re-
sounds – there appears, in a very quick alternation, the image of women’s faces
evoking the decadence of a corrupt civilization. Those women – one of whom
smokes a fat cigar and occupies a central position – appear as scavengers feast-
ing on Lenin’s body. It is most unlikely that the simple juxtaposition of these two
images would have sufficed to produce such a powerful effect, but the flickering
superimposition gives the impression of a successful attack on Lenin’s body
launched by the women of The New Babylon (1929, Fig. 7).

Neither an Art nor a Technique: A Mystery

Even though none of all this would be possible without the use of technique,
Godard nevertheless rejects the primacy of technique in the foundations of art
and thought: “I mean that cinema has never been an art, and even less so a
technique. Technicians might tell you this isn’t true, but one must bear in mind
that the 19th century, which invented all techniques, also invented stupidity.”36
Techniques do not really matter, video is cinema, and “the camera has never

204 céline scemama

fundamentally changed: the Panavision Platinum is less sophisticated than the
Debrie 7…”37 In fact, nothing is ever predetermined by the artist, that “operator
of associations” – “A thought that forms a form that thinks” – but it is such
techniques and such gestures that produce the unexpected that appears on
screen: a mystery, that is, since whatever objectively appears onscreen neither
results from technique nor intention.
“Neither an art nor a technique,” says Godard. Of course, such a statement
must be put into context, as Godard is probably the last person on earth to not
consider cinema as an art form – and even Art itself, as it appears in Histoire
(s). However, by going back to the origins of cinema – the infancy of an art form
– he brings the mechanical characteristics of the cinematograph back to the fore-
ground. He also refers to the Lumière brothers’ prediction, which he explains as
follows: “An art without a future, a kind warning immediately uttered by the two
brothers [...] and then they were misunderstood: they spoke of an art without a
future – namely an art of the present, an art that gives, and receives before it
gives: say, the infancy of art.”38 An art – Godard calls it an art – that, because it
inherited from photography, becomes the most realistic of all art forms. The
infancy of art is the promise that art made to life, because cinema, by reprodu-
cing life, has a responsibility toward life, and resounds through it: here is an-
other aspect of the mystery.
Let us consider another example39 dealing with the potentialities of the cine-
matograph’s early techniques – the infancy of an art that promises to fulfill its
duty toward the life it is capable of reproducing, and, on the other hand, of an art
perverted by its desire to gain power over life itself. Such a thirst for power over
life is related to that which realizes itself in war. And such a desire to possess the
world is incarnated onscreen under the aspect of another: the desire to possess
the body of a woman. Both aspects are systematically interconnected in His-
toire(s) du Cinéma: every time a threat looms over a living thing, every time
humanity is offended, attacked, raped, despised, or worse, pornography fills the
screen and the bodies of women become objects of domination. The phrase
“Splendor and Misery of Cinema” appears on screen, thereby emphasizing the
two opposite aspects of cinema: Eadweard Muybridge’s galloping horse, and,
later on, Étienne-Jules Marey’s flying bird – “splendor,” the same sequence re-
peated over and over of a lion going round and round in a cage – splendor and
misery – a pornographic film from the nineteen-thirties (Fig. 8). Superimposed
on magic lantern animals, stags appear, along with the phrase “on cinema,” and
a song by Otis Redding is heard: I’ve Been Loving You Too Long – a sadly ironical
counterpoint to the “love stories” shown in pornographic films.
There are no exact words to describe what can be seen and heard on screen
while viewing Histoire(s) du Cinéma: the combination of many forms and
the modalities of their encounters. Maybe this is what Godard has always called
montage, one that has never existed yet, “like a plant that never really popped out

jean-luc godard’s histoire(s) du cinéma: cogito ergo video 205

Fig. 8: Chapter 1b, A Single Story, 28’54’’. A pornographic film from the thirties
and Rolla (Gervex, 1878).

of the ground […]. People at the time of silent movies felt it very strongly and
talked about it a lot. Nobody though really found it.”40 Cinema thus seems con-
demned to die without having done what it could and had to. Nevertheless, in the
dusk of the 20th century, Godard produced this monumental opus displaying, like
a fireworks display, the full power of film editing. Paradoxically, he uses the
techniques of video to discover cinema’s most lively mode of expression. How-
ever, video – which Godard considers as one of the avatars of cinema – is not
used to make a video film but to show – in a state of emergency, before it is too
late – in what consists the kind of cinema that fundamentally relies on editing –
that is, on associations. And this is a manual work above all else. The whole
“mystery” of Histoire(s) seems to rely on the strange balance struck between a
thought developed with one’s hands and that elaborated with the help of ma-
chines.

Translated by Maxime Shelledy

206 céline scemama

 documents related to the film club’s activities show. See “Enzo Ferrieri Archive-
Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori,” courtesy of the foundation.
53. Bragaglia, Film sonoro, 18 [my translation].
54. Ibid., 20 [my translation].
55. See, for instance, Enzo Ferrieri, “Il film di silhouettes,” unpublished and undated
lecture [presumably 1933], typescript with hand-made remarks, Class. 1.3, Fasc. 3,
“Enzo Ferrieri Archive-Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori,” courtesy of the
foundation.
56. Ettore Maria Margadonna, “Felix, Mickey, Oswald and Co. (Cioè la cosa cinemato-
grafica vera e propria),” Il Convegno 3-4 (25 April 1930): 128-136 [my italics]. See
also Alberto Cecchi, “Cinelandia-Cartoni animati,” L’Italia letteraria 12 (30 March
1930): 5.
57. See Tom Gunning, “Moving away from the Index: Cinema and the Impression of
Reality,” in Screen Dynamics: Mapping the Borders of Cinema, ed. Gertrud Koch, Volker
Pantenburg and Simon Rothöler (Vienna: Österreichisches Filmmuseum, 2012), 42-
59.
58. See Ferrieri, “Il film di silhouettes.”

Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma: Cogito Ergo Video

1. Time indications are based on the Japanese edition of Godard’s film (Imagica,
2001). This may vary slightly from other editions. For the Gaumont edition (2007),
21 or 22 seconds must be added to the time code indicated here.
2. Jean-Luc Godard and Youssef Ishaghpour, Cinema: The Archaeology of Film and the
Memory of a Century, trans. John Howe (Oxford & New York: Berg, 2005), 36.
3. Ernst Lubitsch, 1942.
4. Cf. Jacques Aumont, Amnésies. Fictions du cinéma d’après Jean-Luc Godard (Paris: P.O.L.,
1999), 241-242.
5. Élie Faure, Fonction du cinéma (Paris: Denoël-Gonthier, Médiations, 1953), 82.
6. “I like objects. In my editing room, there is a notice on the machines: ‘Be gentle
with us, we are not human beings’” (Jean-Luc Godard, “Editing, Loneliness and
Liberty,” comments made at a conference on April 26, 1989, available at http://
www.directors.0catch.com/s/Godard/conference_Godard.htm; French version in
Godard, “Le montage, la solitude et la liberté,” Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard,
Volume 2: 1984-1998, ed. Alain Bergala [Paris: Cahiers du cinéma-éd. de l’Étoile,
1998], 243).
7. Béla Balázs, L’Esprit du cinéma, trans. J.M. Chavy (Paris: Payot, 1977), 234.
8. Chapter 1b, 0’13’’.
9. Chapter 1a, 44’55’’. Godard’s voice is heard pronouncing those words in figure 2.
10. In “Hiroshima, notre amour,” Cahiers du cinéma 97 (July 1959): 5.
11. 1b [10’11’’, 25’14’’, 28’03’’, 29’05’’, 30’02’’]; 2b [9’22’’- 9’53’’, 10’36’’, 23’08’’].
12. Ernst Lubitsch, 1942.
13. Chapter 1b, 0’14’’.
14. Robert Bresson, Notes on Cinematography, trans. Jonathan Griffin (New York: Urizen
Books, 1977), 45.

318 notes
15. Ibid., 32.
16. Ibid., 33.
17. Ibid., 30.
18. Ibid., 56.
19. Virgil’s Aeneid quoted in the first shot of chapter 1a.
20. Robert Bresson, Notes on Cinematography, 50.
21. Chapter 3a, 23’37’’- 25’50’’.
22. Godard and Ishaghpour, Cinema, 31-32.
23. IT “information technology.”
24. Godard and Ishaghpour, Cinema, 31-32.
25. Ibid., 32-33.
26. Denis de Rougemont, Penser avec les mains (Paris: Albin Michel, 1936), 14, 146, 147,
163, 171.
27. In La Grande illusion (Renoir, 1937). Chapter 1a, 39’45’’.
28. In Two Tickets to Broadway (James V. Kern, 1951).
29. Chapter 1a, 21’21’’.
30. Chapter 1a, 23’34’’; chapter 3b, 5’17’’- 5’37’’.
31. Chapter 3a, 6’49’’- 6’54’’.
32. Chapter 3a, 7’31’’.
33. Vidor, 1932.
34. Chapter 1a, 13’44’’- 15’40’’.
35. Chapter 1a, 13’36’’.
36. Chapter 1b, 28’3’’.
37. Chapter 1b, 27’38’’.
38. Chapter 1b, 30’2’’- 31’30’’.
39. Chapter 1b, 27’22’’- 29’5’’.
40. Godard, “Editing, Loneliness and Liberty”; in French: Godard, “Le montage, la
solitude et la liberté,” 242.

Performativity/Expressivity: The Mobile Micro Screen and Its

Subject
1. Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1999), 306. About Latour’s notion of inscription and his
related concept of the immutable mobile in relation to digital cartography for mo-
bile screens, see Sybille Lammes, “Destabilizing Playgrounds: Cartographical Inter-
faces, Mutability, Risk and Play,” in Playing the System: Subversion of Technoculture, ed.
Daniel Cermak-Sassenrath et al. (Heidelberg: Springer Verlag, 2014, forthcoming).
2. In line with this Latourian perspective and the so-called affordances approach to
technology as developed by Donald Norman, we subscribe to the idea that not
only do technologies shape our practices, but also practices inscribe technology
(Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things [London: Basic Books, 1988]). As
Larissa Hjorth has sketched out, Latour and Norman adhere to what can be called
Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) perspective to technology, which in-
clude social constructivist and affordances approaches, of which the latter has

notes 319