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Amnesias: Jean-Luc Godard’s Cinematic Fictions
translated by Timothy Barnard
Jacques Aumont, one of the leading film scholars and theorists at work in the world today, ruminates on Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma project in a masterful display of erudition and critical insight, the summa of his own thinking about film. Tracing Godard’s meditations on film (hi)stories from his talks in Montreal in 1978 through to the completion of Histoire(s) du cinéma in the late 1990s, Aumont situates Godard’s cinematic fictions in modern thought and cinema, confronting Histoire(s) with the work of Malraux, Hegel, Proust, Cocteau, Dante, Virgil, Langlois, Wittgenstein and . . . Jerry Lewis.
Why use images, movement and sound, and not words like Montaigne or Amiel, for this long confession? Because this is not merely a confession, but a prosopopoeia: I, the cinema, am speaking. Or more precisely: I, Jean-Luc Godard, who for the moment and the needs of the cause embody the cinema, am speaking. I thus express myself in the language of cinema—in moving images and sound—and also with the devices of cinema—in configurations of duration, in sequences, encounters and concomitances. To remember itself, the cinema must use the forms of its own memory. Above all else it must use the invention which, a century on, remains without a doubt its only constant: montage.
is one of the foremost film scholars at work today. His publications include monographs on Eisenstein, Dreyer and Bergman, treatises on film theory and film and painting, co-edited volumes, etc. He is professor at Université de Paris 3.
