Currently in preparation
Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television
preface by Serge Losique
edited, translated and with an introduction by Timothy Barnard
In 1978, just before returning to the international stage for the second phase of his career, the world’s most renowned art-film director then and now, Jean-Luc Godard, improvised a series of fourteen one-hour talks at Concordia University in Montreal as part of a projected written history of cinema. These talks, published in French in 1980 and long out of print, have never before been translated into English. For this edition, the faulty and incomplete French transcription has been entirely revised and corrected, working from the sole videotape copies of the lectures, housed in the Concordia University archives.
For this project, Godard screened for a dozen or so students his own famous films of the 1960s—watching them himself for the first time since their production—alongside single reels of some of the films which most influenced his work (by Eisenstein, Dreyer, Rossellini, the American directors of the 1950s and many others). Working at the dawn of the video age, a technology which was to be essential to his completion of the project many years later, as the visual essay Histoire(s) du cinéma, Godard used pieces of 35mm film, projected in an auditorium, to approximate the historical montage he was groping towards. He then held forth, in an experience he describes as a form of ‘public self-psychoanalysis’, on his personal and professional relationships (with François Truffaut, Anna Karina, Raoul Coutard, film producers and audiences), working methods, aesthetic preferences, political beliefs and, on the cusp of 50, his philosophy of life.
The result must count as the most extensive and revealing account ever of his work and critical opinions. Never has Godard been as loquacious, lucid and consistently compelling as he is here, revealing the depth of his genius and outlining in embryo the method and aims of what was to become his career-capping Histoire(s) du cinéma.
Readers familiar with the Histoire(s) du cinéma video project, famous for its enigmatic juxtapositions of fragments of texts and images, will find some of the same works discussed here, providing an invaluable key to the meaning of Godard’s later collages.
You need to project a piece of film, so you first have to find it; you have to begin by projecting the fact that you searched for this piece of film, by projecting a bunch of little bits and pieces, by explaining how you found them, saying ‘I looked here, I looked there’. And then, suddenly, but with and in front of others, like in an experiment, you realise that this little piece here is interesting, and then you link it to another piece or you make it a little piece of history. But to do this you need to have films, you need the means to project them and to look at them. And you need the intellectual means to do all this. And in the end, the history of cinema you will create will be a trace, like a regret that it isn’t even possible to create a history of cinema. But you’ll see the traces of that history.
