about Jean-Luc Godard and Cinema

The Histoire(s) implicitly present the argument that the cinema is both an art, and a history; the cinema records not only directorial mise-en-scène but also events. With that established, we might acknowledge the cinema as the only art-form in the history of the world to exist as a living ghost. In the Histoire(s) the connection is made that the cinema has indeed always been a record of mourning for that which has passed or that which has been lost. Human beauty and human suffering alike have thus been chronicled, captured on celluloid, but why then have these images—cinematographic evidence—done nothing to dissuade nationalistic tyranny or prevent genocide? Where lies the disconnect between audience spectatorship (ecstasy before the projected spectacle) and the ex post facto indifference and callousness of that same audience/world that once watched? Is the cinema only a dream after all? Or nothing more than “stories”? (The French “histoire” can be translated as both “history” and “story”; I employ the latter connotation here, in the same way a grandmother might proclaim on any weekday afternoon that it's time to watch her “stories.”) The rigorous examination of the cinema's role in world events forms the epicenter of the Histoire(s), but this same scrutinizing, this same reconstruction of the “pieces” so as to examine not only where the cinema went wrong but how it can possibly go right, propelled the critic Godard to wage his aesthetic battle in the 1950s against movie-Philistinism and for a “poetic heightening” that was missing in all accounts of the history of the cinema. An “attempt” at criticism, in a sense similar to Godard's frequent remarks that his films were “attempts at cinema”—but an attempt that acknowledges the medium as one that is only as “real” as we make it, or can believe its potential to be.