Histoire(s) du Cinema: Godard's Ultimate Mixtape

I finally got around to watching Godard's magnum opus, "Histoire(s) du Cinema".   For those who haven't heard of it, it is a four hour cinematic poem loosely based on the notion of a history of cinema.  Godard's initial premise in starting the project was the idea that a history of cinema should be told in cinematic form, and not as a written text.  It's not really a history of cinema, or histories (as he prefers), but rather a dense collage which invokes Godard's own experiences with cinema and his own preoccupations.  So what you get is a four hour collage (in episodes) of fragments of music, film soundtracks, spoken texts, printed texts, segments from films, paintings, and filmed bits of Godard and others (Julie Delpy, etc.) and Godard's editing machine and typewriter.  It's the ultimate mixtape.   (There is a French website that attempts to identify each source.)   And all of these elements are superimposed, transformed, cut and otherwise manipulated, sometimes to the point of unrecognizability.
Part of the experience of watching and listening to this, then, is hearing and seeing both familiar and unfamiliar things; everyone's experience will be different, depending on what their own memories are.   I do recognize a lot of things, but that can be somewhat distracting.  (Jonathan Rosenbaum has talked about how cinema creates indelible moments in our brains.   I have these, and some of them are in Godard's film. The dying Major Amberson...)  Distracting, in the sense that your brain can't help but identify and remember that particular bit and what ever feelings it evokes.  And, as well, we bring our own sensibilities to our experience; thus, as a classically trained musician, I respond differently than would someone who is not oriented that way.  (Is that really Hindemith?  Did I just hear a bit of Janis Joplin?)   At the same time, everything is chopped up, so if you are really liking that bit of dialogue or music, it will soon be abruptly terminated.

So what do I make of it?   First of all, on a basic level, I was mesmerized.  I like this kind of thing.  Because of that, I am able to brush aside any number of infuriating and annoying aspects of Godard's various ideas and preoccupations.   There are a lot of a sort of free-association ideas that Godard throws out.   For example, somewhere he talks about color being available to early filmmakers, but that they chose to film in black and white, the colors of mourning, in mourning for something like reality.   This has little basis in fact, of course, but that's not what it is meant to be about.  For Godard, I think the whole film is about both his great love for cinema (and music and art), and his high expectations for cinema as an art form, and finally his great disillusionment at the failure of cinema to live up to those expectations.  

Speaking of mixtapes, back in the 1970's, a group of my friends and family were together one evening and decided to make our own mixtape, using my then extensive and eclectic collection of LP's, among other things. I have no idea how we got the idea to do such a thing, or if such things were in the air at that time.  Each of us took random turns, putting on something we liked.   As the evening developed we started  attempting to create more radical juxtapositions; thus a bit of Webern might be followed by some Otis Redding, or a Nonesuch recording of a group of hippos.  It included live readings of texts, sound effects, melodica improvisations, TV sound, and general noise in addition to all the recordings.   It was all recorded on cassette, and last year my brother-in-law decided to restore the original recording (including identification of all the recorded materials)   After extensive research (an international network of ethnomusicologists was involved at a certain point!), he created a beautifully restored and annotated edition of the original recording, though some bits (recordings from live TV, spoken readings from liner notes, etc.) remained unidentified.

So what does this have to do with Godard? Well, when I listen to the mixtape now, it does evoke a personal feeling, both for the music that I love of all different kinds, and for that evening some forty years ago, spent with people that I love.  And, in our collective effort, we were somehow expressing something about how we heard the world of music and sound.   Not to compare our efforts to that of Godard, but somehow I think we shared some of the same impulse; to assemble things that we knew and loved, both in homage and as a way of making their assembly a  manifestation of our sensibilities.  (I also think that we were just having a lot of fun being crazy!)  That is why I am fascinated by the Godard, and why I can put up with his idiosyncrasies, because I admire his own dedication to his art, and his particular sensibility.    And particularly his relentless sense of a quest.  After making films for almost sixty years, he is still challenging himself (and others!).  Challenging the way we listen and see, and how we think.   He always has questions, and very few answers.

Some images: