باستان‌شناسی سینما و خاطرۀ یک قرن

by Jean-Luc Godard, Youssef Ishaghpour, یوسف اسحاق‌پور

An introduction and supplement to Godard's Les Histoire(s) du cinema:
"Cinema is quite simply a unique book from one of the most influential film-makers in the history of cinema. Here, Jean-Luc Godard looks back on a century of film as well as his own work and career. Born with the twentieth century, cinema became not just the century's dominant art form but its best historian. Godard argues that - after Chaplin and Pol Pot, Monroe and Hitler, Stalin and Mae West, Mao and the Marx Brothers - film and history are inextricably intertwined. Godard presents his thoughts on film theory, cinematic technique, film histories, as well as the recent video revolution. He expounds on his central concerns - how film can "resurrect the past," the role of rhythm in film, and how cinema can be an "art that thinks." Here Godard comes closest to defining a lifetime's obsession with cinema and cinema's lifelong obsession with history."

Genres: Film, Art, History, Philosophy, Nonfiction

127 pages

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Jean-Luc Godard is a French and Swiss filmmaker and one of the founding members of the Nouvelle Vague, or "French New Wave".

Godard was born to Franco-Swiss parents in Paris. He attended school in Nyon, Switzerland, and at the Lycée Rohmer, and the Sorbonne in Paris. During his time at the Sorbonne, he became involved with the young group of filmmakers and film theorists that gave birth to the New Wave.

Many of Godard's films challenged the conventions of Hollywood cinema, and he was often considered the most extreme New Wave filmmaker. His films often expressed his political ideologies as well as his knowledge of film history. In addition, Godards' films often cited existential and Marxist philosophy.

Reviews

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book length conversation between Godard and a journalist regarding the nature of cinema and how it is place among real history as well as cinematic history. Is this an important book? Not really, but anything with quotations from the always quotable Godard is superb. It's amazing to me that this man is still doing super work and I think he's a fantastic visionary (just like Ballard).

[Andreea · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh, quite good introduction to Les Histoire(s) du cinema, but Youssef Ishaghpour is trying way to hard to sound clever at times. One feels like everybody would be much better off if he could just write an essay about what he thinks Histoire(s) means just to get it over with and then be able to have a normal conversation with JLG.

[Tintarella]

گفت و گوی یوسف اسحاق‌پور و گُدار درباره‌ی تاریخ‌(های) سینما و تاریخ‌های سینما
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- من معتقدم که در ارتباط با موج نو، وِلز جایگاهی دارد که به خاطر روسلینی نادیده گرفته شده است. وِلز چهره‌ی نمادینِ دیگر موج نو است، به‌خصوص در مورد خاص شما؛ فکر می‌کنم فیلم‌های اولیه‌تان بسیار نزدیک‌ترند به بانوئی از شانگهای تا فیلمی از روسلینی
+ کاملاً درست است. سرباز کوچولو از درون بانوئی از شانگهای می‌آید. شاید روسلینی مورد علاقه‌ام بود چون وِلز برای بازن خدا بود، خدای پدرمان و ما لازم بود از پدران‌مان متفاوت باشیم
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+ در ارتباط با نقاشی و عکاسی، مسیحیت درباره‌ی تصویر هیاهوی فراوانی به راه انداخت. برخلاف تمدن‌های دیگر که با این مسئله مواجه نبودند که آیا می‌شود بودا را نقاشی کرد یا نه...
- به دلیلی خیلی ساده، چرا که مسیحیت از درون یهودیتی آمد که تصویر انسانی را در مقام بت‌پرستی ممنوع کرده بود، چرا که در مذاهب دیگر رابطه‌ای میان تصویر و خدایان وجود داشت، در حالی‌که در یهودیت خدا بازنمائی ناپذیر است...
+ این مسئله بسیار مهم است، چرا که اگر تصویری از خدا وجود داشت، پس مردم آن را می‌دیدند و همه‌چیز فرو می‌ریخت، مثل رولان دوبیار هنگامی که گفت: من یک‌بار مغاک را دیدم، از آن‌چه مردم می‌پندارند خیلی کم‌تر و ناچیزتر است
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- برای شما واژه‌ها دشمن‌اند.
+ نه، تنها وقتی که در مقام فرامین به‌کار می‌روند، که یا فاقد اندیشه‌اند و یا بداندیشانه در مقام اسلحه به‌کار می‌روند.
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+ این رابطه‌ی میان پوزیتیو و نگاتیو (ایجابی و سلبی) که توسط هگل توضیح داده شده بود، در سینما در ساده‌ترین سطح مادی وجود داشت. سینما تصویر آن است، اما با دیجیتال، نگاتیو ناپدید شد. دیگر خبری از پوزیتیو و نگاتیو نبود، بلکه نوعی خطی‌بودن تخت وجود داشت، رابطه‌ی متناقض میان شب و روز دیگر ممکن نیست، یک قرن طول کشید تا این رابطه ناپدید شود؛ همین امر وا می‌دارد تا بگویم سینما ایده‌ای قرن نوزدهمی‌ست، ایده‌ای که یک قرن طول کشید تا واقعیت پیدا کند و نابود شود. این بدین معناست که قرن بیستم چیزی را ابداع نکرد و مرا وا می‌دارد تا با اغراق بیش‌تر (اما این فقط یک تصویر است) بگویم که قرن بیستم چندان هم وجود نداشت؛ قرن بیستم هراس را ابداع نکرد بلکه هزاران نسخه از آن را پشت سرهم بیرون داد. قرن بیستم ایده‌های اندکی داشت: نسبیت و فیزیک کوانتوم، همه‌ی آن از قرن نوزدهم میاید. متفکران ارتجاعی خیلی زود گفتند که قرن بیستم مقارن با ظهور تکنولوژی بود، ظهور ایدئولوژیِ تکنولوژی، اما تکنولوژی در قرن نوزدهم ابداع شد. در قرن بیستم کاربردها شکل گرفت، ابداعی وجود نداشت.

[Jack Reed · Rating 4 out of 5]

At times, Ishaghpour’s long questions, observations, are a bit of the Deleuzian view of discussion, and you can tell through Godard’s resistance to engaging. But he draws out some interesting ideas and sometimes pulls something revelatory out of Godard. The essay at the end is also pretty good.

[Dany · Rating 4 out of 5]

Time has to be endured whatever you do with it.

When I said "Just cinema" I also meant that only in cinema do you find images like that: here's a photo, you only see it in the cinema, you see a train hanging in a ravine, it's not literature, it's Buster Keaton, or a still from Mack Sennett or from Eisenstein, only cinema could have made those images. You only have to look, for example, at some stills from Pré de Bejine. There are incredible angles, as only Eisenstein could do them, not at all like Welles's angles, which are a function of thought and so a different thing altogether. In Eisenstein they're formalist angles very like painting or something of the sort. It's easy to see that by putting two angles side by side you get an effect of true montage, which enabled me to say, afterwards, that Eisenstein discovered the angle after Degas and others in painting, and that having discovered the angle he discovered montage.

YI: There's a history that patrols the cemetery, Péguy says, and another form of history that tries to be "a resurrection of the past," a redemption of the past: that's memory, something that can only be realized in a work of art, and your Histore(s) du cinéma is essentially and above all a work of art.
JLG: It's cinema, in other words not like literature which is more closely bound to meaning, in film there's rhythm, it's more like music, that's how I came to use black for rhythm…

To me History is, so to speak, the work of works; it contains all of them. History is the family name, there are parents and children, literature, painting, philosophy ... let's say History is the whole lot. So a work of art, if well made, is part of History, fi intended as such and fi this is artistically apparent. You can get a feeling through it because it is worked artistically. Science doesn't have to do that, and other disciplines haven't done it. tI seemed to me that History could be a work of art, something not generally admitted except perhaps by Michelet.

Video seemed to me one of the avatars of cinema, but it's become something rather different in broadcast television where there's no creation at all any more, just broadcasting. But video's going to be overtaken by information technology or some sort of hybrid mixture which will get increasingly remote from cinematic creation as it can still just about exist today. I'd say there was no very big difference between video and cinema and you could use one like the other. There are things you can do better with one so with the other you do something else. Video came from cinema, but you can't say now that IT comes from cinema. The first video cameras and even today, the three colours and things like that, the standard settings are much the same as in cinema, but it's different with what comes from IT theory.

At one time I'd tried things in cinémathèques, with clips of film, five minutes of one, then another and so on, loading films on two projectors. That produced amazing things; you really got the feeling of time and that for me is what History is...

Somewhere between the video game and the CD-ROM there could be another way of making films, which would be a lot closer to Borges and people like him.

VI: These days there's no discussion between philosophers, painters or writers...
JLG: It's because of television and computers. It's the triumph of Edison, because Edison wanted cinema
for one person at a time while Lumière... All those philosophers, it's a pity they didn't make cinema... Deleuze was tempted, but instead of making a film he wrote "a book about".

I'd say that in films there's the spectacle of History, living History almost, really that's what cinema does, it's a living image of the unfolding of History and the tempo of History.

But when you read the book without seeing, it's relatively incomprehensible. It's like a maths textbook, you say I don't see, because people nowadays don't know how to see a photo and a text without trying to interpret them... There has to be a key, either comprehensive or explanatory. You have to know whether it's tennis or rugby; if it's just two players knocking a ball back and forth it's meaningless, you're far less capable of appreciating or not appreciating…

All prisoners, except those being tortured, "escape" by thinking. To survive they do gymnastic exercises, and intellectuals work out in their heads the theories they will write when they come out of prison, it's a little story that might have come from Canguilhem or Koyré.

YI: What is it that distinguishes Hitchcock from the rest, for you?
JLG: Big or small, I haven't thought about the differ- ences, they're equal ... there aren't any small masters, they're all in the big book... Hitchcock is emblematic of a particular moment, he achieved success by doing difficult things, which is rare. I wouldn't call Rio Bravo a difficult film, but Psycho isn't an easy film at al. It's avery strange film; there's a whole hour at the beginning in which nothing happens. Hitchcock did difficult things and was enormously successful. Stil si today. It wasn't to say that's what the cinema ought to have been, it's just a chapter, like the one on Howard Hughes...

The entire planet is willing, as I still am myself sometimes on a Saturday, to go and watch an American film with an ice-cream cone, rather than going just from time to time to see a proper film…. But it's a real mystery: why do people like a bad American film and prefer it to, say, a bad Norwegian film?

We’re born in the museum, it's our homeland after all…

YI: I believe there's a place for Welles in relation to the Nouvelle Vague that's been obscured because of Rossellini, and besides, your chapter on the Nouvelle Vague immediately follows the one on neorealism. I think Welles si the other figure, anyway in your particular case especially; I think your early films are a lot closer to Lady from Shanghai than to anything by Rossellini.
JLG: That's true, very much so, Le Petit Soldat came out of Lady from Shanghai. Perhaps Rossellini was favored because Welles was God to Bazin,' thus the parental God, and we needed to differentiate ourselves from our parents.

In the French Resistance as it really was, they were all men and women. I'd rather say boys and girls because they were all very young. They all had lovers or sweethearts. None of that exists for historians; they don't mention it. You don't imagine things like that in daylight; only cinema could do it. There must have been betrayals, jealousies, stuff like that. But for historians none of that exists, so it's pretty weird history they write about.… There's the time factor: I started making films in '60, and there were a few years before that. In the year 2000 that wil be exactly fifty years, just the right moment for me to take an interest in those stories. There's more time between my first film and my latest than there was for my father between the First and Second Wars, two-and-a-half times as long. When the time comes I can wonder: "How did he see all that?"….

That time dimension, that's what cinema should devote itself to — properly made cinema. Even in documentary mode cinema can give that time scale that exists for everyone.

From the moment it could be done technically, when cinema had the means to show its products by running off a number of copies, it also brought in the idea of copying on a larger scale. Since then, when horror si copied it's copied several times, so there aren't just the trenches of 1914 but there's Sarajevo, Rwanda, the Spanish Civil War. There's a lot more of it, you could say horror's being exploited, and that's the moment when the means of pure diffusion arrives, not even copying, just diffusion, and that's TV, and it's even going to be reproduced in cinema, since copies aren't even going to be made any more, films will be exploited by satellite instead. In other words there's going to be pure diffusion, production in the name of diffusion... The twentieth century exploited that, there was more war, more horror.. horror had to be democratized too, so to speak.

YI: Although there's still the unbeliever Goya, with his images of horror and disaster, or his Saturn, time eating its children, or his knife-wielding Judith, there's also the constant presence of Rembrandt, a Christian painter fi there ever was one, you liken the screen to the Samaritan's cloak or to a shroud, and there's a Rembrandt deposition from the cross with Christ's body and the winding-sheet. So Christianity seems to be the main thing...
JLG: That's History. I recall Christianity as the first film, it's there in all painters, it's something literature hasn't done.

No, it's simply that people don't know how to use cinema. Even pornography could be made differently if people knew how to use it; perhaps that shouldn't be shown, there's a temptation but people don't know, I don't know, something everyone loves... There's a quote from St. Augustine that I wanted to put in the film and then forgot: something like,
"Men so love the truth that those who tell it not yearn for what they tell to be the truth."

I have a strong feeling that the image enables us to talk less and say more.

There's a mystery all the same, because it started as silent cinema and for thirty years there was no reason for it to be silent; it could have had sound but it had started silent, then was like a child who's been perverted. Anyway that's more or less how I see it, but there's nevertheless what's called a historical fact. You'd have to find for example, the invention of the script, I say it was a Mafia accountant, it's an intuition but one that ought to be checkable. Since the invention of the script is getting something under control, you can imagine something of that sort would have happened, not exactly that but something like it, especially as we know the Mafia moved from New York to Los Angeles the moment Hollywood was born. When I say it's a small-time Mafia accountant…

There's no such thing as reason. Thinking, creating, is an act of resistance; that's what Deleuze was saying in his fashion.

But for me Histoire(s) du cinéma was historical, it wasn't despairing at all. It shows things that induce despair. There's a fair amount to be despairing about, but existence can't despair. We can say broadly that a certain idea of cinema which wasn't Lumière's but was perhaps Feuillade's up to a point - which continued with Delluc and Vigo, and which I myself feel quite close to - that idea of cinema has passed, as the Fontainebleau School passed, as Italian painting passed, as very suddenly - Braudel gives a good account of this - Venice gave place to Amsterdam and then Amsterdam to Genoa and then Genoa to London and then New York. You could say that a certain cinema is now concluded. As Hegel said, an epoch has ended. Afterwards things are different. One feels sad because childhood has been lost. But it's normal too. Now there's a new cinema, and a different art, whose history will be made in fifty or a hundred years. Now humanity's in a new chapter, and perhaps even the idea of History will change.

[Ali QS]

اوایل که فیلم‌های گدار را می‌دیدم، ابداً قبول نداشتم. آن موقع حد اقل در مورد سینما، دیدگاه‌هایی مطلق‌گرا داشتم. بی‌حوصلگی می‌کردم و عجول بودم، نه فقط نسبت به فیلم‌های گدار، که بسیاری از آثار دیگر. حالا به هر صورتی که بود، تازه داشتم با گدار ارتباط می‌گرفتم که چشمم خورد به این کتاب. زیاد نگذشته بود از خریدش که شروع کردم به خواندن. نمی‌دانم یک هفته از شروع خواندن گذشته بود یا نه، خبر رسید گدار با اراده‌ی خودش بی‌نفس شده. می‌دانم کمی مرده‌پرستانه به نظر می‌رسد، اما واقعاً انگیزه‌ام برای خواندن و توجه به کتاب بیشتر شد. هر بخش –که به طور میانگین بیش از ۵ صفحه نبود– را در یک روز می‌خواندم. البته بیشتر اسحاق‌پور حرف می‌زند و گدار کمتر. برای تیفوسی‌های گدار شاید ضدحال باشد، اما شک نکنید که اسحاق‌پور ذهنی‌ست درخشان. پیشنهاد می‌کنم خیلی گذرا و شتابزده کتاب را نخوانید.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found the statement that "Here, Jean-Luc Godard looks back on a century of film as well as his own work and career" to be a little misleading. Basically the book is a discussion by Youssef Ishaghpour and Godard about the themes within Godard's "Histoire(s) du cinema" - a 'documentary montage' which does indeed look back on the history of cinema in itself, but this short volume doesn't really encapsulate what that magnificent piece of work achieved and nor in any way forms Godard's reflections on his overall work and career. Instead, the book is an interesting study of how a film essayist reacts with a film producer, where the essayist imposes his personal opinions on meaning and intent on the director who (in many cases) says "no" and then corrects the (mis)interpretation. It's not a case that either are correct/incorrect, simply an example of how interpretation and meaning is different for each viewer. It could be argued that whilst Godard's intentions are crystal clear to him, that in the process of filmmaking the viewer's interpretation diverts from that intention. Anyway, I did find it amusing for Ishaghpour to spend a couple of pages saying one thing only for Godard to contradict it and then for Ishaghpour to slightly alter his analysis to conform with Godard.

I'm not saying Ishaghour is necessarily incorrect, but he is the more verbose of the two and the less 'authentic' when it comes to us understanding Godard's work (most of us would prefer it from the horse's mouth). Aside from the conversation, however, at the end of the book Ishaghpour does redeem himself with an insightful essay about the 'reality of the image and the image of reality' which I really enjoyed.

Overall, it's an interesting book for Godard completists - although I do feel you have to have seen "Histoire(s) du cinema" to appreciate it.

[Devin · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF at 60%, but I am willing to go back and finish this eventually, definitely after I've watched Histoire[s] du Cinema, which is the film this interview is based on.

I love Godard's films and if this were just Godard speaking, it would be one thing, but Youssef Ishaghpour is an insufferably annoying interviewer who makes parts of this interview unbearable. You can even read sort of when Godard is exasperated at his paragraph-length questions and just wants him to shut the fuck up. He continually tries to argue with Godard on what GODARD'S FILMS MEAN. He is trying to argue about the meaning of a film or a theme of a film he thinks he sees, with the man who made the film, who tells him in so many words "no", many times. Ugh.

[Connor Reed · Rating 2 out of 5]

There should be a note on this book that unless you have seen Histoire(s) du Cinema you will most likely be lost. This is is not a book about Godard talking about cinema it is 80% Youssef trying to wax poetic, 15% of Youssef saying Godard is wrong, and 5% of Godard talking about film. Few things frustrate me more than an interviewer talking more than the person being interviewed. Youssef's annoyingly intellectual and assuming rants utterly ruin this book. The last chapter is nearly unreadable and I honestly think it is the most arrogant piece I have ever read.

[Andy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wish the other guy would shut up and let Godard talk more.

[Jessica]

i am just following Tosh's superior reading trail....