Godard, Jean-Luc
«Histoire(s) du cinéma»

«Histoire(s) du cinéma - as TV series/video essay - was made for Canal+, ARTE and Gaumont, from 1988 to 1998. The work subdivides into four chapters of two parts each. Of those four chapters, the first was broadcasted on five European channels simultaneously, the three others have been screened at film festivals. The series was shown as part of an installation at Documenta X, the interdisciplinary arts festival in Kassel, Germany, in 1997. The Museum of Modern Art in New York has screened each episode as it has become available. An extended essay on cinema by means of cinema. A history of the cinema, and history interpreted by the cinema. An hommage and a critique. An anecdotal autobiography, illuminated by Godard's encyclopaedic wit, extending the idiom established by Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard. An epic – and non-linear – poem. A freely associative essay. A vast multi-layered musical composition. Histoire(s) du cinéma is all of these. It is above all, a work made by a man who loves and is fascinated by the world of film. For American movie critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, Godard's video series represents the culmination of 20th century filmmaking, and is a work ‹of enormous importance›: ‹Just as Finnegans Wake, the art work to which Histoire(s) du cinéma seems most comparable, situates itself at some theoretical stage after the end of the English language as we know it, Godard's magnum opus similarly projects itself into the future in order to ask, What was cinema?.›»

(source: essay of ecm-records)