“For more than ten years Jean-Luc Godard has worked on a series of eight films where at the same time he edits and shows ‘what cinema has been’ and ‘what the 20th century has been’. The eight films are produced on video as this technique allows for collage, still images, effects, slow-motion, scenes from other films, comparison between styles of different filmmakers. In other words, video enables Jean-Luc Godard to make the history of cinema, just like art historians have made the history of art through photographic reproductions. The filmmaker presents a very personal history of cinema. First of all, these are ‘histoire(s),’ stories. His face appears often in the image, as well as his shadow, and mostly his voice. Godard compares cinema with other art forms in order to better understand cinema, but also to somewhat ‘force’ other art forms through a theoretical renewal. Painting, literature, personalities embodying political and historical events of this century are depicted as characters in a fiction film, whose subject is the history of this century. But images from the past and their faded bodies become ideas, concepts.

Therefore an analysis, but also an emotion through colours playing with each other, the mélange of arts, sounds, music. Baudelaire meets children from The Night of the Hunter, Italy’s neorealist cinema meets Riccardo Cocciante’s pop and romantic music….

The 20th century has been thought by cinema: this is the great lesson of these eight films, organised as episodes from a ‘theoretical serial’. No longer can this work be ignored, first of all in order to make a history of cinema, but, secondly, it cannot any longer be ignored if we want to continue making films, just like modern painting has kept within itself at the closing of the century Picasso’s mark from Demoiselles d’Avignon”.

(Dominique Païni)