Silverman, Godard

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The Dream of the Nineteenth Century

Silverman, Kaja.

Camera Obscura, 51 (Volume 17, Number 3), 2002, pp. 1-29 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

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Nouvelle Vague (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, Switzerland and

France, 1990)



What is cinema? Nothing.

What does cinema want? Everything.

What can cinema do? Something.

—Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire(s) du cinéma

In Histoire(s) du cinéma (France, 1988–98), Godard explores the

“nothing” that cinema now is, and the “something” that it could

do.1 Cinema is nothing in its present form because in the early

years of the 1940s the “great directors of fiction” turned their

cameras away from Auschwitz. Although some narrative filmmak-

ers, like Steven Spielberg, later made films dramatizing life and

death in the camps, these dramatizations only magnified the orig-

inal betrayal, since they took place within the parameters of the

Hollywood star system. “Suffering is not a star,” Godard says in

part 1A of Histoire(s) du cinéma , “nor is it a burned church, nor a

devastated landscape.” Only the documentary camera worked to

“save the honor of reality.”2

The notion that cinema might be capable of saving the

honor of reality contravenes one of the founding assumptions of

The Dream of the

Nineteenth Century

Kaja Silverman

Copyright © 2002 by Kaja Silverman

Camera Obscura 51, Volume 17, Number 3

Published by Duke University Press

1



poststructuralist thought—the assumption that representation

alienates us from the phenomenal world. It is also at odds with

many accounts of the Holocaust. For a number of historians and

theorists of World War II, what happened in the camps was so trau-

matic and extended so far beyond the cultural pale as to be utterly

unrepresentable.3 But from the very beginning of his filmmaking

career, Godard has stubbornly gone his own way on this issue—as

on every other. In early interviews, he speaks both of the constant

“coming” and “going” between representation and reality and of

the support that his fictions find in the actuality of those who enact

them.4 In Histoire(s) du cinéma , Godard changes the metaphor, but not his theoretical position. The relation between a film and what

it depicts should be fraternal—a kind of brotherly “give” and

“take.”5 The filmmaker makes this relation possible when he puts

reality into his work and then uses the work itself to realize the real

(4B). This last formulation has radical implications for our under-

standing of art, since it implies that actuality can only become

“itself” by means of a representational intervention.Godard’s clarification of the “something” that cinema can

do is a considerably more protracted affair. It requires the full

length of Histoire(s) du cinéma and an exploration of the nature of

history itself—not just the history of cinema, but also of what

Godard at one point calls “the big history.” The French word his-

toire(s) conventionally signifies two different things: “story” and

“history”—or, in the plural form in which Godard uses it, “sto-

ries” and “histories.” The title Histoire (s) du cinéma thus seems to

promise to the uninitiated viewer either stories about or histories

of cinema. But when Serge Daney, with whom Godard conducts a

lengthy conversation at the beginning of part 2A, voices this view

by distinguishing between the histories of cinema and the big his-

tory, Godard immediately takes exception. The big history, he

maintains, does not remain external to cinema; it is, rather, cin-

ema itself, or at least what cinema could be if it were to confront the “nothing” that it now is. “To me,” he says, “big history is the

history of cinema.” The rest of Histoire(s) du cinéma comes as a

clarification of this astonishing claim. From it we learn that cin-

ema is not just the primary place of historical representation, but

also the primary place where history happens.6

2 • Camera Obscura



On three different occasions in Histoire(s) du cinéma , Godard

suggests that those who inhabit the domain of cinema derive

from an anterior world. Their “reflections, their sensations, are

from before,” he tells us through a female voice-over. The first

time he makes this claim (1A), he seems merely to be invoking

cinema’s capacity to provide “a delayed reflection” of the past.7

The second time, though, he equates the “before” about which

he is speaking with the nineteenth century by invoking a number

of its talismanic names: Zola, Morisot, Manet, and the Lumière

brothers (1B). In part 2A of Histoire (s) du cinéma , where Godard

advances the same argument in different terms, he again linkscinema to the nineteenth century. Now he also inverts the rela-

tion between these two terms. It is no longer cinema that derives

from the nineteenth century, but rather the nineteenth century

that derives from cinema. “The cinema is a nineteenth-century

matter that was resolved in the twentieth century,” Godard tells

Serge Daney. “There’s always a time lapse.”8

But although cinema has the capacity to actualize thenineteenth century, it has not yet done so. As Godard says in part

3A, “The past is never dead—it hasn’t even passed.” Therefore,

the nineteenth century has still not taken place. It will “occur”

only when film does what it is capable of doing. This complica-

tion of our usual understanding of cinema’s temporality helps to

explain Godard’s odd hesitation in assigning a tense to it at the

beginning of Histoire(s) du cinéma : “Histories of the cinema, with

an s , all the histories that might have been, that were or might

have been, that there have been” (1A).

Walter Benjamin is clearly the resident spirit of Histoire(s) du

cinéma , although he is never acknowledged as such.9 In The Arcades

Project and “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin

develops the theoretical model of history on which Godard

implicitly (and probably unconsciously) draws. “Every epochdreams the one to follow,” Benjamin writes in the first of these

works.10 It is the political responsibility of the subsequent century

to awaken from this dream, and—in so doing—to confer on the

past a “higher degree of actuality than it had in the moment of

The Dream of the Nineteenth Century • 3



existing” (392). We awaken from the dream of the century that

preceded our own by relating our “now” to its “then.” This process

is synchronic rather than diachronic; we set it in motion not by

creating a continuous narrative leading from the previous cen-

tury to our own, but rather by “blast[ing]” those moments of the

past that metaphorically anticipate the present out of the “contin-

uum” of history.11 Such figurations permit us to see that we are on

the verge of repeating the mistakes of the past. They consequently

put us in a position not only to actualize what came before, but

also to “redeem” it (254).

Benjamin does not hesitate to give the metaphor of redemp-tion a distinctly theological inflection. As he puts it in “Theses on

the Philosophy of History,” “The past carries with it a temporal

index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret

agreement between past generations and the present one. Our

coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that pre-

ceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a

power to which the past has a claim” (254; emphasis in original). We experience a moment of the past in the guise of the “now”

through what Benjamin calls the “dialectical image.”

The dialectical image is not well served by the name Ben-

jamin gives it. It consists not of a thesis, antithesis, and resolution,

but rather of something more closely approximating a Baude-

lairean “correspondence.” It makes manifest the resemblances

linking temporally divergent moments to each other, permitting

them to “communicate.” These similarities render null and void

concepts like progress , development , and cause and effect . As Ben-

jamin himself acknowledges in an important passage from The

Arcades Project , they therefore bring “dialectics” to a “standstill”

(462). Finally, the dialectical image blurs the distinction between

word and image.

Benjamin underscores the dialectical image’s appeal to

the look both by consistently linking it to light 12 and by filling The Arcades Project with visual examples of it. The remnants of the

nineteenth century within which he discovers the present are

almost all the stuff of which flânerie is made: department stores,

dioramas, world exhibitions, the Paris arcades, and photography.




In “A Short History of Photography,” Benjamin also locates the

temporal logic of the dialectical image at the heart of the last of

these representational forms. The past embeds itself in a photo-

graph in a way that can be recognized only by those who come

later, he writes. It consequently exists only retroactively: “No mat-

ter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully posed

his subject, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a

picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now,

with which reality has . . . seared the subject, to find the inconspic-

uous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment

the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may redis-cover it.”13

At the same time, however, Benjamin insists on the dialec-

tical image’s “legibility.”14 In it, “what has been comes together in

a flash with the now to form a [signifying] constellation,” and the

real becomes “read[able]” (463). We are able to “open the book

of what happened” (464). This is in part because the relationship

that a dialectical image establishes between our moment and anearlier one is figural in nature. But it is also because this kind of

image can assume a verbal form. Benjamin even goes so far at one

point in The Arcades Project as to suggest that it always does: “Only

dialectical images are genuine images . . . and the place where

one encounters them is language” (462). Finally, as is clearly indi-

cated by the passages I have just quoted, the dialectical image

undoes the opposition separating representation from the real.

Godard shares not only Benjamin’s view of history, but also his

belief in the capacity of the image to awaken us from the dream of

the nineteenth century. Once again, the redemptive image repre-

sents a constellation of images, rather than a single one. It is also

riven through and through by language and can even take a lin-

guistic form. Finally, like The Arcades Project , Histoire (s) du cinéma

constitutes a compendium of dialectical images. Godard createsthem by using the technology of video to combine footage drawn

from newsreels or documentary films with footage taken from

fiction films; to place still photographs side by side with moving

images; and to juxtapose material drawn from one historical




period or geographical region with material drawn from another.

He also frequently places one video image on top of another, or

superimposes a word on an image or a palimpsest of images.

A sequence from part 1B of Histoire(s) du cinéma renders

unusually explicit the Benjaminian imperative driving such

formal experimentation. This sequence begins with a montage

of train images, drawn from a range of films. With it, Godard

invokes both the birth of cinema, begun, by many accounts, with

the Lumière Brothers’ The Train Leaving the Station , and the nine-

teenth century, which created public transportation. He then

relates the nineteenth century and the whole of cinematic history to Auschwitz through a chilling shot of a deportee looking out of

a partially open door in a German train en route to one of the

camps.

Godard mixes up different kinds of sounds in a similar

way. He often half drowns out a piece of music or a speaking voice

with another piece of music or another speaking voice. And even

when he allows someone to speak without such interference, heputs what this speaker says in dialogue with what comes earlier or

later.15 Almost all of the voices in this work also speak “over” the

images, in every sense of the word; in addition to deriving from

another time and space, they generally add yet another layer of

textuality to what we see. They also point outward toward a range

of other texts. Virtually every word spoken in Histoire(s) du cinéma

is a quotation, and often a quotation of a quotation. The same

holds true for this work’s musical score; it is stitched together out

of elements drawn from a multitude of sources.

We might seem to have reached the limit of the possible

parallels between Benjamin and Godard. Whereas the former

seeks to bring “dialectics” to a “standstill,” the latter is clearly com-

mitted to movement. Godard frequently inscribes the words

“montage, mon beau souci” [montage, my beautiful worry] over

the images of Histoire(s) du cinéma , and he uses Hitchcock tounderscore the temporal nature of this technique: “We have a

rectangular screen in a movie house,” he shows the latter saying,

“and this rectangular screen has got to be filled with a succession

of images. That’s where the ideas come from—one picture comes




after another.” However, as Youssef Isaghpour has noted, The

Arcades Project also constitutes a montage of quotations.16 We

require as much time to read it as to view Histoire(s) du cinéma .

Finally, Godard is far from establishing a one-to-one relation

between montage and movement. The most important of all of

the elements that he conjoins—the I and the you —arrest rather

than dynamize. And what they arrest is the dialectic itself.

But what is the dream of the nineteenth century? Benjamin and

Godard offer different answers to this question. For the author of

The Arcades Project , it is clearly commodification in all its phantas-mogorical forms. For the author of Histoire(s) du cinéma , on the

other hand, the dream that extends uninterruptedly from the

nineteenth to the twentieth century is sovereignty. Hitler stands as

its most egregious manifestation in parts 1, 2, and 3, and Hitler

and Stalin are jointly manifest in part 4. But sovereignty assumes

the more quotidian form of the movie moguls Irving Thalberg,

who disposed of fifty-five films a day and who represented himself as cinema’s “foundation, founding, and only son,” and Howard

Hughes, who simultaneously built a filmic and an aviational

empire. Godard sketches the portraits of Thalberg and Hughes in

part 1A, prior to his meditation on Hitler, making evident the con-

nection that he sees between Hollywood and National Socialism.

It might seem odd that Godard would associate the will to

power with the nineteenth century, since it is as old as humanity

itself. Different periods and cultures, however, define sovereignty

in varying ways. For an extended period of Western history, sover-

eignty meant “God.” Later it was instantiated by the monarch, ini-

tially as a representative of God, and subsequently as an embodi-

ment of the state. The notion of sovereignty that emerged in the

nineteenth century, and that is still very much with us, is that elab-

orated by Hegel in Phenomenology of Spirit : the autonomous and

self-constituting subject.The subject exists, Hegel tells us, only by being recognized

by another subject.17 He finds this dependency intolerable, how-

ever, since he seeks to be acknowledged not merely as a subject,

but also as one who is independent and self-made. He attempts to




rid himself of his “self-externality” (114) by refusing to recognize

the subject whose recognition he demands. Since this other sub-

ject is driven by the same desire, a murderous struggle ensues,

which ends only when one of the two decides that life is more

important than recognition. The latter then acknowledges the

other as “master” and steps into the position of “slave.”

Hegel is quick to point out the impossibility of the posi-

tion in which the master now finds himself. By refusing to acknowl-

edge his opponent as a subject, he has rendered null and void the

homage that the latter has conferred on him; he therefore rules

over “nothing.”18 But this does not invalidate the notion of mas-tery for Hegel. He goes on to argue that the slave’s defeat provides

the condition for his ultimate victory, since the work that he per-

forms at the behest of the master permits him to negate and

reshape the exterior world in such a way that what is external to

him ceases to be other (118). In so doing, he remakes himself,

thereby achieving the sovereignty denied to the master.

And although the master/slave dialectic keeps reassertingitself through history and is, indeed, the driving force behind it,

the slave’s apparent defeat keeps turning into an actual victory.

Ultimately a figure emerges who is capable of straddling both

sides of the dialectic, thereby resolving it. Not surprisingly, given

the rest of the narrative recounted by Hegel, this figure is some-

one who not only set out to conquer the world, but also suc-

ceeded to a significant degree in doing so: Napoleon. But history

does not come to a complete end until a subject emerges who is

able to stand outside it and view it in its totality. This subject is

Hegel himself. Far from laying the concept of mastery to rest,

then, Phenomenology of Spirit reconceives it on a grander scale.

Although even more deeply inside the dream of the nine-

teenth century than Hegel, Alexandre Kojève is prepared to

shine a flashlight into some of its darkest corners. In the second

chapter of Introduction to the Reading of Hegel , he provides a kind of Guide Bleu to history as it is represented within Phenomenology of

Spirit , bringing into sharp relief the violence through which it

unfolds. The slave only achieves the mastery that eludes his oppo-




nent by negating the “given.” This “given” can assume an infinity

of forms—biology, the material world, even history itself. But

what is always ultimately denied is the slave’s own “given”: interre-

lationality. Kojève writes,

At the start, the future Master and the future Slave are both determined

by a given, natural World independent of them, hence they are not yet

truly human, historical beings. Then, by risking his life, the Master raises

himself above given Nature . . . and becomes a human being, a being that

creates itself in and by its conscious negating Action. Then, he forces the

Slave to work. The latter changes the real given World. Hence he too

raises himself above Nature, above his (animal) “nature,” since he

succeeds in making it other than it was. . . . Thanks to his work, he can

become other. . . . And this is what actually took place, as universal

history and, finally, the French Revolution and Napoleon show.19

And if Hegel’s claim that Napoleon resolved the master/

slave dialectic is not sufficient in and of itself to dispel the illusion

that we are now outside the dialectic, Godard suggests, we need

only consider the abominations of the twentieth century: those

represented by the names “Hitler,” “Stalin,” “Bosnia,” and “Rwanda.”

As Frantz Fanon helps us to see through his revisionary account

of the master/slave dialectic, which places at its center the colo-

nized subject, the psychic damage that we inflict on another when

we refuse to recognize her is devastating.20 It is not in our power,however, to deny another’s subjectivity. The latter depends not on

us, but rather on the first-person pronoun, and this pronoun is

available to all comers. What we do when we fail to acknowledge

another is to depersonalize her. I may seem to be splitting linguis-

tic hairs by insisting on this distinction, but without it we cannot

account for the capacity of an oppressed subject to resist her

oppression. We are also at a loss to understand what it wouldmean to bring the dialectic to a halt.

One can depersonalize another subject either by assimi-

lating her, or by relegating her to the category of the third person.

It was Fanon’s misfortune to fall victim to both kinds of deperson-




alization. Growing up in Martinique when it was still a colony, he

was fed such a steady diet of French values that he came to see

himself as French.21 This belief was shattered when he moved to

Paris, not only because most of its inhabitants refused to recog-

nize him as “French,” but also because they induced in him what

he calls a “third-person consciousness” (110–11).

Fanon cites as one of the sources of his depersonalization

the words “Look, a Negro!” spoken about him by one passerby to

another (111). But we do not need to resort to a substantializing

and potentially abusive term like Negro in order to induce a third-

person consciousness in another subject. Depersonalization canalso take the seemingly benign form of the third-person pro-

noun. This is because he and she differ radically from you and I .22

Whereas the first- and second-person pronouns are interdepend-

ent and reversible, the third is the “word of separation.”23 It desig-

nates someone or something external to the discursive situation,

over and against which the speaker constitutes himself.

In the case of Hitler, depersonalization took both of theseforms. Through mass rallies and rituals, as well as the larger promul-

gation of a German essence or Volk , the Führer assimilated vast

numbers of people to himself. But he also relegated millions of

other people to the category of the nonperson: gypsies, homo-

sexuals, communists, the mentally ill, and the whole of European

Jewry. Although shamelessly promoting the cult of his own per-

sonality, and so a kind of “Stalinification” of those over whom he

presided, Stalin was ultimately less gifted at assimilation than his

German counterpart; those who initially appeared as faithful fol-

lowers kept turning, in his mind, into enemies of the state. He

consequently established his sovereignty more through the sec-

ond than the first kind of depersonalization.

The violence enacted by Thalberg and Hughes might

seem to pale by comparison with that exercised by Hitler and

Stalin. They exiled actors and directors from work—not thenation or the human species. And many of those to whom they

denied personhood enjoyed luxuries unimaginable for those in

confined in the German or Soviet camps. But Godard looks at the




matter differently. For him, Thalberg and Hughes represent a

cinema that is as negatory of other cinemas as Hitler and Stalin

were of other subjects. One of his primary projects in Histoire(s) du

cinéma is to critique the world domination that the United States

has effected through film and television—its extinction of one

form of alternative cinema after another. Thalberg and Hughes

also presided over one of the primary “factories”24 within which

the dream of the nineteenth century was reminted for the twenti-

eth. This newly articulated account of sovereignty depended on

depersonalization every bit as much as National Socialism or the

Soviet Union did. Those to whom it denied personhood were,moreover, not “merely” the members of another nation or race,

but half of humanity : the feminine half.

Napoleon, Stalin, and Hitler all imposed an emphatically

masculine identity on their versions of the autonomous and self-

constituting subject. However, each of these figures laid claim to

sovereignty by killing, maiming, and imprisoning vast numbers of

other men. Pointing to the regularity with which male characterssuffer injury and impairment in Soviet literature and cinema, one

scholar has recently suggested that Stalin’s triumph must also

have been psychically damaging for millions of men, inducing in

them the third-person consciousness described by Fanon.25

Within Hollywood, the dream of the nineteenth century under-

went a democratization. It assumed the more modest guise of the

“self-made man”26 and became an automatic effect of certain

filmic conventions. It was thereby placed within the reach of every

male viewer, at least within the darkened hall of the movie the-

ater. But this popularization necessitated an equally all-encom-

passing depersonalization of the female viewer. Godard makes

this point indirectly in part 4, both through an important mono-

logue and the montage of female faces that accompanies it:

In 1932, the Dutchman Jan Ort was studying the stars moving away fromthe milky way. Soon, as predicted, gravity pulls them back. By measuring

the positions and speeds of these repatriated stars, Ort was able to

calculate the mass of our galaxy. Imagine his surprise on discovering that

visible matter represented fifty percent of the mass needed to exert the




necessary gravitational force. So where has the other half of the universe

gone? Phantom matter was born, omnipresent but invisible. (4B)

Godard does not specify the agency whereby half of the

human race becomes invisible at this point in Histoire(s) du cinéma .

However, in part 2B he draws attention to a striking example of

depersonalization-through-assimilation, and it takes an emphati-

cally gendered form. He flashes the words Temps Perdu [time lost]

and Temps Retrouvé [time found] on the screen, in an obvious ref-

erence to Proust. A few minutes later, he suggests that Marcel, the

narrator of A la recherche du temps perdu (literally, “In Search of

Lost Time”),27 lives his life in the mode of a dream—the dream,

precisely, of the nineteenth century.28 He also intimates that it is

because Marcel is more asleep than awake that Albertine, his mis-

tress, dies. Proust’s narrator attempts to deny his dependence

upon her by possessing her in an ever more absolute sense.

Although this quest fails, it is nevertheless fatal to her. “Albertine

gone,” Godard says in voice-over, speaking for Marcel, “For a longtime, I used to go to bed early, that’s what I’m saying. And all of a

sudden, it’s Albertine who dies, and that’s the time that is found

again.” As we will see, Histoire(s) du cinéma contains a much more

extended meditation on pronominal depersonalization, and one

that again bears primarily on the female subject.

Histoire(s) du cinéma is full to bursting with images of women.Godard dedicates the “Fatal Beauty” section of part 2B to the

“other sex,” along with large sections of every other part. Taken in

isolation from each other, many of these representations of women

are indicative of the nothing that cinema now is. The same is true

of much of the text, which constitutes such a vital component of

Godard’s magnum opus, whether vocally or in the form of graphic

inscription. However, not all of Histoire(s) du cinéma ’s words and

images emerge from the dream factory. Many others work to inter-

rupt our sleep and summon us to consciousness.

Godard’s strategies of disruption are numerous and

varied; some are drawn from the lexicon of modernism. These

include not only montage itself, but also the jarring staccato




sound of his computer printing out the text he has just written

into it and the whirring noise of celluloid moving through the

bobbins of his editing table. These two sounds challenge sleep at

the conceptual as well as the auditory level since they expose the

machinery behind the cinematic dream. Godard uses a related

device in part 1A of Histoire(s) du cinéma ; he writes the words

dream and one must dream over a montage of film clips in which

women are traditionally displayed. On other occasions, he con-

fronts the issue of gender more frontally. Twice, for instance, he

reverses the depersonalization effected by a formulation like “a

film is a girl and a gun” by enumerating a series of female names,each one of which evokes a particular human being. The first of

these lists occurs in part 1A of Histoire (s) du cinéma , immediately

after the story about Howard Hughes and his RKO starlets. It

reads, “Billie, Virginia, Jane, Terry, Ann, Adele, Jane, Faith, Joan,

Ginger, Rita.”

Godard also includes many female voices in Histoire(s) du

cinéma , often entrusting them with important monologues. For themost part, these voices are disembodied, but on two occasions a

woman presents herself as a speaking subject at the level of the

image as well as the sound, thereby laying a more emphatic claim to

the first-person pronoun. In part 2A, a girl ( Julie Delpy) reads a

lengthy text about the intoxication of travel, in part from a position

in front of the camera. And in part 2B, a grown woman (Sabine

Azéma) delivers a crucial monologue on the topic of beauty, again

in synchronized sound. The second of these speeches is especially

remarkable, since beauty is an attribute traditionally incarnated by

the female subject but “addressed” to the male. Here a woman con-

stitutes beauty’s epicure, as well as its embodiment.

In part 1A of Histoire(s) du cinéma , Godard raises this proj-

ect to a metacritical level. He inscribes the words to the object of cin-

ema in white titles against a black backdrop. He then cuts to a

radiant close-up of a woman’s face. A few minutes later, over amontage that ends with another close-up of the same face, he

adds the words in our relation to each other we are both [cinema’s] sub-

jects . With this little montage, Godard once again makes the first-

person pronoun available to the women in his film. He also sug-




gests that we are all subordinate to and dependent on cinema,

just as the inhabitants of a monarchy are on the monarch. He

thereby divests the word subject of values like mastery and auton-

omy . Finally, he brings into sharp focus what will increasingly

emerge as the primary concern of this work: his own subjectivity.

In part 1B of Histoire (s) du cinéma , Godard turns the magnifying

glass that he earlier focused on Hitler, Thalberg, and Hughes on

himself. He asks, “But for me, first of all, mine, my story, and what

have I got to do with all of that —all that clarity, all that obscu-

rity?” Part 3B, dedicated to the topic of the Nouvelle Vague, might seem to provide the answer to this question; as Godard reminds

us here, he was one of the chief innovators of postwar French cin-

ema. However, in his conversation with Daney at the beginning of

part 2A, he clearly distinguishes his story from that of the French

New Wave. In response to the suggestion that his generation was

ideally positioned to take account of the history of cinema, Godard

responds not with a discussion of the Nouvelle Vague, but rather with a series of references to himself. He also suggests that his

story cannot be separated from the dream he is critiquing. “The

thing about cinema, according to my idea or my desire, and my

unconscious, which now can be consciously expressed,” he tells

Daney, “is that it was the only way to go, to recount, to take account

myself, that I have a history in myself. . . . If there were no cinema,

I wouldn’t know that I had a history.”

Godard forges an even closer link between his subjectivity

and the dream of the nineteenth century at the beginning of part

1B. After asking what he has to do with “all that obscurity, all that

clarity,” he adds, “sometimes in the evening someone whispers in

my bedroom. I shut off the television, but the whispering goes on.

Is it the wind, or my ancestors? History of solitude; solitude of

history.” With the word solitude Godard situates himself fully

within the dialectic. A series of excerpts from Godard’s Le weekend (France and Italy, 1967) and Le mépris [Contempt] (France and

Italy, 1963) follows, providing an unpalatable dramatization of

the will to power and linking it once to the author of Histoire(s) du

cinéma .




But Godard does even more in this work than implicate

himself in the dream of the nineteenth century; he also tells the

story of his awakening. He does so through another series of ref-

erences to his own work—this time Nouvelle Vague (Switzerland

and France, 1990), his account of heterosexuality at the end of

the twentieth century; JLG/JLG (France, 1985), his autumnal

self-portrait; and Soft and Hard (A Soft Conversation between two

Friends on a Hard Subject) (United Kingdom, 1986), his and Anne-

Marie Miéville’s video account of their very different attitudes

toward creative production. Although the references to Nouvelle

Vague and JLG/JLG are much more explicit and numerous in His- toire(s) du cinéma than those to Soft and Hard , the representation

of sexual difference offered in the latter text constitutes the point

of origin for all of the other three.29

That gender constitutes a central concern in Soft and Hard

is already evident from its title; Godard and Miéville ring many

changes on the words soft and hard in this text, but the primary

referent for soft is clearly femininity in general, and Miéville inparticular. It is equally clear that hard designates masculinity in

general, and Godard in particular. The conversation in which

they engage in the second half of Soft and Hard provides a striking

instantiation of this binary. After listening for a while with appar-

ent patience and sympathy to Miéville’s anguished account of the

doubts that assail her whenever she tries to produce art, Godard

steals the show. He boasts that he could create a film out of some-

thing as humble as a piece of string, in a vivid display both of his

overweening self-confidence and his belief in his power to create

ex nihilo. He then holds forth at length on the topic of projection

and the role that it plays in cinematic spectatorship. The visual

game with which Soft and Hard concludes works to dramatize

Godard’s thesis about projection and to force Miéville into the

role of the lowly assistant.

Significantly, however, it is Miéville who has the last wordin this exchange. Prior to being silenced, she makes a trenchant

critique of Godard’s filmmaking practice. She tells him that he

lacks courage when it comes to depicting the relations between

men and women, and that he keeps falling back on the same cine-




matic constructions. Although Godard seems resigned in Soft and

Hard to recycling in future films the same forms and ideas that he

has used in the past, maintaining that he is incapable of doing

anything else, he rises dramatically to Miéville’s challenge in Nou-

velle Vague .

This film represents a fresh start in every sense of the

word: in the quality of its images, its editing strategies, the compo-

sition of its sound track, and last—but not least—in its account

of heterosexuality. The roles traditionally designated by the terms

man and woman give way to those of master and slave , and Godard

prevents us from recovering the former through the latter by making the relationship between the two central characters,

Elena Torlasco and Roger/Richard Lennox, so volatile. The bal-

ance of power keeps shifting, and with it the roles each character

plays. In the first half of the film, Elena dominates Lennox; the

second half reverses this paradigm.

But Godard’s reconceptualization of heterosexuality in

Nouvelle Vague constitutes only a partial response to Miéville’scritique. This is because, rather than deconstructing the opposi-

tion of soft and hard so manifestly at work in her and Godard’s

video conversation, this film confronts hardness with hardness;

it depicts a relationship between two people who both seek to

occupy the position of the autonomous and self-constituting sub-

ject and who therefore cannot help but enact over and over again

some version of the battle to the death. Godard also provides a

less-than-adequate response to Miéville’s criticism in Nouvelle

Vague because he does not put his own subjectivity on the line. As

Soft and Hard shows, he stands outside the struggle that his film

dramatizes, since Miéville will always respond to his hardness with

softness.30

Godard addresses the first of these limitations in Nouvelle

Vague itself by developing a powerful new thematic: the thematic

of the gift. On two separate occasions, he shows the central char-acters in this film rising above the psychodynamic of power to

which they are generally in thrall and engaging in an exchange

representative of the purest love. One of them gives the other the

gift of life. Since this gift cannot be possessed, it neither bank-




rupts the one who gives nor indebts the one who receives. There-

fore the giver gladly gives, and the receiver gladly receives. Godard

metaphorizes this exchange through the image of one hand

reaching out to another.31

During the twelve years since the making of Nouvelle Vague ,

Godard has remained obsessed with the notion of the gift. It is the

governing trope both of JLG/JLG and Histoire(s) du cinéma , and in

both of these works he elaborates it in ways that encroach on his

own subjectivity. In JLG/JLG , he defines existence as the giver, the

world as the gift, and the author as the receiver. He also breaks

definitively with the notion of the “given” as something to be“overcome” by the human subject by attempting to become the

blank surface on which the world inscribes itself. To this end, he

struggles to divest himself of himself.32

In Histoire(s) du cinéma , Godard goes one step further. He

restages the battle of softness and hardness in his and Miéville’s

video, but with a radical and saving difference: this time it is soft-

ness that wins. Once again, these concepts correlate with genderin predictable ways. In this work, however, Godard acknowledges

not only the deeply problematic nature of hardness, but also the

authority and strength that can find refuge within softness. At the

outset of part 4, he has a female voice sweetly utter the following

words over a montage of female faces:

In an undertone, a voice gentle and soft, saying big things, important

things, important, astonishing, profound and apposite things; in a voice

gentle and soft, the threat of thunder; the presence of absolutes in a

robin’s song, in the grace notes of a flute, and the delicacy of pure sound.

Warm sunshine suggested through a half smile or undertone, and a sort

of murmur of infinitely pure French . . . that voice hardly rippling the air,

that whispering power.

It is through the concept of the gift that Godard effects his rap-prochement with softness in Histoire(s) du cinéma , and once again

its primary emblem is the hand. There are images of hands every-

where in this work, including two taken from Nouvelle Vague .

Here, however, the giver is not archetypal man or woman, or even




existence, but rather Godard himself. What he gives is also not

life or the world, but simply the second-person pronoun. Although

this might seem a meager gift, it is in fact the greatest that one

subject can confer on another.

Histoire(s) du cinéma proceeds through a series of prefigurations.

Each part anticipates many important elements whose full elabo-

ration only comes later. Consequently, although he is primarily

concerned in part 1A with the will to power, Godard takes time to

announce the goal at which he will arrive only much later. He dis-

sects the graphic sign for the French word histoires into his and toi .He then repeats the second of these particles, which forms the

objective form of the second-person pronoun in French.33 He

thereby announces his determination to find the you so notably

absent both from the last part of Soft and Hard and from the his-

tory he recounts in Histoire(s) du cinéma . A clip of Gene Kelly danc-

ing with Leslie Caron provides another proleptic inscription of

the you , while at the same time situating it within the context of the heterosexual couple.34

Godard returns to the subject of a feminine you in part 1B,

again in order to link it to a masculine me . After asking, near the

beginning of that section of Histoire(s) du cinéma , what “all of this”

has to do with him, he cuts to a lengthy montage of cinematic and

other images, repeatedly intercut with a freeze frame of a man

and a woman at a projector, apparently watching a film together.

Godard repeats this image or a variant of it so often in part 1B

that it emerges as the primary principle of structuration. The

image of the couple at the projector is suggestive of a collabora-

tive investigation of cinema—of one which, because it concerns

both partners equally, the male and female subject perform

together. It thus constitutes an implicit critique of the many

images of Godard at work alone, which provide the visual drama-

tization of solitude. Part 1B also abounds with musical and otherreferences to Nouvelle Vague , and it concludes with a moving series

of images of heterosexual couples.

There are many other inscriptions of a feminine you in

Histoire(s) du cinéma , sometimes in isolation from a masculine I




and at other times in tandem with it. The most striking examples

of the former are the montages of women extending from one

end of this text to the other. The most visually compelling exam-

ple of the latter is the shot of Elena’s hand reaching out to Lennox’s

against the green and blue of a country field and sky from Nouvelle

Vague . But far more important than any of these images are the

many devoted to the grapheme you . With these word-images,

which help us to make sense of the linguistic nature of the dialec-

tical image, Godard creates what he could otherwise only depict:

a genuine hetero-sexuality.

As has often been noted, I does not refer to an already existing subject; rather, it creates the subject.35 But the same

thing can be said about the second-person pronoun. You is the

one to whom it is addressed, and the latter neither precedes nor

postdates the former. The first-person pronoun is also completely

dependent on the second. I derives its meaning not just from the

one speaking, but also from the listener or group of listeners to

whom it is directed. It would therefore be as accurate to definethe subject as the one who says “you” as the one who says “I.”36

All of this is another way of suggesting that Hegel’s account

of the dialectic is missing a crucial component. The subject who

demands to be acknowledged by the other does so from the place

of an I , and every I is shot through and through with the you . In

order to achieve even an illusory sovereignty, he must therefore

do more than overcome the other; he must also negate the

second-person pronoun. The only way he can do this is by coerc-

ing his opponent out of the category of the first-person pronoun,

and into the third. This depersonalizing imperative constitutes

the driving force behind the dialectic. It is consequently only by

affirming the you that we can exit the dream of the nineteenth

century.37

In order to affirm the second-person pronoun, Godard

tells us, we must put something of our own “essence” into it (4A);38 we must give ourselves away. Both here and elsewhere in

Histoires(s) du cinéma , he seems to be thinking in concert with Mar-

tin Buber, whose I and Thou also constitutes an extended medita-

tion on the second-person pronoun, and who also defines the lat-




ter as the precondition for a nondialectical relation to the other.

Although we generally treat the you and the I as separate and

even opposed words, Buber argues, they in fact constitute a single

word: the “ I-You.”39 This word inhabits both the first- and second-

person pronouns, but usually in a suppressed form. We summon

it forth whenever we say “I” in a way that locates its meaning at the

site of the you , or “you” in a way that locates its meaning at the site

of the I . Buber describes this kind of speech, which is constitutive

of personhood, as “giving” and “receiving” the “you” (57). Through

it, we both claim the other—recognize her as flesh of our flesh,

and skin of our skin—and allow her to define what you meansto us.

Buber refers at an important point in I and Thou to what

he calls “my You” (58). He also attributes to this you the power to

light up the world—to make it available to us as something other

than a set of “givens” to be expunged. In Buber’s account, there is

no limit on the number of subjects who can occupy this position.

Every time we address someone in the mode of the “I-You,” wesay “my You” to her or him. But as Histoire(s) du cinéma helps us

understand, each of us arrives at the possibility of saying “I-You”

to the world of others only through the medium of a par ticular

other. It is also imperative that we acknowledge as much, since

only then does our dependence on this other become “real” for

us. The phrase “my You” represents the speech act through which

we do so.

In the monologue with which he begins part 4A, Godard

attributes to “femininity” the same power that Buber does to the

“my You.” The “soft” and “gentle” voice in whose guise he cele-

brates “the other sex” opens on to a robin’s song, the notes of a

flute, warm sunshine, and pure sound. Godard also attempts to

move from this voice to a new kind of sociality—one that would

be “a hand held out, not a dressed-up sentiment, an ideal passing

on the road to Jericho” (4A). However, the second-person pro-noun occupies a very marginal position in this account of soft-

ness. When it does appear, moreover, it remains completely

abstract. Part 4A also includes the most grotesquely depersonaliz-

ing sequence in the whole of Histoire(s) du cinéma . A male speaker




(Alain Cuny) delivers a long monologue, whose larger topic is

cinema, but which metamorphoses at a certain point into a gen-

eralizing discourse about the “other sex.” Not only are both the

speaker and his interlocutor explicitly male, but this dyad is effec-

tively rendered a monad by the speaker’s recourse to a sovereign

and all-inclusive “we.” He speaks to and on behalf of all men,

about that undifferentiated nonperson, woman: “[Cinema is]

there when the cradle comes to life, it’s there when the girl appears

to us, leaning from the window with her unknowing eyes and a

pearl between her breasts. It’s there when we’ve undressed her,

when her firm body trembles to the beat of our lust. It’s there when the woman parts her thighs for us, with the same maternal

emotion she feels in opening her arms to the child.”40

Godard also fails in his attempt to extrapolate a nondialec-

tical sociality from this generalized femininity. Although it prompts

him to stress the importance of “love for one’s neighbor,” love and

neighbor remain empty categories. Before long, moreover, both

vanish, leaving the solitary subject once again in possession of thestage. “The believers in a collective ‘we’ were mistaken about the

individual,” Godard tells us. “X is an individual, a creative ele-

ment, an incalculable freedom. Man as a man is a creator, but a

created creator.” In the lengthy homage to Hitchcock that fol-

lows, sovereignty also makes a big comeback. Although Alexan-

der, Julius Caesar, Hitler, and Napoleon all failed in their attempt

to “control the universe,” Hitchcock succeeded. World domina-

tion consequently represents a realizable goal.

What begins as a celebration of softness mutates so quickly

into a revalorization of hardness because Godard has not yet

named his particular you , either to her, himself, or us. She is still

confined to the category of the third-person pronoun. In the clos-

ing minutes of part 4A, he moves quickly to rectify this situation.

He acknowledges his dependency on the first-person pronoun

and foregrounds the alterity that haunts it. He also abandons allclaims to mastery. “In ‘I think, therefore I am,’ the I of ‘I am’ is no

longer the same as the I of ‘I think,’ ” he says. “The feeling of exis-

tence that I have is not yet a self, it’s an unconsidered feeling. It’s

born with me, but without me.”




A moment later, Godard also identifies his you by dedicat-

ing part 4B of Histoire(s) du cinéma to Anne-Marie Miéville. After

writing that it is “for” her, he adds that it is also for himself,

thereby completing the “basic I-You word.” Immediately after-

ward, Miéville’s voice utters the following words: “He was saying

that fidelity, however complete it may be, has no effect on the

march of time, that it is not capable of reviving anything, or any-

one, and that nevertheless there is no other solution than fidelity.”

The speaker does not identify the man to whom she imputes

these words. However, Godard signs his signature under them by

cutting back and forth between a photo of the face of LaurenBacall and a photo of the face of Robert Le Vigan, on which he

inscribes the word love .41 The dialogue that failed to materialize

in Soft and Hard finally takes place.

But it appears that Godard has not yet brought the dialectic to a

“standstill.” Later in part 4B, a male voice-over recites two of

Dylan Thomas’s most famous lines: “Do not go gentle / Into that good night.” In the original text, the phrase good night provides a

synonym for death . Godard reconstitutes it as a signifier for that

state of somnolence that Benjamin associates with the nineteenth

century by embedding it in a lengthy nocturnal montage. This

montage begins with the shot from Nouvelle Vague in which the

camera slowly tracks the entire length of Elena’s glass-walled

house, shining like a beacon in the night, and continues with a

meditation on a more radical kind of obscurity—that suffered by

that half of the subjective universe which we call “women.” It also

includes three other important monologues. The first associates

night with torture and death; the second with Good Friday, and

the third with the “nothing” that can be seen when one rises from

bed in the dark and looks out the window.

The last of these speeches marks the site for the emer-

gence of a “faint light.” Since Godard accompanies his referenceto it with the by-now-familiar image of a man and woman stand-

ing behind a projector, it seems to attest to the redemptive poten-

tial of the heterosexual couple. However, most of the other images

in the nocturnal montage are devoted to the horrors of the twen-




tieth century. After a harrowing sequence of shots from newsreels

and fiction films dramatizing the crimes of Hitler and Stalin, and

after the extraordinary colporteur montage, which warrants an

essay of its own, Godard returns to the metaphor of night. As we

look at the image of a living soldier’s decomposing face, he also

explains why the storm clouds of the nineteenth century have

been regathering so ominously. He has liberated his you from the

category of the third-person pronoun only to swallow her up in

that of the first-person plural. He has been dreaming while osten-

sibly awake:

For the love of what . . . curtain up do we despoil ourselves of our

dreams? How do we dare on waking to bring them into the light? Oh,

into the light each of us carries about him invisible dreams. The music

draws us all to that line of light . . . that gleams under the curtain when an

orchestra tunes its violins. The dance begins, then our hands slide and

separate. We lose ourselves in one another’s gaze . . . each careful not to

disturb the other’s dream, not to send him back into the dark —to rid

the night of night, which isn’t day, while we love each other.

This monologue is Godard’s way of telling us that there are

no final solutions. Even after we have said “my You” to another,

and apprehended the world in the radiance of her light, darkness

will soon return, obliging us to begin all over again our journey

toward her. But in the final moments of Histoire(s) du cinéma ,

Godard suggests that this may not be an unmitigated disaster. When we are asleep, we do not know that we are dreaming. And

once fully conscious, we have forgotten our dreams. Only at the

moment of awakening do we have access to both states of mind. It

may consequently only be during the brief interval between sleep-

ing and consciousness that we are capable of uttering the words

“my You.” “If a man . . . wandered through paradise, and kept a

flower to remind him where he’d been,” Godard says, “and thenupon waking found that flower in his hand . . . what can I say? I was

that man.” With this little story, he once again rouses himself from

the nightmare of history in order to affirm softness. He also offers

one last tribute to his particular you, whose fragrance now perme-

ates the real: Anne-Marie Miéville, the yellow rose of Rolles.




Notes

1. Throughout this essay, I rely on the English translation of the

commentary from Histoire(s) du cinéma provided by the trilingual

book version of Histoire(s) du cinéma: Introduction à une veritable

historie du cinéma, la seule, la vraie , produced by Manfred Eicher

(Munich: ECM Records, 1999), into which I occasionally

introduce slight changes.

2. Although at this point in Histoire (s) du cinéma Godard seems to be

referring to film in a general sense, it later becomes clear that it

was documentary cinema that served this function.

3. Saul Friedlander has been especially insistent on this point. See,

for instance, his “On the Unease in Historical Interpretation,” in

Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing

World , ed. Peter Hayes (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University

Press, 1991), 35. See also Probing the Limits of Representation:

Nazism and the “Final Solution ,” ed. Friedlander (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1992). Ernst von Alphen offers an

excellent account of the opposite position in Caught by History:

Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).

4. See, for example, Tom Milne, “Jean-Luc Godard and Vivre sa vie ,”

in Jean-Luc Godard: A Critical Anthology , ed. Toby Mussman (New

York: Dutton, 1968), 82; Godard, “Propos Rompus” and “Ma

demarche en quatre mouvements,” in Jean-Luc Godard par

Jean-Luc Godard , vol. 1, ed. Alain Bergala (Paris: Cahiers du

Cinéma, Editions de l’Etoile, 1985), 296–98, 470. Jonathan

Dronsfield also comments on the prevalence of these kinds of

formulations in Godard’s work in “ ‘The Present Never Exists

There’: The Temporality of Decision in Godard’s Later Film and

Video Essays,” in The Cinema Alone: Essays on the Work of Jean-Luc

Godard, 1985–2000 , ed. Michael Temple and James S. Williams

(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000), 63.

5. As he puts it at one point in part 3A, “Equality and fraternity

between reality and fiction.”

6. As Jean-Luc Douin says in passing, Histoire(s) du cinéma gives us

less “the history of cinema than history by cinema” (“Histoire (s) du

cinéma ,” CinémAction 52 [1989]: 79; my translation).

7. André Bazin, “Theatre and Cinema—Part Two,” in What Is

Cinema? vol. 2, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of




California Press, 1967), 97. Jacques Aumont makes much of

another of Bazin’s metaphors in the very different account he

offers of Histoire (s) du cinéma ’s “historiographic capacity” in his

excellent Amnésies: Fictions du cinéma d’après Jean-Luc Godard (Paris: P. O. L., 1999), 162. For him, film is able to access history

better than any art form because it both embalms and transforms

reality, while at the same time making possible critical thought

(162–74, 194). For Bazin’s own use of the metaphor, see his

“The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema? ,

9–16.

8. In part 4B, Godard also says: “When one century is slowly

dissolving into the next, a few individuals transform the old

means of survival into new means—these are what we call art.

The only thing that survives an era as such is the form of art it has

created for itself. . . . In this way, the art of the nineteenth century,

the cinema, brought into existence the twentieth, which on its

own barely existed.”

9. In his extraordinary conversation with Youssef Ishaghpour,

however, Godard does invoke Benjamin’s account of thedialectical image (“Archéologie du cinéma et mémoire du

siècle: Dialogue (1),” Trafic 29 [1999]: 1). And in the same

conversation, Ishaghpour comments on the affinities between

Benjamin’s Arcades Project and Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma

(22–23).

10. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project , trans. Howard Eilard and

Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999),

4. Benjamin here is quoting Michelet.

11. This formulation comes from a related text, Benjamin’s “Theses

on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations , trans. Harry Zohn

(New York: Schocken, 1969), 261.

12. Benjamin, The Arcades Project , 462– 63.

13. Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” Screen 13.1

(1972): 7.

14. Benjamin, The Arcades Project , 462.

15. As Jean-Louis Leutrat elegantly puts it, “The first impression [of

Histoire(s) du cinéma ] is that of unstable images, menaced either

from the interior, or [by others that are] in competition with

them” (“Histoire (s) du cinéma , or comment devenir maître d’un

souvenir,” Cinémathèque 5 [1994]: 34).




16. Isaghpour, “Archéologie du cinéma,” 22–23.

17. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit , trans. A. V. Miller (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 111.18. Ibid., 116–17. The word nothing is mine.

19. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel , trans. James

H. Nichols Jr. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969),

52–53.

20. I will be using the male pronoun when referring to those who

aspire to mastery, and the female pronoun when referring to

those over and against whom this subject defines himself. Thebasis for this pronominal bifurcation is history, not essence.

21. See Frantz Fanon,Black Skin, White Masks , trans. Charles Lam

Markmann (London: Pluto, 1986), especially 18–22.

22. See Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics , trans. Mary

Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press,

1971), 217–22; and Martin Buber, I and Thou , trans. Walter

Kaufmann (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).23. Buber, I and Thou , 75.

24. This is Godard’s metaphor.

25. I refer here to chapter 10 of Lilya Kagonovsky’s dissertation,

“Bodily Remains: The ‘Positive Hero’ in Stalinist Fiction” (Ph.D.

diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2000).

26. Since the advent of films like Rambo (dir. Ted Kotcheff, US,

1982), however, the sovereign subjectivity available to the male

viewer has assumed more and more grandiose forms.

27. This film circulates in English as Remembrance of Things Past .

28. Significantly, Benjamin also invokes Proust in the context of

discussing the dream of the nineteenth century. See The Arcades

Project , 466. It is hardly surprising that either Godard or

Benjamin would include this reference, given that Proust’s

magnum opus begins, “For a long time I used to go to bed early.Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close

so quickly that I had not even time to say to myself: ‘I’m falling

asleep.’ And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go

to sleep would awaken me.” (Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way , trans.

C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin [New York: Random

House, 1989], 3).




29. Michael Temple and James S. Williams also note the importance

of Soft and Hard for any understanding of Histoire (s) du cinéma

(“Introduction to the Mysteries of Cinema, 1985–2000,” in

Temple and Williams, The Cinema Alone , 14).

30. I am referring here to the Miéville of Soft and Hard , who is also

the one evoked by Godard at the end of Histoire(s) du cinéma . Her

own work offers a more equivocal account of gender. Although

the central female figures in Lou Didn’t Say No (1993), We’re All

Still Here (1997), and Reaching an Understanding (2000) all seek

to exit the history described by Godard in Histoire (s) du cinéma ,

they at times approximate something like “hardness.” They do so,

for the most part, because of the intractability of their male

counterparts.

31. For a fuller elaboration of this reading, see Kaja Silverman and

Harun Farocki, Speaking about Godard (New York: New York

University Press, 1998), 197–227.

32. This is a brief summary of the reading I offer of JLG/JLG in “The

Author As Receiver,” October 96(2001): 17–34.

33. Godard also puns repeatedly on the word du in the title Histoire(s)

du cinéma , which means both “of” in French and “you” in

German, the latter in the nominative form.

34. Aumont, too, remarks on the prevalence of this pronoun in

Histoire (s) du cinéma , but suggests that it is addressed by Godard to

those whom he quotes (Amnésies , 134).

35. See, for instance, Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics ,

224–27; and Jacques Lacan, “Function and Field of Speech and

Language in Psychoanalysis,” in Ecrits: A Selection , trans. Alan

Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 30–113.

36. Although I will not be following Benveniste’s account of the you

in the following discussion, it would seem important to note

that he also makes personhood dependent on the second-person

pronoun: “Consciousness of self is only possible if it is

experienced by contrast,” he writes in Problems in General Linguistics . “I use I only when I am speaking to someone who will

be a you in my address. It is this condition of dialogue that is

constitutive of person , for it implies that reciprocally I becomes

you in the address of the one who in his turn designates himself

as I ” (224– 25).




37. Mieke Bal also attributes a transformative force to the

second-person pronoun. She develops the notion of a

“second-person narration” in “First Person, Second Person,

Same Person: Narrative as Epistemology,” New Literary History 24.2 (1993): 293–320. In Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art,

Preposterous History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999),

Bal searches for the second-person pronoun in the field of

vision. Activated within aesthetic experience, it is instantiated

simultaneously by a work of art and the one who looks at it

(204–5).

38. Godard elaborates this point in negative terms—by suggesting

that the you is not a gift when it no longer involves something of

the speaker’s essence. Elsewhere in the same monologue, he

suggests that “the mind is only real when it manifests its presence,

makes itself manifest or shows its hand,” and he equates this

mental reality with creation. The concept of thinking with one’s

hands comes from Denis de Rougement’s Penser avec les mains

(Paris: A. Michel, 1936), as does much of the monologue in

which this concept in embedded (James S. Williams, “European

Culture and Artistic Resistance in Histoire (s) du cinéma : Chapter3A, La monnaie de l’absolu ,” in Temple and Williams, The Cinema

Alone , 115–16). It has obvious reference to the shots of Godard at

the editing table, and—by extension— montage.

39. Buber, I and Thou , 54.

40. Aumont also notes the objectifying nature of this monologue,

but sees it as consistent with the larger point of view adopted by

Godard toward women in Histoire (s) du cinéma (Amnésies , 88– 90).

41. The first part of this monologue comes from Elie Faure’s Histoire

de l’art: L’art moderne (Paris: Denoël, 1987), 97–109. I am

indebted to Michael Temple for this attribution (“Big Rhythm

and the Power of Metamorphosis: Some Models and Precursors

for Histoire(s) du cinéma ,” in Temple and Williams, The Cinema

Alone , 79–80.) Aumont also notes the objectifying nature of this

monologue but sees it as consistent with the larger point of view

adopted by Godard toward women in Histoire(s) du cinéma (Amnésies , 88–90). Godard offers an implicit critique of the

words I have just quoted in part 4B, where he says: “Sometimes I

hear men describing the pleasure they have taken with this

woman or that. Oh, it isn’t coarseness—the words at times very

precise . . . but . . . I want to tell them, ‘Look, look it was

something else.’ ”




42. Ishaghpour also comments on the importance of love in

Histoire(s) du cinéma in the second installment of his conversation

with Godard (“Archéologie du cinéma,” 35), and Marie-Anne

Guerin writes that Godard insists in part 4B on “the necessity fora sexual duality” (“Les signes parmi nous ,” Cahiers du cinéma , May

2000, 12–13).

Kaja Silverman is Class of 1940 Professor of Rhetoric and Film at

the University of California, Berkeley. Her publications include James

Coleman (2002), World Spectators: Cultural Memory in the Present (2002),Speaking About Godard (1998), The Threshold of the Visible World (1996),

Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992), The Acoustic Mirror (1988), and

The Subject of Semiotics (1983).


Histoire (s) du cinéma (1988 98)

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