The (Im)possible History

The article interrogates Jean-Luc Godard's monumental Histoire(s) du cinéma in the light of Walter Benjamin’s theory of history. Divided into 4 x 2 chapters and composed through a period of over twenty years (1978-1998), Godard's work is an attempt to elaborate and practice an alternative form of historiography based on audiovisual citation and montage. The peculiar status that the image assumes in this context allows to situate Godard's effort in the philosophical tradition of anti-historicism, from Nietzsche to Benjamin, to Charles Péguy and André Malraux. As a montage of quotations, Histoire(s) du Cinéma constructs a (hi)story - or a history that is also a fiction - from a specific, unrepeatable point in time, endowed with the power of mobilising the whole past and identified with the moment of cinema’s death. Yet by indicating a purely cinematic method for the making of history, Histoire(s) du Cinéma also shows that cinema will live in the future as a praxis of audiovisual film history, when the memories stored in the archives will finally become the matter of montage.