Jean-Luc Godard, Cinema Historian

proposal and demonstration of a cinematically inspired method of fabricating history based on the principle of the montage of disparate phenomena in poetic imagery. “Bring together things that have as yet never been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so,” he suggests simply, citing Robert Bresson.4

he past is never dead. It’s not even past,” he says at one point in the series, citing William Faulkner’s celebrated dictum.3 If the fundamental challenge facing all historians is that of bringing the past to life, Godard’s response to that challenge – the central tenet of his theorem – is the pro

films should be made for popular consumption, and be desired and valued by their popular audience. Contrary to music and painting, he argues, cinema brought real art to the masses:
Painting never experienced this: Goya was seen by very few people; Beethoven was little heard.… But cinema was immediately seen by one hundred people at the Grand Café.

He has also returned repeatedly to the idea that it was the collaborative nature of the filmmaking process in the Hollywood studios that constituted the strength of the American cinema, and that meant that even mediocre films were generally of a higher quality than those produced outside such an environment.10 He has often claimed anecdotally that for cinema to exist, a film studio must have a cafeteria, and specifically a cafeteria where all those involved in the filmmaking process go, and where they are able to discuss the films they are working on.

“[T]he great national cinemas, apart from Germany, have always been great war films, and particularly civil war films. In other words, a time at which the nation is fighting against itself and no longer knows what it is. It’s Birth of a Nation in the United States, it’s Potemkin in Russia, and it’s Rome, Open City in Italy.”

“Cinema is made to spread out, to flatten. I always compare it to the court system. You open a file, that’s cinema. (Godard opens a file). And then you weigh it.”43 Films representing pressing contemporary concerns are made, projected, viewed, and discussed in the same way that evidence is brought into a courtroom and laid before a jury. The image can be accepted or refused, but it is there for discussion and it awaits a verdict. It invites the following question: Is this a just reality represented on the screen, and does the image accord with one’s personal experience?

There’s a shot before, and another one after. And between the two, there’s a physical support. That’s cinema. You see a rich person and a poor person and there’s a comparison. And you say: it’s not fair. Justice comes from a comparison. And from then weighing it in the scales. The very idea of montage is the scales of justice.44

25 The “sordidness of the epoch” combined with commercial exploitation, suggested Breton, “were enough to clip its wings as soon as it flew the nest.”

The image is a pure creation of the soul.
It cannot be born of a comparison, but of a reconciliation of two realities that are more or less far apart.
The more the connections between these two realities are distant and true, the stronger the image will be, and the more it will have emotive power.

Like all the great poets, like Flaherty, Rouch, or Dovzhenko, Jacques Rozier knows how to recompose nature on the basis of the imagination.