A Filmmaker Historian

Abstract

In his new book entitled Jean-Luc Godard, Cinema Historian (2013), Michael Witt deals with some of the most complex and key aspects concerning the multifarious work of Jean-Luc Godard. Taking Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1998) as his central object of study, Michael Witt addresses the historical propositions made within it and contextualizes its forms, themes and procedures throughout a comprehensive analysis of the films and videos developed by the French filmmaker during the project. This book review focuses on Witt’s accounts about Godard’s guides and methodological approaches to history, giving particular emphasis to the dialogic encounter with the work of Walter Benjamin. The alternative modes of writing history converge with a creative usage of montage and with the exploration of image’s intuitive and expressive features, allowing the viewer to enter in a subjective relation with the past. And, in the case of Godard, this will lead as well to a reformulation of filmic syntax, mirroring an amplification of its capacities in narrating history.