Histoire(s) du cinéma
| Histoire(s) du cinéma | |
|---|---|
An image quoted from Ingmar Bergman's movie Prison, overlapped with the text Histoire(s) du cinéma | |
| Directed by | Jean-Luc Godard |
| Written by | Jean-Luc Godard |
| Produced by | Canal+, Centre National de la Cinématographie, France 3, Gaumont, La Sept, Télévision Suisse Romande, Vega Films |
| Starring | Juliette Binoche, Julie Delpy, Anne-Marie Miéville, André Malraux, Ezra Pound, Paul Celan |
| Narrated by | Jean-Luc Godard |
| Cinematography | Pierre Binggeli, Hervé Duhamel |
| Edited by | Jean-Luc Godard |
| Music by | Johann Sebastian Bach, Béla Bartók, Ludwig van Beethoven, Leonard Cohen, John Coltrane, David Darling, Bernard Herrmann, Paul Hindemith, Arthur Honegger, Giya Kancheli, György Kurtág, Franz Liszt, Gustav Mahler, Arvo Pärt, Otis Redding, Dino Saluzzi, Franz Schubert, Dmitri Shostakovich, Igor Stravinsky, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Anton Webern |
| Distributed by | Gaumont |
Release date | 1988-1998 |
Running time | 266 minutes (total) |
| Countries | France Switzerland |
| Language | French |
Histoire(s) du cinéma (French: [istwaʁ dy sinema]) is an eight-part video project begun by Jean-Luc Godard in the late 1980s and completed in 1998. At a total of 266 minutes, it is the longest and one of the most complex of Godard's projects. Histoire(s) du cinéma is an examination of the history of the concept of cinema and how it relates to the 20th century; in this sense, it can also be considered a critique of the 20th century and how it perceives itself. The project is widely considered Godard's magnum opus.
Histoire(s) du cinéma is always referred to in English by its French title, because of the untranslatable word play it implies: histoire means both "history" and "story," and the s in parentheses gives the possibility of a plural. Therefore, the phrase Histoire(s) du cinéma simultaneously means The History of Cinema, Histories of Cinema, The Story of Cinema and Stories of Cinema. Similar double or triple meanings, as well as puns, are a recurring motif throughout Histoire(s) and much of Godard's work.
The film was screened out of competition at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival. Nine years later, it was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1997 Festival.
The soundtrack was released as a 5-CD boxed set on the ECM record label.
In 2012, it was voted the 48th greatest film of all time in a poll of film directors by Sight & Sound.