All the stories, all the histories, all at once: the episode, and the film as a whole, begins with simultaneity, with too much all once, visually and sonically. The opening minutes feel as if the tracking shot of the traffic jam in Weekend or its corollary, the assembly line in the car factory of British Sounds, had turned into an instant pile-up, every frame superimposed over the next. Nonetheless, a lot of this episode feels like throat-clearing (sometimes literally--a sound effect that will predominate in the much more aged voiceover, Godard wheezing and coughing, of Le Livre D'Image/The Image Book thirty years later). Godard repeats the history/story/stories pun of the title--Godard's story, the story of cinema, of history in general? The viewer spends the opening minutes acclimatising to method; the method is musical, in a sense; themes appearing, developing, crossing over: counterpoint, dissonance; but also the logic of the jump-cut, the tape splice, what musique concrète in music (or hip-hop sampling, plunderphonics, etc) and the Nouvelle Vague's separation of the elements of film-making accomplished in film. A dissection that is also a building up: accretion, bricolage, pile-up. Irving Thallberg as the epitome of invention--200 movies in his head everyday--and of despotic megalomania, cinema as dream factory, as illusion, as schizoid form--Howard Hughes' mania. Images of resistance and suffering--particular that of women--from Soviet and Third Cinema struggle from under the weight of these images, even as their heroisation contains its own problematics. (Godard's vision is here, as, as others have noted, almost exclusively that of a Western cinema, the 'Second Cinema' of Europe and of America with walk-on parts for Glauber Rocha but little else.) The sudden flash of corpses, the grasping of hands at guns or straws.
Review of Toutes les histoires
