This is a past event
The Centre and Peacock Visual Arts are presenting Godard’s extraordinary project: Chapters 1 & 2, December 4 at 7pm; chapters 3 & 4, December 11 at 7pm.
Showing Histoire(s) du cinéma, Dec. 4 & 11
“Let each eye negotiate for itself” Histoire(s) du cinéma
In Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988/98) Jean-Luc Godard demands that “It is time for life to give back to cinema what it stole from it.” A savage critique of the cinema and 20th century history, Histoire(s) du cinéma is a relentless, irascible, maddening tour de force in which Godard provides a near-autopsy for his beloved art form. In an intense and self-conscious play of montage, Godard fluidly weaves between video and film imagery, the different registers of sound and the silent, classical and modern film, leaving us a document breathtaking in its beauty and ferocious in commentary. Whether he is treating Hitchcock or the Nazi concentration camps, the effect is indelible—“magnificent signs bathed in the light of their absence of explanation.”
“The video he’s immersed himself in totally with Histoire(s) du cinema is not something he makes or does; it has become what he actually is: a body of images, a thought of images, a world of images—an image-being of everything.” Philippe Dubois
“Godard proceeds to a critical evaluation: he works into the ’mise-en-histoire,’ as into the mise-en-scene, whatever he is saying—or having someone say—on the central question he lives and breathes: the question of words and images.” Raymond Bellour
See also: the Peacock announcement.
Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988/98), by Jean-Luc Godard. 4 h 24 m.
Chapters 1 & 2, December 4 at 7pm Chapters 3 & 4, December 11 at 7pm At Peacock Visual Arts Presented by the Centre for Modern Thought, University of Aberdeen and Peacock Visual Arts