(la) mesure(s)

... //

Godard counts /

Histoire(s) du cinema does not reduce to propositions. Yet its investigation does discover at least three points:

The first is the visibility of history in the artifactual record. History is visible in exactly the way that cinema is: in and through shared perception, mutual attunements between monteur and audience, connoisseur and community. There are no hidden discourses or ideologies or Zeitgeister. On the contrary, this mode of knowledge is no less (and no more) intimate than your relation to your own hands.

The second point is the priority of montage to any historical project. Technical procedures of combination regulate knowledge of the past, an assertion that does not entail skepticism about the world but the open-ended possibility of its rediscovery. Against the case method of historical criticism, with its arrangement of artefacts into objects of study and supporting evidence, Godard insists that the principle of combination always awaits fresh finding, as a continent, a world, forever new: “Firstly we have to know the meaning of ‘plus’”. The most neglected aspects of historiography - connoiseurship and other technniques of evidence - are, precisely, the ones that count most.

The third point is the ethical implication of monteur and audience. Exactly because montage asks us for universal assent, exactly because the audience will not give it, asking, giving, and withholding come to constitute either community or catastrophy. Testing these rules of agreement is the essence of what Godard calls a politique.

/ By Richard Neer, from Critical Inquiry, Autumn 2007