i want to spend the rest of my life everywhere, with everyone, one to one, always, forever, now.

His 20th Century [HISTOIRE(S) DU CINÉMA]
by Jonathan Rosenbaum
(From the Chicago Reader; July 16, 1993)

If you want to be “up to the minute” about cinema, there’s no reason to be concerned that it’s taken four years for Jean-Luc Godard’s ambitious video series to reach Chicago. After all, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, the artwork to which Histoire(s) du cinéma seems most comparable, written between 1922 and 1939, was first published in 1939, but if you started to read it for the first time this week, you’d still be way ahead of most people in keeping up with literature. For just as Finnegans Wake figuratively situates itself at some theoretical stage after the end of the English language as we know it — from a vantage point where, inside Joyce’s richly multilingual, pun-filled babble, one can look back at the 20th century and ask oneself, “What was the English language?” — Godard’s babbling video similarly projects itself into the future in order to ask, “What was cinema?” Indeed, the fact that it’s a video and not a film already tells you a great deal about its point of view. Joyce’s province was the history of mankind as perceived through language and vice versa, both experienced and recapitulated through a single ordinary night of sleep. Only superficially more modest, Godard’s province is the 20th century as perceived through cinema and vice versa — the title can be translated loosely as “Film (Hi)story/Film (Hi)- stories” — both experienced and recapitulated through technology. Clips and sound tracks are examined and juxtaposed — partly through the ordinary operations of a video watcher (fast forward, slow motion, freeze frame, muting, and programming) and partly through more sophisticated techniques like editing, sound mixing, captioning, and superimposition.