by Jon Lackman | 7 April 2008 | Theory
In the most recent (Winter 2007) issue of Dalhousie French Studies, which is devoted to “Representations of Trauma” (and, alas, has pages out of sequence), Tom Conley writes:
After a decade, in 1999, the reception and appreciation of Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma too a forceful turn … Jacque Rancière examined its sense of history. He engaged close readings of short sequences in which the director’s voice-over mixes with clips from documentary footage, feature films, and fragments from canonical works of art [Giotto, Rembrandt, Goya, ...]. Godard, he recalled, had been obsessed by the impoverishment of images in the wake of the Allied liberation of the Nazi concentration camps … how in God’s name could any image supplant what could not be assimilated in the camps? In order to respond to the question … and to resurrect images in the wake of this turning point in western history, Godard, argued Rancière, undertook the ambitious project of Histoire(s) … I would like to suggest that that the director’s aim to redeem or resurrect the cinematic image is exceeded by the very relation that its form holds with trauma …
The viewer of Histoire(s) cannot fail to locate the film in the history of a “war of images” that prevailed during and in the aftermath of the Wars of Religion. Both are at war with the histories they depict, and in their creative conflicts both are at war with themselves. Each exhumes traumatic material from the archives at their disposal, and each renews the power of images at a point when they are deemed finished. To say that both resurrect and bring redemption to the images they create would risk mediating our ways of coping with the trauma inhabiting them.”
