Nouvelle Vague (dir.

Jean-Luc Godard, Switzerland and

France, 1990)
The Dream of the
Nineteenth Century

Kaja Silverman

What is cinema? Nothing.

What does cinema want? Everything.
What can cinema do? Something.
— Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire(s) du cinéma

In Histoire(s) du cinéma (France, 1988 – 98), Godard explores the

“nothing” that cinema now is, and the “something” that it could
do.1 Cinema is nothing in its present form because in the early
years of the 1940s the “great directors of fiction” turned their
cameras away from Auschwitz. Although some narrative filmmak-
ers, like Steven Spielberg, later made films dramatizing life and
death in the camps, these dramatizations only magnified the orig-
inal betrayal, since they took place within the parameters of the
Hollywood star system. “Suffering is not a star,” Godard says in
part 1A of Histoire(s) du cinéma, “nor is it a burned church, nor a
devastated landscape.” Only the documentary camera worked to
“save the honor of reality.”2
The notion that cinema might be capable of saving the
honor of reality contravenes one of the founding assumptions of

Copyright © 2002 by Kaja Silverman

Camera Obscura 51, Volume 17, Number 3
Published by Duke University Press

1
2 • Camera Obscura

poststructuralist thought — the assumption that representation

alienates us from the phenomenal world. It is also at odds with
many accounts of the Holocaust. For a number of historians and
theorists of World War II, what happened in the camps was so trau-
matic and extended so far beyond the cultural pale as to be utterly
unrepresentable.3 But from the very beginning of his filmmaking
career, Godard has stubbornly gone his own way on this issue — as
on every other. In early interviews, he speaks both of the constant
“coming” and “going” between representation and reality and of
the support that his fictions find in the actuality of those who enact
them.4 In Histoire(s) du cinéma, Godard changes the metaphor, but
not his theoretical position. The relation between a film and what
it depicts should be fraternal — a kind of brotherly “give” and
“take.”5 The filmmaker makes this relation possible when he puts
reality into his work and then uses the work itself to realize the real
(4B). This last formulation has radical implications for our under-
standing of art, since it implies that actuality can only become
“itself” by means of a representational intervention.
Godard’s clarification of the “something” that cinema can
do is a considerably more protracted affair. It requires the full
length of Histoire(s) du cinéma and an exploration of the nature of
history itself — not just the history of cinema, but also of what
Godard at one point calls “the big history.” The French word his-
toire(s) conventionally signifies two different things: “story” and
“history”— or, in the plural form in which Godard uses it, “sto-
ries” and “histories.” The title Histoire(s) du cinéma thus seems to
promise to the uninitiated viewer either stories about or histories
of cinema. But when Serge Daney, with whom Godard conducts a
lengthy conversation at the beginning of part 2A, voices this view
by distinguishing between the histories of cinema and the big his-
tory, Godard immediately takes exception. The big history, he
maintains, does not remain external to cinema; it is, rather, cin-
ema itself, or at least what cinema could be if it were to confront
the “nothing” that it now is. “To me,” he says, “big history is the
history of cinema.” The rest of Histoire(s) du cinéma comes as a
clarification of this astonishing claim. From it we learn that cin-
ema is not just the primary place of historical representation, but
also the primary place where history happens.6
 The Dream of the Nineteenth Centur y • 3

On three different occasions in Histoire(s) du cinéma, Godard

suggests that those who inhabit the domain of cinema derive
from an anterior world. Their “reflections, their sensations, are
from before,” he tells us through a female voice-over. The first
time he makes this claim (1A), he seems merely to be invoking
cinema’s capacity to provide “a delayed reflection” of the past.7
The second time, though, he equates the “before” about which
he is speaking with the nineteenth century by invoking a number
of its talismanic names: Zola, Morisot, Manet, and the Lumière
brothers (1B). In part 2A of Histoire(s) du cinéma, where Godard
advances the same argument in different terms, he again links
cinema to the nineteenth century. Now he also inverts the rela-
tion between these two terms. It is no longer cinema that derives
from the nineteenth century, but rather the nineteenth century
that derives from cinema. “The cinema is a nineteenth-century
matter that was resolved in the twentieth century,” Godard tells
Serge Daney. “There’s always a time lapse.”8
But although cinema has the capacity to actualize the
nineteenth century, it has not yet done so. As Godard says in part
3A, “The past is never dead — it hasn’t even passed.” Therefore,
the nineteenth century has still not taken place. It will “occur”
only when film does what it is capable of doing. This complica-
tion of our usual understanding of cinema’s temporality helps to
explain Godard’s odd hesitation in assigning a tense to it at the
beginning of Histoire(s) du cinéma: “Histories of the cinema, with
an s, all the histories that might have been, that were or might
have been, that there have been” (1A).

Walter Benjamin is clearly the resident spirit of Histoire(s) du

cinéma, although he is never acknowledged as such.9 In The Arcades
Project and “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin
develops the theoretical model of history on which Godard
implicitly (and probably unconsciously) draws. “Every epoch
dreams the one to follow,” Benjamin writes in the first of these
works.10 It is the political responsibility of the subsequent century
to awaken from this dream, and — in so doing — to confer on the
past a “higher degree of actuality than it had in the moment of
4 • Camera Obscura

existing” (392). We awaken from the dream of the century that

preceded our own by relating our “now” to its “then.” This process
is synchronic rather than diachronic; we set it in motion not by
creating a continuous narrative leading from the previous cen-
tury to our own, but rather by “blast[ing]” those moments of the
past that metaphorically anticipate the present out of the “contin-
uum” of history.11 Such figurations permit us to see that we are on
the verge of repeating the mistakes of the past. They consequently
put us in a position not only to actualize what came before, but
also to “redeem” it (254).
Benjamin does not hesitate to give the metaphor of redemp-
tion a distinctly theological inflection. As he puts it in “Theses on
the Philosophy of History,” “The past carries with it a temporal
index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret
agreement between past generations and the present one. Our
coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that pre-
ceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a
power to which the past has a claim” (254; emphasis in original).
We experience a moment of the past in the guise of the “now”
through what Benjamin calls the “dialectical image.”
The dialectical image is not well served by the name Ben-
jamin gives it. It consists not of a thesis, antithesis, and resolution,
but rather of something more closely approximating a Baude-
lairean “correspondence.” It makes manifest the resemblances
linking temporally divergent moments to each other, permitting
them to “communicate.” These similarities render null and void
concepts like progress, development, and cause and effect. As Ben-
jamin himself acknowledges in an important passage from The
Arcades Project, they therefore bring “dialectics” to a “standstill”
(462). Finally, the dialectical image blurs the distinction between
word and image.
Benjamin underscores the dialectical image’s appeal to
the look both by consistently linking it to light12 and by filling The
Arcades Project with visual examples of it. The remnants of the
nineteenth century within which he discovers the present are
almost all the stuff of which flânerie is made: department stores,
dioramas, world exhibitions, the Paris arcades, and photography.
 The Dream of the Nineteenth Centur y • 5

In “A Short History of Photography,” Benjamin also locates the

temporal logic of the dialectical image at the heart of the last of
these representational forms. The past embeds itself in a photo-
graph in a way that can be recognized only by those who come
later, he writes. It consequently exists only retroactively: “No mat-
ter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully posed
his subject, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a
picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now,
with which reality has . . . seared the subject, to find the inconspic-
uous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment
the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may redis-
cover it.”13
At the same time, however, Benjamin insists on the dialec-
tical image’s “legibility.”14 In it, “what has been comes together in
a flash with the now to form a [signifying] constellation,” and the
real becomes “read[able]” (463). We are able to “open the book
of what happened” (464). This is in part because the relationship
that a dialectical image establishes between our moment and an
earlier one is figural in nature. But it is also because this kind of
image can assume a verbal form. Benjamin even goes so far at one
point in The Arcades Project as to suggest that it always does: “Only
dialectical images are genuine images . . . and the place where
one encounters them is language” (462). Finally, as is clearly indi-
cated by the passages I have just quoted, the dialectical image
undoes the opposition separating representation from the real.

Godard shares not only Benjamin’s view of history, but also his
belief in the capacity of the image to awaken us from the dream of
the nineteenth century. Once again, the redemptive image repre-
sents a constellation of images, rather than a single one. It is also
riven through and through by language and can even take a lin-
guistic form. Finally, like The Arcades Project, Histoire(s) du cinéma
constitutes a compendium of dialectical images. Godard creates
them by using the technology of video to combine footage drawn
from newsreels or documentary films with footage taken from
fiction films; to place still photographs side by side with moving
images; and to juxtapose material drawn from one historical
6 • Camera Obscura

period or geographical region with material drawn from another.

He also frequently places one video image on top of another, or
superimposes a word on an image or a palimpsest of images.
A sequence from part 1B of Histoire(s) du cinéma renders
unusually explicit the Benjaminian imperative driving such
formal experimentation. This sequence begins with a montage
of train images, drawn from a range of films. With it, Godard
invokes both the birth of cinema, begun, by many accounts, with
the Lumière Brothers’ The Train Leaving the Station, and the nine-
teenth century, which created public transportation. He then
relates the nineteenth century and the whole of cinematic history
to Auschwitz through a chilling shot of a deportee looking out of
a partially open door in a German train en route to one of the
camps.
Godard mixes up different kinds of sounds in a similar
way. He often half drowns out a piece of music or a speaking voice
with another piece of music or another speaking voice. And even
when he allows someone to speak without such interference, he
puts what this speaker says in dialogue with what comes earlier or
later.15 Almost all of the voices in this work also speak “over” the
images, in every sense of the word; in addition to deriving from
another time and space, they generally add yet another layer of
textuality to what we see. They also point outward toward a range
of other texts. Virtually every word spoken in Histoire(s) du cinéma
is a quotation, and often a quotation of a quotation. The same
holds true for this work’s musical score; it is stitched together out
of elements drawn from a multitude of sources.
We might seem to have reached the limit of the possible
parallels between Benjamin and Godard. Whereas the former
seeks to bring “dialectics” to a “standstill,” the latter is clearly com-
mitted to movement. Godard frequently inscribes the words
“montage, mon beau souci” [montage, my beautiful worry] over
the images of Histoire(s) du cinéma, and he uses Hitchcock to
underscore the temporal nature of this technique: “We have a
rectangular screen in a movie house,” he shows the latter saying,
“and this rectangular screen has got to be filled with a succession
of images. That’s where the ideas come from — one picture comes
 The Dream of the Nineteenth Centur y • 7

after another.” However, as Youssef Isaghpour has noted, The

Arcades Project also constitutes a montage of quotations.16 We
require as much time to read it as to view Histoire(s) du cinéma.
Finally, Godard is far from establishing a one-to-one relation
between montage and movement. The most important of all of
the elements that he conjoins — the I and the you — arrest rather
than dynamize. And what they arrest is the dialectic itself.

But what is the dream of the nineteenth century? Benjamin and

Godard offer different answers to this question. For the author of
The Arcades Project, it is clearly commodification in all its phantas-
mogorical forms. For the author of Histoire(s) du cinéma, on the
other hand, the dream that extends uninterruptedly from the
nineteenth to the twentieth century is sovereignty. Hitler stands as
its most egregious manifestation in parts 1, 2, and 3, and Hitler
and Stalin are jointly manifest in part 4. But sovereignty assumes
the more quotidian form of the movie moguls Irving Thalberg,
who disposed of fifty-five films a day and who represented himself
as cinema’s “foundation, founding, and only son,” and Howard
Hughes, who simultaneously built a filmic and an aviational
empire. Godard sketches the portraits of Thalberg and Hughes in
part 1A, prior to his meditation on Hitler, making evident the con-
nection that he sees between Hollywood and National Socialism.
It might seem odd that Godard would associate the will to
power with the nineteenth century, since it is as old as humanity
itself. Different periods and cultures, however, define sovereignty
in varying ways. For an extended period of Western history, sover-
eignty meant “God.” Later it was instantiated by the monarch, ini-
tially as a representative of God, and subsequently as an embodi-
ment of the state. The notion of sovereignty that emerged in the
nineteenth century, and that is still very much with us, is that elab-
orated by Hegel in Phenomenology of Spirit: the autonomous and
self-constituting subject.
The subject exists, Hegel tells us, only by being recognized
by another subject.17 He finds this dependency intolerable, how-
ever, since he seeks to be acknowledged not merely as a subject,
but also as one who is independent and self-made. He attempts to
8 • Camera Obscura

rid himself of his “self-externality” (114) by refusing to recognize

the subject whose recognition he demands. Since this other sub-
ject is driven by the same desire, a murderous struggle ensues,
which ends only when one of the two decides that life is more
important than recognition. The latter then acknowledges the
other as “master” and steps into the position of “slave.”
Hegel is quick to point out the impossibility of the posi-
tion in which the master now finds himself. By refusing to acknowl-
edge his opponent as a subject, he has rendered null and void the
homage that the latter has conferred on him; he therefore rules
over “nothing.”18 But this does not invalidate the notion of mas-
tery for Hegel. He goes on to argue that the slave’s defeat provides
the condition for his ultimate victory, since the work that he per-
forms at the behest of the master permits him to negate and
reshape the exterior world in such a way that what is external to
him ceases to be other (118). In so doing, he remakes himself,
thereby achieving the sovereignty denied to the master.
And although the master/slave dialectic keeps reasserting
itself through history and is, indeed, the driving force behind it,
the slave’s apparent defeat keeps turning into an actual victory.
Ultimately a figure emerges who is capable of straddling both
sides of the dialectic, thereby resolving it. Not surprisingly, given
the rest of the narrative recounted by Hegel, this figure is some-
one who not only set out to conquer the world, but also suc-
ceeded to a significant degree in doing so: Napoleon. But history
does not come to a complete end until a subject emerges who is
able to stand outside it and view it in its totality. This subject is
Hegel himself. Far from laying the concept of mastery to rest,
then, Phenomenology of Spirit reconceives it on a grander scale.
Although even more deeply inside the dream of the nine-
teenth century than Hegel, Alexandre Kojève is prepared to
shine a flashlight into some of its darkest corners. In the second
chapter of Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, he provides a kind of
Guide Bleu to history as it is represented within Phenomenology of
Spirit, bringing into sharp relief the violence through which it
unfolds. The slave only achieves the mastery that eludes his oppo-
 The Dream of the Nineteenth Centur y • 9

nent by negating the “given.” This “given” can assume an infinity

of forms — biology, the material world, even history itself. But
what is always ultimately denied is the slave’s own “given”: interre-
lationality. Kojève writes,

At the start, the future Master and the future Slave are both determined
by a given, natural World independent of them, hence they are not yet
truly human, historical beings. Then, by risking his life, the Master raises
himself above given Nature . . . and becomes a human being, a being that
creates itself in and by its conscious negating Action. Then, he forces the
Slave to work. The latter changes the real given World. Hence he too
raises himself above Nature, above his (animal) “nature,” since he
succeeds in making it other than it was. . . . Thanks to his work, he can
become other. . . . And this is what actually took place, as universal
history and, finally, the French Revolution and Napoleon show.19

And if Hegel’s claim that Napoleon resolved the master/

slave dialectic is not sufficient in and of itself to dispel the illusion
that we are now outside the dialectic, Godard suggests, we need
only consider the abominations of the twentieth century: those
represented by the names “Hitler,” “Stalin,” “Bosnia,” and “Rwanda.”

As Frantz Fanon helps us to see through his revisionary account

of the master/slave dialectic, which places at its center the colo-
nized subject, the psychic damage that we inflict on another when
we refuse to recognize her is devastating.20 It is not in our power,
however, to deny another’s subjectivity. The latter depends not on
us, but rather on the first-person pronoun, and this pronoun is
available to all comers. What we do when we fail to acknowledge
another is to depersonalize her. I may seem to be splitting linguis-
tic hairs by insisting on this distinction, but without it we cannot
account for the capacity of an oppressed subject to resist her
oppression. We are also at a loss to understand what it would
mean to bring the dialectic to a halt.
One can depersonalize another subject either by assimi-
lating her, or by relegating her to the category of the third person.
It was Fanon’s misfortune to fall victim to both kinds of deperson-
10 • Camera Obscura

alization. Growing up in Martinique when it was still a colony, he

was fed such a steady diet of French values that he came to see
himself as French.21 This belief was shattered when he moved to
Paris, not only because most of its inhabitants refused to recog-
nize him as “French,” but also because they induced in him what
he calls a “third-person consciousness” (110 –11).
Fanon cites as one of the sources of his depersonalization
the words “Look, a Negro!” spoken about him by one passerby to
another (111). But we do not need to resort to a substantializing
and potentially abusive term like Negro in order to induce a third-
person consciousness in another subject. Depersonalization can
also take the seemingly benign form of the third-person pro-
noun. This is because he and she differ radically from you and I.22
Whereas the first- and second-person pronouns are interdepend-
ent and reversible, the third is the “word of separation.”23 It desig-
nates someone or something external to the discursive situation,
over and against which the speaker constitutes himself.
In the case of Hitler, depersonalization took both of these
forms. Through mass rallies and rituals, as well as the larger promul-
gation of a German essence or Volk, the Führer assimilated vast
numbers of people to himself. But he also relegated millions of
other people to the category of the nonperson: gypsies, homo-
sexuals, communists, the mentally ill, and the whole of European
Jewry. Although shamelessly promoting the cult of his own per-
sonality, and so a kind of “Stalinification” of those over whom he
presided, Stalin was ultimately less gifted at assimilation than his
German counterpart; those who initially appeared as faithful fol-
lowers kept turning, in his mind, into enemies of the state. He
consequently established his sovereignty more through the sec-
ond than the first kind of depersonalization.
The violence enacted by Thalberg and Hughes might
seem to pale by comparison with that exercised by Hitler and
Stalin. They exiled actors and directors from work — not the
nation or the human species. And many of those to whom they
denied personhood enjoyed luxuries unimaginable for those in
confined in the German or Soviet camps. But Godard looks at the
 The Dream of the Nineteenth Centur y • 11

matter differently. For him, Thalberg and Hughes represent a

cinema that is as negatory of other cinemas as Hitler and Stalin
were of other subjects. One of his primary projects in Histoire(s) du
cinéma is to critique the world domination that the United States
has effected through film and television — its extinction of one
form of alternative cinema after another. Thalberg and Hughes
also presided over one of the primary “factories”24 within which
the dream of the nineteenth century was reminted for the twenti-
eth. This newly articulated account of sovereignty depended on
depersonalization every bit as much as National Socialism or the
Soviet Union did. Those to whom it denied personhood were,
moreover, not “merely” the members of another nation or race,
but half of humanity: the feminine half.
Napoleon, Stalin, and Hitler all imposed an emphatically
masculine identity on their versions of the autonomous and self-
constituting subject. However, each of these figures laid claim to
sovereignty by killing, maiming, and imprisoning vast numbers of
other men. Pointing to the regularity with which male characters
suffer injury and impairment in Soviet literature and cinema, one
scholar has recently suggested that Stalin’s triumph must also
have been psychically damaging for millions of men, inducing in
them the third-person consciousness described by Fanon.25
Within Hollywood, the dream of the nineteenth century under-
went a democratization. It assumed the more modest guise of the
“self-made man”26 and became an automatic effect of certain
filmic conventions. It was thereby placed within the reach of every
male viewer, at least within the darkened hall of the movie the-
ater. But this popularization necessitated an equally all-encom-
passing depersonalization of the female viewer. Godard makes
this point indirectly in part 4, both through an important mono-
logue and the montage of female faces that accompanies it:

In 1932, the Dutchman Jan Ort was studying the stars moving away from
the milky way. Soon, as predicted, gravity pulls them back. By measuring
the positions and speeds of these repatriated stars, Ort was able to
calculate the mass of our galaxy. Imagine his surprise on discovering that
visible matter represented fifty percent of the mass needed to exert the
12 • Camera Obscura

necessary gravitational force. So where has the other half of the universe
gone? Phantom matter was born, omnipresent but invisible. (4B)

Godard does not specify the agency whereby half of the

human race becomes invisible at this point in Histoire(s) du cinéma.
However, in part 2B he draws attention to a striking example of
depersonalization-through-assimilation, and it takes an emphati-
cally gendered form. He flashes the words Temps Perdu [time lost]
and Temps Retrouvé [time found] on the screen, in an obvious ref-
erence to Proust. A few minutes later, he suggests that Marcel, the
narrator of A la recherche du temps perdu (literally, “In Search of
Lost Time”),27 lives his life in the mode of a dream — the dream,
precisely, of the nineteenth century.28 He also intimates that it is
because Marcel is more asleep than awake that Albertine, his mis-
tress, dies. Proust’s narrator attempts to deny his dependence
upon her by possessing her in an ever more absolute sense.
Although this quest fails, it is nevertheless fatal to her. “Albertine
gone,” Godard says in voice-over, speaking for Marcel, “For a long
time, I used to go to bed early, that’s what I’m saying. And all of a
sudden, it’s Albertine who dies, and that’s the time that is found
again.” As we will see, Histoire(s) du cinéma contains a much more
extended meditation on pronominal depersonalization, and one
that again bears primarily on the female subject.

Histoire(s) du cinéma is full to bursting with images of women.

Godard dedicates the “Fatal Beauty” section of part 2B to the
“other sex,” along with large sections of every other part. Taken in
isolation from each other, many of these representations of women
are indicative of the nothing that cinema now is. The same is true
of much of the text, which constitutes such a vital component of
Godard’s magnum opus, whether vocally or in the form of graphic
inscription. However, not all of Histoire(s) du cinéma’s words and
images emerge from the dream factory. Many others work to inter-
rupt our sleep and summon us to consciousness.
Godard’s strategies of disruption are numerous and
varied; some are drawn from the lexicon of modernism. These
include not only montage itself, but also the jarring staccato
 The Dream of the Nineteenth Centur y • 13

sound of his computer printing out the text he has just written
into it and the whirring noise of celluloid moving through the
bobbins of his editing table. These two sounds challenge sleep at
the conceptual as well as the auditory level since they expose the
machinery behind the cinematic dream. Godard uses a related
device in part 1A of Histoire(s) du cinéma; he writes the words
dream and one must dream over a montage of film clips in which
women are traditionally displayed. On other occasions, he con-
fronts the issue of gender more frontally. Twice, for instance, he
reverses the depersonalization effected by a formulation like “a
film is a girl and a gun” by enumerating a series of female names,
each one of which evokes a particular human being. The first of
these lists occurs in part 1A of Histoire(s) du cinéma, immediately
after the story about Howard Hughes and his RKO starlets. It
reads, “Billie, Virginia, Jane, Terry, Ann, Adele, Jane, Faith, Joan,
Ginger, Rita.”
Godard also includes many female voices in Histoire(s) du
cinéma, often entrusting them with important monologues. For the
most part, these voices are disembodied, but on two occasions a
woman presents herself as a speaking subject at the level of the
image as well as the sound, thereby laying a more emphatic claim to
the first-person pronoun. In part 2A, a girl ( Julie Delpy) reads a
lengthy text about the intoxication of travel, in part from a position
in front of the camera. And in part 2B, a grown woman (Sabine
Azéma) delivers a crucial monologue on the topic of beauty, again
in synchronized sound. The second of these speeches is especially
remarkable, since beauty is an attribute traditionally incarnated by
the female subject but “addressed” to the male. Here a woman con-
stitutes beauty’s epicure, as well as its embodiment.
In part 1A of Histoire(s) du cinéma, Godard raises this proj-
ect to a metacritical level. He inscribes the words to the object of cin-
ema in white titles against a black backdrop. He then cuts to a
radiant close-up of a woman’s face. A few minutes later, over a
montage that ends with another close-up of the same face, he
adds the words in our relation to each other we are both [cinema’s] sub-
jects. With this little montage, Godard once again makes the first-
person pronoun available to the women in his film. He also sug-
14 • Camera Obscura

gests that we are all subordinate to and dependent on cinema,

just as the inhabitants of a monarchy are on the monarch. He
thereby divests the word subject of values like mastery and auton-
omy. Finally, he brings into sharp focus what will increasingly
emerge as the primary concern of this work: his own subjectivity.

In part 1B of Histoire(s) du cinéma, Godard turns the magnifying

glass that he earlier focused on Hitler, Thalberg, and Hughes on
himself. He asks, “But for me, first of all, mine, my story, and what
have I got to do with all of that — all that clarity, all that obscu-
rity?” Part 3B, dedicated to the topic of the Nouvelle Vague, might
seem to provide the answer to this question; as Godard reminds
us here, he was one of the chief innovators of postwar French cin-
ema. However, in his conversation with Daney at the beginning of
part 2A, he clearly distinguishes his story from that of the French
New Wave. In response to the suggestion that his generation was
ideally positioned to take account of the history of cinema, Godard
responds not with a discussion of the Nouvelle Vague, but rather
with a series of references to himself. He also suggests that his
story cannot be separated from the dream he is critiquing. “The
thing about cinema, according to my idea or my desire, and my
unconscious, which now can be consciously expressed,” he tells
Daney, “is that it was the only way to go, to recount, to take account
myself, that I have a history in myself. . . . If there were no cinema,
I wouldn’t know that I had a history.”
Godard forges an even closer link between his subjectivity
and the dream of the nineteenth century at the beginning of part
1B. After asking what he has to do with “all that obscurity, all that
clarity,” he adds, “sometimes in the evening someone whispers in
my bedroom. I shut off the television, but the whispering goes on.
Is it the wind, or my ancestors? History of solitude; solitude of
history.” With the word solitude Godard situates himself fully
within the dialectic. A series of excerpts from Godard’s Le weekend
(France and Italy, 1967) and Le mépris [Contempt] (France and
Italy, 1963) follows, providing an unpalatable dramatization of
the will to power and linking it once to the author of Histoire(s) du
cinéma.
 The Dream of the Nineteenth Centur y • 15

But Godard does even more in this work than implicate

himself in the dream of the nineteenth century; he also tells the
story of his awakening. He does so through another series of ref-
erences to his own work — this time Nouvelle Vague (Switzerland
and France, 1990), his account of heterosexuality at the end of
the twentieth century; JLG/JLG (France, 1985), his autumnal
self-portrait; and Soft and Hard (A Soft Conversation between two
Friends on a Hard Subject) (United Kingdom, 1986), his and Anne-
Marie Miéville’s video account of their very different attitudes
toward creative production. Although the references to Nouvelle
Vague and JLG/JLG are much more explicit and numerous in His-
toire(s) du cinéma than those to Soft and Hard, the representation
of sexual difference offered in the latter text constitutes the point
of origin for all of the other three.29
That gender constitutes a central concern in Soft and Hard
is already evident from its title; Godard and Miéville ring many
changes on the words soft and hard in this text, but the primary
referent for soft is clearly femininity in general, and Miéville in
particular. It is equally clear that hard designates masculinity in
general, and Godard in particular. The conversation in which
they engage in the second half of Soft and Hard provides a striking
instantiation of this binary. After listening for a while with appar-
ent patience and sympathy to Miéville’s anguished account of the
doubts that assail her whenever she tries to produce art, Godard
steals the show. He boasts that he could create a film out of some-
thing as humble as a piece of string, in a vivid display both of his
overweening self-confidence and his belief in his power to create
ex nihilo. He then holds forth at length on the topic of projection
and the role that it plays in cinematic spectatorship. The visual
game with which Soft and Hard concludes works to dramatize
Godard’s thesis about projection and to force Miéville into the
role of the lowly assistant.
Significantly, however, it is Miéville who has the last word
in this exchange. Prior to being silenced, she makes a trenchant
critique of Godard’s filmmaking practice. She tells him that he
lacks courage when it comes to depicting the relations between
men and women, and that he keeps falling back on the same cine-
16 • Camera Obscura

matic constructions. Although Godard seems resigned in Soft and

Hard to recycling in future films the same forms and ideas that he
has used in the past, maintaining that he is incapable of doing
anything else, he rises dramatically to Miéville’s challenge in Nou-
velle Vague.
This film represents a fresh start in every sense of the
word: in the quality of its images, its editing strategies, the compo-
sition of its sound track, and last — but not least — in its account
of heterosexuality. The roles traditionally designated by the terms
man and woman give way to those of master and slave, and Godard
prevents us from recovering the former through the latter by
making the relationship between the two central characters,
Elena Torlasco and Roger/Richard Lennox, so volatile. The bal-
ance of power keeps shifting, and with it the roles each character
plays. In the first half of the film, Elena dominates Lennox; the
second half reverses this paradigm.
But Godard’s reconceptualization of heterosexuality in
Nouvelle Vague constitutes only a partial response to Miéville’s
critique. This is because, rather than deconstructing the opposi-
tion of soft and hard so manifestly at work in her and Godard’s
video conversation, this film confronts hardness with hardness;
it depicts a relationship between two people who both seek to
occupy the position of the autonomous and self-constituting sub-
ject and who therefore cannot help but enact over and over again
some version of the battle to the death. Godard also provides a
less-than-adequate response to Miéville’s criticism in Nouvelle
Vague because he does not put his own subjectivity on the line. As
Soft and Hard shows, he stands outside the struggle that his film
dramatizes, since Miéville will always respond to his hardness with
softness.30
Godard addresses the first of these limitations in Nouvelle
Vague itself by developing a powerful new thematic: the thematic
of the gift. On two separate occasions, he shows the central char-
acters in this film rising above the psychodynamic of power to
which they are generally in thrall and engaging in an exchange
representative of the purest love. One of them gives the other the
gift of life. Since this gift cannot be possessed, it neither bank-
 The Dream of the Nineteenth Centur y • 17

rupts the one who gives nor indebts the one who receives. There-
fore the giver gladly gives, and the receiver gladly receives. Godard
metaphorizes this exchange through the image of one hand
reaching out to another.31
During the twelve years since the making of Nouvelle Vague,
Godard has remained obsessed with the notion of the gift. It is the
governing trope both of JLG/JLG and Histoire(s) du cinéma, and in
both of these works he elaborates it in ways that encroach on his
own subjectivity. In JLG/JLG, he defines existence as the giver, the
world as the gift, and the author as the receiver. He also breaks
definitively with the notion of the “given” as something to be
“overcome” by the human subject by attempting to become the
blank surface on which the world inscribes itself. To this end, he
struggles to divest himself of himself.32
In Histoire(s) du cinéma, Godard goes one step further. He
restages the battle of softness and hardness in his and Miéville’s
video, but with a radical and saving difference: this time it is soft-
ness that wins. Once again, these concepts correlate with gender
in predictable ways. In this work, however, Godard acknowledges
not only the deeply problematic nature of hardness, but also the
authority and strength that can find refuge within softness. At the
outset of part 4, he has a female voice sweetly utter the following
words over a montage of female faces:

In an undertone, a voice gentle and soft, saying big things, important

things, important, astonishing, profound and apposite things; in a voice
gentle and soft, the threat of thunder; the presence of absolutes in a
robin’s song, in the grace notes of a flute, and the delicacy of pure sound.
Warm sunshine suggested through a half smile or undertone, and a sort
of murmur of infinitely pure French . . . that voice hardly rippling the air,
that whispering power.

It is through the concept of the gift that Godard effects his rap-
prochement with softness in Histoire(s) du cinéma, and once again
its primary emblem is the hand. There are images of hands every-
where in this work, including two taken from Nouvelle Vague.
Here, however, the giver is not archetypal man or woman, or even
18 • Camera Obscura

existence, but rather Godard himself. What he gives is also not

life or the world, but simply the second-person pronoun. Although
this might seem a meager gift, it is in fact the greatest that one
subject can confer on another.

Histoire(s) du cinéma proceeds through a series of prefigurations.

Each part anticipates many important elements whose full elabo-
ration only comes later. Consequently, although he is primarily
concerned in part 1A with the will to power, Godard takes time to
announce the goal at which he will arrive only much later. He dis-
sects the graphic sign for the French word histoires into his and toi.
He then repeats the second of these particles, which forms the
objective form of the second-person pronoun in French.33 He
thereby announces his determination to find the you so notably
absent both from the last part of Soft and Hard and from the his-
tory he recounts in Histoire(s) du cinéma. A clip of Gene Kelly danc-
ing with Leslie Caron provides another proleptic inscription of
the you, while at the same time situating it within the context of
the heterosexual couple.34
Godard returns to the subject of a feminine you in part 1B,
again in order to link it to a masculine me. After asking, near the
beginning of that section of Histoire(s) du cinéma, what “all of this”
has to do with him, he cuts to a lengthy montage of cinematic and
other images, repeatedly intercut with a freeze frame of a man
and a woman at a projector, apparently watching a film together.
Godard repeats this image or a variant of it so often in part 1B
that it emerges as the primary principle of structuration. The
image of the couple at the projector is suggestive of a collabora-
tive investigation of cinema — of one which, because it concerns
both partners equally, the male and female subject perform
together. It thus constitutes an implicit critique of the many
images of Godard at work alone, which provide the visual drama-
tization of solitude. Part 1B also abounds with musical and other
references to Nouvelle Vague, and it concludes with a moving series
of images of heterosexual couples.
There are many other inscriptions of a feminine you in
Histoire(s) du cinéma, sometimes in isolation from a masculine I
 The Dream of the Nineteenth Centur y • 19

and at other times in tandem with it. The most striking examples
of the former are the montages of women extending from one
end of this text to the other. The most visually compelling exam-
ple of the latter is the shot of Elena’s hand reaching out to Lennox’s
against the green and blue of a country field and sky from Nouvelle
Vague. But far more important than any of these images are the
many devoted to the grapheme you. With these word-images,
which help us to make sense of the linguistic nature of the dialec-
tical image, Godard creates what he could otherwise only depict:
a genuine hetero-sexuality.
As has often been noted, I does not refer to an already
existing subject; rather, it creates the subject.35 But the same
thing can be said about the second-person pronoun. You is the
one to whom it is addressed, and the latter neither precedes nor
postdates the former. The first-person pronoun is also completely
dependent on the second. I derives its meaning not just from the
one speaking, but also from the listener or group of listeners to
whom it is directed. It would therefore be as accurate to define
the subject as the one who says “you” as the one who says “I.”36
All of this is another way of suggesting that Hegel’s account
of the dialectic is missing a crucial component. The subject who
demands to be acknowledged by the other does so from the place
of an I, and every I is shot through and through with the you. In
order to achieve even an illusory sovereignty, he must therefore
do more than overcome the other; he must also negate the
second-person pronoun. The only way he can do this is by coerc-
ing his opponent out of the category of the first-person pronoun,
and into the third. This depersonalizing imperative constitutes
the driving force behind the dialectic. It is consequently only by
affirming the you that we can exit the dream of the nineteenth
century.37
In order to affirm the second-person pronoun, Godard
tells us, we must put something of our own “essence” into it
(4A);38 we must give ourselves away. Both here and elsewhere in
Histoires(s) du cinéma, he seems to be thinking in concert with Mar-
tin Buber, whose I and Thou also constitutes an extended medita-
tion on the second-person pronoun, and who also defines the lat-
20 • Camera Obscura

ter as the precondition for a nondialectical relation to the other.

Although we generally treat the you and the I as separate and
even opposed words, Buber argues, they in fact constitute a single
word: the “ I-You.”39 This word inhabits both the first- and second-
person pronouns, but usually in a suppressed form. We summon
it forth whenever we say “I” in a way that locates its meaning at the
site of the you, or “you” in a way that locates its meaning at the site
of the I. Buber describes this kind of speech, which is constitutive
of personhood, as “giving” and “receiving” the “you” (57). Through
it, we both claim the other — recognize her as flesh of our flesh,
and skin of our skin — and allow her to define what you means
to us.
Buber refers at an important point in I and Thou to what
he calls “my You” (58). He also attributes to this you the power to
light up the world — to make it available to us as something other
than a set of “givens” to be expunged. In Buber’s account, there is
no limit on the number of subjects who can occupy this position.
Every time we address someone in the mode of the “I-You,” we
say “my You” to her or him. But as Histoire(s) du cinéma helps us
understand, each of us arrives at the possibility of saying “I-You”
to the world of others only through the medium of a particular
other. It is also imperative that we acknowledge as much, since
only then does our dependence on this other become “real” for
us. The phrase “my You” represents the speech act through which
we do so.
In the monologue with which he begins part 4A, Godard
attributes to “femininity” the same power that Buber does to the
“my You.” The “soft” and “gentle” voice in whose guise he cele-
brates “the other sex” opens on to a robin’s song, the notes of a
flute, warm sunshine, and pure sound. Godard also attempts to
move from this voice to a new kind of sociality — one that would
be “a hand held out, not a dressed-up sentiment, an ideal passing
on the road to Jericho” (4A). However, the second-person pro-
noun occupies a very marginal position in this account of soft-
ness. When it does appear, moreover, it remains completely
abstract. Part 4A also includes the most grotesquely depersonaliz-
ing sequence in the whole of Histoire(s) du cinéma. A male speaker
 The Dream of the Nineteenth Centur y • 21

(Alain Cuny) delivers a long monologue, whose larger topic is

cinema, but which metamorphoses at a certain point into a gen-
eralizing discourse about the “other sex.” Not only are both the
speaker and his interlocutor explicitly male, but this dyad is effec-
tively rendered a monad by the speaker’s recourse to a sovereign
and all-inclusive “we.” He speaks to and on behalf of all men,
about that undifferentiated nonperson, woman: “[Cinema is]
there when the cradle comes to life, it’s there when the girl appears
to us, leaning from the window with her unknowing eyes and a
pearl between her breasts. It’s there when we’ve undressed her,
when her firm body trembles to the beat of our lust. It’s there
when the woman parts her thighs for us, with the same maternal
emotion she feels in opening her arms to the child.”40
Godard also fails in his attempt to extrapolate a nondialec-
tical sociality from this generalized femininity. Although it prompts
him to stress the importance of “love for one’s neighbor,” love and
neighbor remain empty categories. Before long, moreover, both
vanish, leaving the solitary subject once again in possession of the
stage. “The believers in a collective ‘we’ were mistaken about the
individual,” Godard tells us. “X is an individual, a creative ele-
ment, an incalculable freedom. Man as a man is a creator, but a
created creator.” In the lengthy homage to Hitchcock that fol-
lows, sovereignty also makes a big comeback. Although Alexan-
der, Julius Caesar, Hitler, and Napoleon all failed in their attempt
to “control the universe,” Hitchcock succeeded. World domina-
tion consequently represents a realizable goal.
What begins as a celebration of softness mutates so quickly
into a revalorization of hardness because Godard has not yet
named his particular you, either to her, himself, or us. She is still
confined to the category of the third-person pronoun. In the clos-
ing minutes of part 4A, he moves quickly to rectify this situation.
He acknowledges his dependency on the first-person pronoun
and foregrounds the alterity that haunts it. He also abandons all
claims to mastery. “In ‘I think, therefore I am,’ the I of ‘I am’ is no
longer the same as the I of ‘I think,’ ” he says. “The feeling of exis-
tence that I have is not yet a self, it’s an unconsidered feeling. It’s
born with me, but without me.”
22 • Camera Obscura

A moment later, Godard also identifies his you by dedicat-

ing part 4B of Histoire(s) du cinéma to Anne-Marie Miéville. After
writing that it is “for” her, he adds that it is also for himself,
thereby completing the “basic I-You word.” Immediately after-
ward, Miéville’s voice utters the following words: “He was saying
that fidelity, however complete it may be, has no effect on the
march of time, that it is not capable of reviving anything, or any-
one, and that nevertheless there is no other solution than fidelity.”
The speaker does not identify the man to whom she imputes
these words. However, Godard signs his signature under them by
cutting back and forth between a photo of the face of Lauren
Bacall and a photo of the face of Robert Le Vigan, on which he
inscribes the word love.41 The dialogue that failed to materialize
in Soft and Hard finally takes place.

But it appears that Godard has not yet brought the dialectic to a
“standstill.” Later in part 4B, a male voice-over recites two of
Dylan Thomas’s most famous lines: “Do not go gentle / Into that
good night.” In the original text, the phrase good night provides a
synonym for death. Godard reconstitutes it as a signifier for that
state of somnolence that Benjamin associates with the nineteenth
century by embedding it in a lengthy nocturnal montage. This
montage begins with the shot from Nouvelle Vague in which the
camera slowly tracks the entire length of Elena’s glass-walled
house, shining like a beacon in the night, and continues with a
meditation on a more radical kind of obscurity — that suffered by
that half of the subjective universe which we call “women.” It also
includes three other important monologues. The first associates
night with torture and death; the second with Good Friday, and
the third with the “nothing” that can be seen when one rises from
bed in the dark and looks out the window.
The last of these speeches marks the site for the emer-
gence of a “faint light.” Since Godard accompanies his reference
to it with the by-now-familiar image of a man and woman stand-
ing behind a projector, it seems to attest to the redemptive poten-
tial of the heterosexual couple. However, most of the other images
in the nocturnal montage are devoted to the horrors of the twen-
 The Dream of the Nineteenth Centur y • 23

tieth century. After a harrowing sequence of shots from newsreels

and fiction films dramatizing the crimes of Hitler and Stalin, and
after the extraordinary colporteur montage, which warrants an
essay of its own, Godard returns to the metaphor of night. As we
look at the image of a living soldier’s decomposing face, he also
explains why the storm clouds of the nineteenth century have
been regathering so ominously. He has liberated his you from the
category of the third-person pronoun only to swallow her up in
that of the first-person plural. He has been dreaming while osten-
sibly awake:

For the love of what . . . curtain up do we despoil ourselves of our

dreams? How do we dare on waking to bring them into the light? Oh,
into the light each of us carries about him invisible dreams. The music
draws us all to that line of light . . . that gleams under the curtain when an
orchestra tunes its violins. The dance begins, then our hands slide and
separate. We lose ourselves in one another’s gaze . . . each careful not to
disturb the other’s dream, not to send him back into the dark — to rid
the night of night, which isn’t day, while we love each other.

This monologue is Godard’s way of telling us that there are

no final solutions. Even after we have said “my You” to another,
and apprehended the world in the radiance of her light, darkness
will soon return, obliging us to begin all over again our journey
toward her. But in the final moments of Histoire(s) du cinéma,
Godard suggests that this may not be an unmitigated disaster.
When we are asleep, we do not know that we are dreaming. And
once fully conscious, we have forgotten our dreams. Only at the
moment of awakening do we have access to both states of mind. It
may consequently only be during the brief interval between sleep-
ing and consciousness that we are capable of uttering the words
“my You.” “If a man . . . wandered through paradise, and kept a
flower to remind him where he’d been,” Godard says, “and then
upon waking found that flower in his hand . . . what can I say? I was
that man.” With this little story, he once again rouses himself from
the nightmare of history in order to affirm softness. He also offers
one last tribute to his particular you, whose fragrance now perme-
ates the real: Anne-Marie Miéville, the yellow rose of Rolles.
24 • Camera Obscura

Notes

1. Throughout this essay, I rely on the English translation of the

commentary from Histoire(s) du cinéma provided by the trilingual
book version of Histoire(s) du cinéma: Introduction à une veritable
historie du cinéma, la seule, la vraie, produced by Manfred Eicher
(Munich: ECM Records, 1999), into which I occasionally
introduce slight changes.

2. Although at this point in Histoire(s) du cinéma Godard seems to be

referring to film in a general sense, it later becomes clear that it
was documentary cinema that served this function.

3. Saul Friedlander has been especially insistent on this point. See,

for instance, his “On the Unease in Historical Interpretation,” in
Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing
World, ed. Peter Hayes (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 1991), 35. See also Probing the Limits of Representation:
Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Friedlander (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1992). Ernst von Alphen offers an
excellent account of the opposite position in Caught by History:
Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).

4. See, for example, Tom Milne, “Jean-Luc Godard and Vivre sa vie,”
in Jean-Luc Godard: A Critical Anthology, ed. Toby Mussman (New
York: Dutton, 1968), 82; Godard, “Propos Rompus” and “Ma
demarche en quatre mouvements,” in Jean-Luc Godard par
Jean-Luc Godard, vol. 1, ed. Alain Bergala (Paris: Cahiers du
Cinéma, Editions de l’Etoile, 1985), 296 – 98, 470. Jonathan
Dronsfield also comments on the prevalence of these kinds of
formulations in Godard’s work in “ ‘The Present Never Exists
There’: The Temporality of Decision in Godard’s Later Film and
Video Essays,” in The Cinema Alone: Essays on the Work of Jean-Luc
Godard, 1985–2000, ed. Michael Temple and James S. Williams
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000), 63.

5. As he puts it at one point in part 3A, “Equality and fraternity

between reality and fiction.”

6. As Jean-Luc Douin says in passing, Histoire(s) du cinéma gives us

less “the history of cinema than history by cinema” (“Histoire(s) du
cinéma,” CinémAction 52 [1989]: 79; my translation).

7. André Bazin, “Theatre and Cinema — Part Two,” in What Is

Cinema? vol. 2, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of
 The Dream of the Nineteenth Centur y • 25

California Press, 1967), 97. Jacques Aumont makes much of

another of Bazin’s metaphors in the very different account he
offers of Histoire(s) du cinéma’s “historiographic capacity” in his
excellent Amnésies: Fictions du cinéma d’après Jean-Luc Godard
(Paris: P. O. L., 1999), 162. For him, film is able to access history
better than any art form because it both embalms and transforms
reality, while at the same time making possible critical thought
(162 – 74, 194). For Bazin’s own use of the metaphor, see his
“The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema?,
9 –16.

8. In part 4B, Godard also says: “When one century is slowly

dissolving into the next, a few individuals transform the old
means of survival into new means — these are what we call art.
The only thing that survives an era as such is the form of art it has
created for itself. . . . In this way, the art of the nineteenth century,
the cinema, brought into existence the twentieth, which on its
own barely existed.”

9. In his extraordinary conversation with Youssef Ishaghpour,

however, Godard does invoke Benjamin’s account of the
dialectical image (“Archéologie du cinéma et mémoire du
siècle: Dialogue (1),” Trafic 29 [1999]: 1). And in the same
conversation, Ishaghpour comments on the affinities between
Benjamin’s Arcades Project and Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma
(22 – 23).
10. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eilard and
Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999),
4. Benjamin here is quoting Michelet.

11. This formulation comes from a related text, Benjamin’s “Theses

on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn
(New York: Schocken, 1969), 261.

12. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 462 – 63.

13. Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” Screen 13.1

(1972): 7.

14. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 462.

15. As Jean-Louis Leutrat elegantly puts it, “The first impression [of
Histoire(s) du cinéma] is that of unstable images, menaced either
from the interior, or [by others that are] in competition with
them” (“Histoire(s) du cinéma, or comment devenir maître d’un
souvenir,” Cinémathèque 5 [1994]: 34).
26 • Camera Obscura

16. Isaghpour, “Archéologie du cinéma,” 22 – 23.

17. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 111.

18. Ibid., 116 –17. The word nothing is mine.

19. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. James

H. Nichols Jr. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969),
52 – 53.

20. I will be using the male pronoun when referring to those who
aspire to mastery, and the female pronoun when referring to
those over and against whom this subject defines himself. The
basis for this pronominal bifurcation is history, not essence.

21. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam
Markmann (London: Pluto, 1986), especially 18 – 22.

22. See Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary

Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press,
1971), 217 – 22; and Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter
Kaufmann (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).

23. Buber, I and Thou, 75.

24. This is Godard’s metaphor.

25. I refer here to chapter 10 of Lilya Kagonovsky’s dissertation,

“Bodily Remains: The ‘Positive Hero’ in Stalinist Fiction” (Ph.D.
diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2000).

26. Since the advent of films like Rambo (dir. Ted Kotcheff, US,
1982), however, the sovereign subjectivity available to the male
viewer has assumed more and more grandiose forms.

27. This film circulates in English as Remembrance of Things Past.

28. Significantly, Benjamin also invokes Proust in the context of

discussing the dream of the nineteenth century. See The Arcades
Project, 466. It is hardly surprising that either Godard or
Benjamin would include this reference, given that Proust’s
magnum opus begins, “For a long time I used to go to bed early.
Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close
so quickly that I had not even time to say to myself: ‘I’m falling
asleep.’ And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go
to sleep would awaken me.” (Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans.
C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin [New York: Random
House, 1989], 3).
 The Dream of the Nineteenth Centur y • 27

29. Michael Temple and James S. Williams also note the importance
of Soft and Hard for any understanding of Histoire(s) du cinéma
(“Introduction to the Mysteries of Cinema, 1985 – 2000,” in
Temple and Williams, The Cinema Alone, 14).

30. I am referring here to the Miéville of Soft and Hard, who is also
the one evoked by Godard at the end of Histoire(s) du cinéma. Her
own work offers a more equivocal account of gender. Although
the central female figures in Lou Didn’t Say No (1993), We’re All
Still Here (1997), and Reaching an Understanding (2000) all seek
to exit the history described by Godard in Histoire(s) du cinéma,
they at times approximate something like “hardness.” They do so,
for the most part, because of the intractability of their male
counterparts.

31. For a fuller elaboration of this reading, see Kaja Silverman and
Harun Farocki, Speaking about Godard (New York: New York
University Press, 1998), 197 – 227.

32. This is a brief summary of the reading I offer of JLG/JLG in “The

Author As Receiver,” October 96(2001): 17 – 34.

33. Godard also puns repeatedly on the word du in the title Histoire(s)
du cinéma, which means both “of” in French and “you” in
German, the latter in the nominative form.

34. Aumont, too, remarks on the prevalence of this pronoun in

Histoire(s) du cinéma, but suggests that it is addressed by Godard to
those whom he quotes (Amnésies, 134).

35. See, for instance, Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics,

224 – 27; and Jacques Lacan, “Function and Field of Speech and
Language in Psychoanalysis,” in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 30 –113.

36. Although I will not be following Benveniste’s account of the you

in the following discussion, it would seem important to note
that he also makes personhood dependent on the second-person
pronoun: “Consciousness of self is only possible if it is
experienced by contrast,” he writes in Problems in General
Linguistics. “I use I only when I am speaking to someone who will
be a you in my address. It is this condition of dialogue that is
constitutive of person, for it implies that reciprocally I becomes
you in the address of the one who in his turn designates himself
as I” (224 – 25).
28 • Camera Obscura

37. Mieke Bal also attributes a transformative force to the

second-person pronoun. She develops the notion of a
“second-person narration” in “First Person, Second Person,
Same Person: Narrative as Epistemology,” New Literary History
24.2 (1993): 293 – 320. In Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art,
Preposterous History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999),
Bal searches for the second-person pronoun in the field of
vision. Activated within aesthetic experience, it is instantiated
simultaneously by a work of art and the one who looks at it
(204 – 5).

38. Godard elaborates this point in negative terms — by suggesting

that the you is not a gift when it no longer involves something of
the speaker’s essence. Elsewhere in the same monologue, he
suggests that “the mind is only real when it manifests its presence,
makes itself manifest or shows its hand,” and he equates this
mental reality with creation. The concept of thinking with one’s
hands comes from Denis de Rougement’s Penser avec les mains
(Paris: A. Michel, 1936), as does much of the monologue in
which this concept in embedded ( James S. Williams, “European
Culture and Artistic Resistance in Histoire(s) du cinéma: Chapter
3A, La monnaie de l’absolu,” in Temple and Williams, The Cinema
Alone, 115 –16). It has obvious reference to the shots of Godard at
the editing table, and — by extension — montage.

39. Buber, I and Thou, 54.

40. Aumont also notes the objectifying nature of this monologue,
but sees it as consistent with the larger point of view adopted by
Godard toward women in Histoire(s) du cinéma (Amnésies, 88 – 90).

41. The first part of this monologue comes from Elie Faure’s Histoire
de l’art: L’art moderne (Paris: Denoël, 1987), 97 –109. I am
indebted to Michael Temple for this attribution (“Big Rhythm
and the Power of Metamorphosis: Some Models and Precursors
for Histoire(s) du cinéma,” in Temple and Williams, The Cinema
Alone, 79 – 80.) Aumont also notes the objectifying nature of this
monologue but sees it as consistent with the larger point of view
adopted by Godard toward women in Histoire(s) du cinéma
(Amnésies, 88 – 90). Godard offers an implicit critique of the
words I have just quoted in part 4B, where he says: “Sometimes I
hear men describing the pleasure they have taken with this
woman or that. Oh, it isn’t coarseness — the words at times very
precise . . . but . . . I want to tell them, ‘Look, look it was
something else.’ ”
 The Dream of the Nineteenth Centur y • 29

42. Ishaghpour also comments on the importance of love in

Histoire(s) du cinéma in the second installment of his conversation
with Godard (“Archéologie du cinéma,” 35), and Marie-Anne
Guerin writes that Godard insists in part 4B on “the necessity for
a sexual duality” (“Les signes parmi nous,” Cahiers du cinéma, May
2000, 12 –13).

Kaja Silverman is Class of 1940 Professor of Rhetoric and Film at

the University of California, Berkeley. Her publications include James
Coleman (2002), World Spectators: Cultural Memory in the Present (2002),
Speaking About Godard (1998), The Threshold of the Visible World (1996),
Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992), The Acoustic Mirror (1988), and
The Subject of Semiotics (1983).

Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988 – 98)