THE HAND OF TIME
FROM THE FIRST, GODARD’S MOVIES HAVE BEEN INFORMED by his belief in film as the medium in which the history of the 20th century is written. His collage films, beginning with the epic Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988- 1998), describe how the medium in which this history of the world is inscribed shifts from celluloid, which is projected to a collective audience in theaters, to videotape, the Internet, and discs, all available for personal viewing; and how these works also could be used to “write” image histories as personal as literary histories always have been. To these mediums has been added, in the 21st century, digital cinema. Godard’s collage films, then, are about the inscription of the world in moving images and the reinscription upon re-inscription of that history in keeping with the transformation of the moving image medium itself.
Fabrice Aragno is credited as the cinematographer, co-editor, and co-producer of Jean-Luc Godard’s —both the most abstract and the most nakedly personal of the collage films that have spun off from . In making , Godard used the
