Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television

A must for any cinephile, the complete transcripts of the French filmmaker and Critic's April to October %E2%80%9878 Montreal lectures have finally been made available, situating Godard in the immediacy of his talks and screenings during which he performed %E2%80%98a kind of psychoanalysis of myself and where I am in cinema.' The book is both history and his-story, and the tension of the %E2%80%98subjectively objective' is maintained throughout. Godard sees traditional film criticism, %E2%80%98done by literary types,' as committing a category mistake by privileging the text over the image, failing to notice that "images are freedom and words are prison,' and perpetuating a violence on the medium. He advocates a dialectic of the image and invokes Mao's spiral of ever-improving ideas as a liberating critical process that he rhetorically re-enacts over the talks in self-conscious irony. Coquettishly proclaiming %E2%80%98I don't know film history' while attempting it in another modality, Godard looks to displace discourse while ironically enacting it to recreate a space for the image that he felt has been lost. If his success is difficult to measure, it must be appreciated that the book is a meticulously reconstructed set of literal transcripts. (Apr.)