DVD Release: Histoire(s) du Cinema

Release Date: Dec. 6, 2011
Price: DVD $49.95
Studio: Olive Films


Histoire(s) du Cinema movie scene

Jean-Luc Godard looks at the medium of movies in Histoire(s) du Cinema.

The influential, revolutionary and ever-prolific filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, whose movies include Breathless, Weekend and Contempt, offers one of his most extraordinary and insightful works in the video series Histoire(s) du Cinema.

Revered by cinephiles along with fans of the legendary filmmaker, Histoire(s) du Cinema is a unique experimental documentary look at the medium through Godard’s eyes.

Consisting of eight episodes made over a period of 10 years, the ambitious, 4½- hour film covers a wide range of topics, from the birth of cinema to Italian neo-realism to Hollywood and beyond. Constructed as a seemingly endless montage of sights and sounds, Histoire(s) features a diverse array of film extracts, voices (everyone from Juliette Binoche to Alfred Hitchcock), and an eclectic music soundtrack that includes contributions by talents as wide-ranging as Beethoven and Leonard Cohen.

No bonus features are on the DVD.

Here’s a breakdown of the eight parts of Histoire(s), all presented in French with English subtitles:

Disc 1:
Part 1 (Chapter 1A) – Toutes les histoires//All the (Hi)stories (1988)
Part 2 (Chapter 1B) – Une histoire seule//A Single (Hi)story (1989)
Part 3 (Chapter 2A) – Seul le cinéma//Only Cinema (1997)
Part 4 (Chapter 2B) – Fatale beauté//Deadly Beauty (1997)

Disc 2:
Part 5 (Chapter 3A) – La monnaie de l’absolu//The Coin of the Absolute (1998)
Part 6 (Chapter 3B) – Une vague nouvelle//A New Wave (1998)
Part 7 (Chapter 4A) – Le contrôle de l’univers//The Control of the Universe (1998)
Part 8 (Chapter 4B) – Les signes parmi nous//The Signs Among Us (1998)

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About Laurence

Founder and editor Laurence Lerman saw Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest when he was 13 years old and that’s all it took. He has been writing about film and video for more than a quarter of a century for magazines, anthologies, websites and most recently, Video Business magazine, where he served as the Reviews Editor for 15 years.