Ray Pride

"We live, as we dream, alone," is a reflection from Joseph Conrad I may be too fond of.

Yet it seems uncommonly suited to the moviegoing experience: hold hands or share a bucket of corn, you are still alone in the dark, consuming a seductive dream. Perhaps that is why people talk during movies: as if talking in their sleep, trying to rupture the dream to move from one level of consciousness to another.

Thick thoughts, occasioned by happening upon two issues of Kinetoscope, a modest zine out of Oklahoma, dedicated to the film experiences of one young man named Joshua (no surname offered). He offers ratings and observations of movies he's seen, whether in film classes, on video, satellite, in theaters in Norman, Oklahoma or on a trip to Poland, intermittent trips with mom and dad. The essential litany of companionship that runs through his second issue is melancholy and poignant and true to the dedicated cinephile's life: "Alone... alone.... alone... alone... alone... alone."

For a couple months, I've struggled to come to quips with the 5-CD, complete soundtrack to Jean-Luc Godard's monumental eight-part video critique of a century of cinema, "Jean-Luc Godard: Histoire(s) du cinema." Godard's hoarse rumble confides all. There are four hardcover volumes of the 69-year-old philosopher-imagemaker's poetic ruminations in French, German and English, but only his guttering French to heard between sound samples from a century of movies and swells from diverse sources, including Arvo Part, Beethoven, Bartok, John Coltrane, Leonard Cohen and Otis Redding.

Godard is a king of contradiction, synecdoche, esthetic irony. "If I force the memory," he begins in his last quartet of installments, "all at once I understand what's going on, I'm imagining that's it, I'm no longer remembering, I'm imagining." There is a shift in music, in the background sound from some unnamed film. "Well, now, it's morning, I think."

Morning in another century. Love art death genocide cinema. "An image isn't strong," he reads/recites/proclaims, "because it's brutal or fantastic, but because its association of ideas is far-reaching and true." History in its ephemera and sensations: Is this not cinema? No, it is the most passionate of critiques of cinema.

It is a haunted house, a fun house, more poetically and perhaps more correctly, the sound of an apartment house tuning up to fly. There is even banging on a wall that recurs in part four: it may have more signification attached to images, but as sound, it is someone -- conventional wisdom? Capital? -- telling the Swiss raconteur to pipe down. The effect is of a century of cinema as haunted as the ominous almost-sounds rattling and hinting and infuriating through the corridors of our collective memory like the impinging signs of madness half-heard in Polanski's "Repulsion."

Godard uses video to critique cinema in a fashion, like a scratch-mix, and the corporate rights holders of "intellectual property" have allowed that to be shown in France (with its laws about an artist's "moral rights"), but only on CD, in aural form elsewhere. So we have the voice, an erudite, near-omniscient conscience, a night voice graveled from nicotine and the wearing weight of an amoral, image-ridden world. That hectoring avid voice would speak these thoughts into the night in the middle of nowhere even if we were not there to hear it.

Critics have suggested an affinity to Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," and a concluding essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum declares as much, that "Histoire(s) du cinema" "remains difficult if one insists on reading it as densely textured poetry; in my experience, it is most rewarding when approached in a spirit of play and innocence." The layering of sound and exquisite cross-reference suggests a complexity like that of memory, but of all memories, and of all memories of media that we have been exposed to, a collective consciousness that is more one of refraction than recollection.

Godard began as a critic; became radical chic; wound up a kind of philosopher. The images and ideas in "Histoire(s) du Cinema" are there to inspire those who are prepared to have the experience wash over them, yet more than in most works of art, it takes a conspiracy of the viewer/listener and the artist to complete the composition. Rosenbaum's concluding essay gets more structural than playful at points, but go back to the sound: French, English, Russian, Spanish, German, Italian, quoting, overlapping, hypnotizing. Godard talks about the immediacy of image, and particularly of sound: "... the cinema today is better fitted than either philosophy or the novel to convey the basic data of consciousness."

And so I fell asleep a dozen times or more trying to make sense of the fray. Ornate yet obstinate, "Histoire(s) du cinema" is a cry from the heart, a cry in the dark.

Or, to remember the object that makes me consider its solitude, take me back to Oklahoma: A single serious soul: alone, alone, alone, alone, alone, alone.

"Jean-Luc Godard: Histoire(s) du cinema" (ECM New Series #170610 465 151-2), is available at online stores like bn.com and amazon.com (where it's markedly cheaper than bn); Kinetoscope is available at Quimby's or through futuristo@aol.com. (2000-11-16)

Also by Ray Pride

SUSHIOLOGY 101
I had to be plastered and it had to be right after this year's Oscars to wind up drinking gold-flecked sake for last call at Mirai.
(2000-11-09)

ID STUFF
Clowes' worlds are stylized and precise, but he also walks down the same streets we do. Keep walking or get indoors? Clowes does both.
(2000-11-09)

INTIMATE LIGHTNING
Director James Gray follows up his intent, earnest gangster drama, "Little Odessa," with another stark, generously paced drama (written with Matt Reeves) with its story of young men seething with betrayal in working-class environs.
(2000-11-02)

AMERICAN POP
The kick-crazed decamillion-dollar girl caper "Charlie's Angels" is not a movie for people who take themselves seriously. Smart dumb fun, it's as much like a classic American musical as it is a genuine Hong Kong martial arts vehicle.
(2000-11-02)

TICKLE ME DEADLY
(2000-10-19)

WEST IS EAST
(2000-10-12)

THE FODDER OF OUR COUNTRY
(2000-10-05)

HOW THE FEST WAS WON
(2000-10-05)

DIRTY LOOKS & SMILES
(2000-10-05)

RAGING HORMONES
(2000-09-28)

THE WHITE ALBUM
(2000-09-14)

IN THE COMPANY OF RENEE
(2000-09-07)

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