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Shocking Histoire(s): Godard, Surrealism, and Historical Montage

Charles R. Warner a
a
Cultural and Critical Studies, University of Pittsburgh,
Online Publication Date: 01 January 2008
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Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 25: 1–15, 2008
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DOI: 10.1080/10509200500538773
Shocking Histoire(s): Godard, Surrealism,

and Historical Montage
CHARLES R. WARNER
In the closing seconds of Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–1998), Jean Luc-Godard’s eight-part,

four-and-a-half-hour videographic collage, we encounter the most celebrated image in
Surrealist cinema: the close-up of a razor slashing a woman’s eyeball in Luis Buñuel and
Salvador Dalı́’s Un Chien andalou (1929). Originally, the image introduced a scandalous
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and seemingly incoherent work which the Surrealist group embraced as an “indomitable
call to revolution” (188), and which Buñuel himself called “a passionate appeal to murder”
(Aranda 63). But Godard severely modifies the image, relocating it within a montage
sequence that stresses his own points regarding “the death of cinema” and its possible
“resurrection.” He freeze-frames, crops, and enlarges the original shot to make an even
tighter close-up of the eye, then situates it between dissolving images from Orson Welles’
Mr. Arkadin (1955), his own JLG/JLG: autoportrait de décembre (1995), and a reproduction
of Francis Bacon’s Study for Portrait of Van Gogh II (1957). On the sound track, in place
of the tango selected by Buñuel, a somber piano solo coincides with Ezra Pound reading
Homer’s The Odyssey and with Godard quoting Borges’ “La flor de Coleridge.” In a sense,
Godard even replaces Buñuel and Dalı́’s ironic intertitles with his own writing and wordplay
inside the frame. Given these changes, how might we respond to Godard’s use of Un Chien
andalou? Aside from a gruesome image, what does the film bring to his project? What
aspects of Surrealism survive his alterations?
Of course, trying to pinpoint the meaning of a single citation in Histoire(s)—a work
that recombines hundreds of sounds and images collected from sources as diverse as
Hollywood and European art cinema, newsreels, modern and classical music, cartoons,
pornography, paintings, and computer graphics—is neither a simple task, nor one which
Godard encourages. “The best way to look at these programs,” he suggests, “is to enter into
the image without a single name or reference in your head. The less you know, the better”
(Ciment and Goudet 57). Thus, for Godard, temporarily forgetting the original contexts of
references in Histoire(s) becomes paradoxically necessary for the restoration of memory
(and of the cinema itself) through montage. But whether or not we fall back on our own
ideas about Buñuel and Dali’s film to unpack Godard’s quotation, we can be sure it occupies
a privileged position, appearing in the climactic final moments of a work which took over
a decade to piece together, and which gestated for much longer in text- and lecture-based
versions (Temple and Williams 12–21).
What follows is an attempt to unravel and investigate the rather complex relation
between Godard and Surrealism to which this quotation of Un Chien andalou alludes. I
Charles R. Warner is a Ph.D. student in Cultural and Critical Studies at the University of
Pittsburgh. He has presented research on new media authorship at the Society for Cinema and Media
Studies Conference, and on transcultural remakes at the “Cinema in Europe” conference hosted by
the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis.
1
2 Charles R. Warner
want to argue that Godard’s recourse to Surrealism in this particularly charged sequence
of Histoire(s) involves something more substantial than a surface borrowing of affective
imagery, that aspects of Surrealism—chiefly a poetics of shock—make their way into his
videographic practice. In particular, his use of montage as a tool for retrieving forgotten
histories, and for redeeming the cinema of its failure to sufficiently confront the atrocities
of the twentieth century, reveals an investment in Surrealist tactics of salvaging neglected
objects, dismantling illusions of progress, and juxtaposing antagonistic images with little
or no mediating comment. While these strategies are characteristic of other trends in the
historical avant-garde, they have particular resonances with the Surrealist artists, writers,
and literati who emerged in Paris under the leadership of André Breton between the
two world wars. And yet Breton often said that Surrealism was less a unified doctrine
than an “activity” to be practiced even in the absence of an ultimate, realizable goal.
My concern in this essay is not to lay down a strict definition of Surrealism but to
show how Godard’s use of montage reactivates Surrealism in his most important work to
date.
When voicing his thoughts on montage, Godard at times quotes Robert Bresson’s
Notes on the Cinematographer to communicate how the editing process “brings together
things . . . that did not seem predisposed to be so” (Bresson 41). But more frequently, in his
work and interviews since the 1980s, Godard has turned to the similar ideas expressed in
the proto-Surrealist Pierre Reverdy’s poem “L’Image”:
The image is a pure creation of the spirit.

It cannot be born of a comparison, but of the rapprochement of two more or
less separate realities.
The more distant and just the relationships between these realities that are
brought together, the stronger the image will be—and the more emotional and
poetic reality it will have. (73–75)
Godard quotes these lines midway through the final chapter of Histoire(s), titled “Signs
Among Us,” while the hands of an editor (Woody Allen in Godard’s King Lear [1987])
stitch together strips of celluloid in an overt demonstration of montage, or what Godard
calls “thinking with one’s hands.” As with the quotation of Un Chien andalou, I want to
suggest that Godard’s borrowing of Reverdy’s poem—which Breton adduces in the first
“Manifesto of Surrealism” (20)—retains important links with Surrealism. Although he
may seem to adopt the lines as simply a schematic way of conceptualizing his “electronic
mixing” of scavenged material (Manovich 151), Godard’s practice of montage can still be
seen as bearing out a Surrealist aesthetic of shock and rapprochement.
I have no intention here of pigeonholing Godard as a Surrealist. Instead, I will argue
that his relationship to the radical interwar movement can be established only by exploring
certain quotations and by scrutinizing his connections with specific historical figures—
namely, Louis Aragon, Henri Langlois, Georges Franju, and Walter Benjamin—who have
close attachments to Surrealism. Just as Godard’s method of quotation opens his work
to whatever possibilities the “original” might carry, his habit of invoking these figures
sets up exchanges between his work and theirs which suggest a reframing of his career
stages. The former Surrealist Aragon, whose poetry Godard quotes extensively in his New
Wave films of the 1960s, offers an early way into examining the French-Swiss director
alongside Surrealist montage. Both Langlois and Franju serve as key figures in French
film history around which Godard revises the significance of the Nouvelle Vague, and
Shocking Histoire(s): Godard, Surrealism, and Historical Montage 3
Benjamin provides a philosophical reading of Surrealist shock which goes some way
toward elucidating Godard’s montage-based conception of history.
On the one hand, approaching Surrealism in this light entails a rethinking of the
frequently romanticized movement from which it emerged. Instead of focusing on the
well-known Surrealist notions of surrendering to the logic of dreams through automatic
writing and free association, I want to call attention to the implications of Surrealism for
historiography, to the ways in which its shocks facilitate a spectatorial confrontation with
what Benjamin theorizes as the “true image of the past” which “flits by” and “flashes up” at
an opportune moment “when it can be recognized and is never seen again” (“Theses” 255).
On the other hand, analyzing Godard in this manner calls for a reappraisal of the distinctions
separating his early, middle, and contemporary oeuvres—distinctions that critics have made
too sharply within circular debates about modernist and postmodernist sensibilities. As we
shall see, whether Histoire(s) du cinéma indicates the survival of a modernist aesthetic in
postmodern culture, or the advent of what Jean-François Lyotard postulates as a modernist
art born after and through the postmodern (Ricciardi 171), any such attempt to situate
the videographic series must reckon with the Surrealist aesthetics informing Godard’s
“historical montage” (Smith 190).

The circuit of associations surrounding Godard and Surrealism can be traced back to
his earliest career stages. As James Naremore has argued, Godard’s Cahiers du cinéma
criticism of the 1950s exhibits a Surrealist-like mixture of high and low discourses which
undermines cultural hierarchies and “blurs the boundaries between romantic aestheticism,
modernism, and the historical avant-garde” (17). Dissecting Godard’s review of Douglas
Sirk’s A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958), Naremore shows how within the stretch
of a paragraph, Godard delivers a Joycean pun, lampoons “serious” film criticism, heaps
praise on lowbrow material, and alludes to the “delirium” of the Surrealist writer Aragon
(15–17). Although Naremore restricts this tendency to Godard’s criticism, we can easily
track its persistence in his early films, which also juxtapose dissimilar elements and chip
away at bourgeois taste distinctions. For instance, in Breathless (1960), within a minute
of screen time, Godard apes a plot device common to countless B-movies (eluding police
by climbing out a window), blends a nondiegetic jazz score with gunshots and orchestral
strains from the sound track to Budd Boetticher’s Westbound (1959), and replaces the
dialogue of that “cowboy film” with a collage of lyrical poetry by Aragon and Guillaume
Apollinaire (Martin 255–262), the latter of whom coined the term “surréaliste” in 1917 to
describe his own play (Bohn 121–140). In these moments, which fuse high and low culture
and bring together “more or less separate realities,” Godard’s allusive filmmaking achieves
something more sophisticated than a cinephilic in-joke or an innocuous homage.
Naremore, in part to take issue with the charge of apoliticism often leveled at the
Cahiers critics and eventual New Wave directors, goes on to outline similarities between
the Cahiers auteurists and the interwar Surrealists headed by Breton. “Both were fond of
American films, particularly of the B movie,” he notes, “and both were dreamers of mass
culture looking for what André Breton had called ‘moments of priceless giddiness.” But
“[w]hat the auteurists shared most of all with the surrealists,” Naremore contends, “was a
predilection for l’amour fou”—that is, an attraction to films depicting “compulsive lovers
who flouted bourgeois morality and consumed themselves with passion” (17). Where the
Surrealists invested “mad love” with a transcendent quality in their literature, the Cahiers
group critically relished the theme and later explored it in some of their New Wave films,
such as Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965).
But Naremore, not wanting to “overstate the connection between the auteurists and
the surrealists,” immediately drops the comparison and tells us his “point is simply that
4 Charles R. Warner
Godard’s writing is made up of a mixture of familiar discourses, and that it can’t be

identified completely with any of them” (17). To be sure, a closer inspection would have
to account for the significant differences between and within the two all-male collectives.
Auteurism, or more precisely la politique des auteurs, remained a contested view among
the fairly eclectic contributors to Cahiers, and André Bazin, the mentor of Godard and his
fellow auteurists, took them to task more than once for allotting “such importance to ‘B’
films” and subscribing to an “aesthetic personality cult” (248–259). No less eclectic, the
Surrealist group struggled to reach a consensus among its members, and arguments over
how to reconcile their poetics with revolutionary action often led to “excommunications”
carried out by the authority of Breton (Nadeau 175–211). Even more important, a fuller
comparison would need to examine the crucial variances between post-World War I and
post-World War II French culture. A thorough analysis of these periods falls outside the
ambit of my discussion, but suffice it to say that the Surrealists (disgusted by attempts to
rationalize the horrors of the Great War, suspicious of modernity’s progress, and caught
politically between Communist and Marxist crosscurrents) and the Cahiers critics (on the
whole receptive to the influx of American popular culture which went hand in hand with
French modernization, unmindful of the aftereffects of atomic warfare and the Holocaust,
and reluctant to engage pressing political issues, in particular the colonial war in Algeria
and the unresolved conflicts of the German Occupation) took notably different positions
within notably different cultural milieus (Lowenstein 27–32).
Still, we should probably think twice before we subsume Godard’s early criticism and
filmmaking under a generalized Cahiers/New Wave aesthetic. While Godard would not
evince a rigorous political commitment until the late-1960s, with La Chinoise (1967) and
Week-end (1967) (Hayward 143–144), we might bear in mind that his second feature, La
Petit soldat (filmed in 1960 but banned until 1963), drew French censorship due to its
references to Algeria and its candid depiction of torture on both sides of the war (not that
censorship always curbs progressive politics). Even Breathless, which Godard has all but
disowned on account of its naı̈ve experimentalism and its “fascist overtones” (Kline 185),
registered anti-Gaullist sentiments which censors forced him to delete, namely a sequence
in which he cross-cut footage of de Gaulle trailing Eisenhower down the Champs-Elysées
with a shot of the French criminal Michel following his American love interest down the
sidewalk—a linkage that sexualizes national politics in a manner proleptic of the montage
strategies of Histoire(s) du cinéma (Rosenbaum 54).
My point here is not to deny that Godard’s early output demonstrates an apolitical
impulse in keeping with the larger New Wave; nor do I want to argue against what Alain
Bergala describes (in a conversation with Godard) as the New Wave’s fundamental trend
toward historical “amnesia” in the wake of World War II (Godard, Tome 2 24). Rather, I
wish to suggest that Godard’s early-1960s, pre-Maoist films contain occasional flashes of
political and historical commentary which distinguish his working methods from those of
his Cahiers associates, and which prefigure the historical montage that defines his current
videographic practice and sustains his links to Surrealism.
Aragon establishes a context for these links in his 1965 article “What is Art, Jean-Luc
Godard?” Ostensibly a commentary on Pierrot le fou, the piece digresses to position
Godard not only as an heir to Surrealist-approved auteurs (“Charlie Chaplin, then Renoir,
Buñuel, and now Godard”) but as a successor to Lautrémont, the nineteenth-century poet
whose famous description of beauty gave the Surrealists an aesthetic shorthand. “What is
certain,” writes Aragon, “is that there was no predecessor for [Delacroix’s] Nature morte
aux homards, that meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine, just as there is no other
predecessor than Lautrémont to Godard” (141). With additional reference to painting, he
stakes this claim on Godard’s cubist-like “collage” which brings the fragments of discrete
elements into close contact and shows “the order of disorder” (140). As an artist who
is “proud to have been quoted (or ‘collaged’) by the creator of Pierrot,” Aragon insists
that he and Godard agree aesthetically “on certain essential things,” that they share a
“secret understanding” about the possibilities of “collage” (145). This is not to say that
“collage” and “montage”—two strategies that are vital to the Surrealist enterprise (Clifford
145–148)—are transposable or necessarily complementary. But where Aragon uses the
term “collage” to imply a loosely unified whole, we might still regard “montage” as the
basic device of construction that produces a loose patchwork by juxtaposing dissimilar
sources.
Aragon, I should note, was not the only former member of the Surrealist group to
champion Godard in the 1960s. Georges Sadoul—who along with Aragon, in the 1930s,
attempted to merge the ideals of Surrealism with the revolutionary politics of the French
Communist Party (Nadeau 175–182)—notoriously supported the Nouvelle Vague despite
its apparent detachment from political concerns. Quick to point out that Godard studied
ethnography at the Musée de l’homme before he began to make films, Sadoul compares
the documentary-like style of Breathless to the anthropological aesthetic of Jean Rouch,

only instead of observing West African populations, Godard “studies the lives of Parisian
men and women today” (165). More to the point, Sadoul makes montage the focus of his
assessment by aligning Godard’s editing structures with Eisenstein’s “shock attractions”:
Godard, he argues, induces “no small number of shocks, striking images that shatter the
unities of space, time, and action into tiny fragments” (163).
Of course, Aragon and Sadoul make their observations in the social and political
context of Gaullist France during the 1960s, not the heyday of the Surrealists between the
world wars. And we should note that Aragon and Sadoul interpret Godard’s early-1960s
films through the lens of his later, more outwardly political work, Pierrot le fou and Two
or Three Things I Know About Her (1967) respectively. But their attention to Godard’s
“collage” and aesthetics of shock sets forth an early, prescient account of the relationship
between Godard and Surrealism along the axis of montage; where Aragon notes Godard’s
uncanny ability to convey “the order of what by definition cannot have any order” (140),
Sadoul credits the director with a knack for instilling disorienting, defamiliarizing shocks.
Throughout the 1970s and most of the 1980s, Godard, doubtless hoping to shake off
his romantic image as a jump-cutting auteur of the 1960s, remained silent on the New
Wave and his own critical place within it. But as his work in film and video turned more
and more to questions of history, the French-Swiss director set his sights increasingly on
rethinking the New Wave apart from its mythological status, altering its roster of auteurs,
and atoning for its “erreur tragique”—that is, its predication on “l’amnésie de la guerre,”
on historical amnesia in the wake of the Second Word War. Godard’s revision provides the
basis for an entire chapter of Histoire(s) du cinéma (3B: Une vague nouvelle), and in part it
serves to underline the links between his work and Surrealism. He does this not by directly
endorsing Breton and the Surrealist group, but rather by emphasizing the central role in
the history of cinema—and thus, for Godard, the history of the twentieth century—of two
figures with intimate ties to Surrealism: Henri Langlois and Georges Franju, the cofounders
of the Cinémathèque Française, where the young Godard and other imminent New Wavists
famously received an education in film history at weekly screenings.
Godard’s debt to Langlois, whether figured in aesthetic, curatorial, or pedagogical
terms, cannot be overstressed. His desire to produce an audiovisual history of the cinema
traces back clearly to Langlois’ death in the late 1970s, when Godard took over Langlois’
lecturing duties at the Conservatoire d’art cinématographique in Montreal. As Michael
6 Charles R. Warner
Witt has noted, Langlois’ “eclectic collage-based programming style at the Cinémathèque
Française looms large over the montage-based conception and structure of Histoire(s) du
cinéma” (34). Indeed, in Godard’s eyes, Langlois was less an archivist or curator than an
filmmaker, “cinéaste” who “shot films” through “projectors instead of cameras” (Tome 1
405). Throughout Histoire(s), Godard combines stills of Langlois with images from The
Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929) and with titles which state, “L’homme a
la camera,” thus highlighting Langlois’ status as a filmmaker and montage artist. And in
the chapter devoted expressly to the New Wave, images of Langlois appear with startling
frequency, as though to establish his position alongside Hitchcock, Hawks, and the other
auteurs whom the Cahiers group most revered.
Given that commentators on Langlois’ method of programming tend to evoke the
notions of montage and rapprochement (Roud 134, 180), it is not surprising that Langlois
took interest in Surrealism and screened Surrealist films regularly for ciné-clubs. While
conversant with the movement’s literature and politics, Langlois felt that Surrealism had
its strongest affinities with the cinema. “I am persuaded that Surrealism first existed in
the cinema,” he once stated in an interview. “You’ve only got to look at Les Vampires
[Louis Feuillade, 1915] to understand that the cinema, because it was the expression of
the twentieth century, carried Surrealism within it” (qtd. in MacCabe 48). In the same
interview, Langlois asserts that “a return to Surrealism, to its sources and its endings, is
the only hope of a cinematographic renewal. And that’s why one must . . . go back to the
Surrealist manifesto, because it remains explosive provided you read it with eyes which
are in excellent condition” (388n7). It would be a reach to argue that Godard performs a
rereading of Breton’s “Manifesto of Surrealism,” but when he appoints himself the heir to
Langlois in making Histoire(s), he inherits Langlois’ interest in Surrealism and he indeed
returns to the movement’s “explosive” aesthetics within a project of cinematic renewal.
As for Franju, who perhaps more than any of Godard’s postwar contemporaries retained
Surrealism’s affective impact in his fiction films and documentaries (though like Godard,
he elided the distinctions between the two), his role in Godard’s revision of the New Wave
is equally important. Not unlike several members of the Surrealist group who fought in the
Great War “by obligation and under constraint” (Nadeau 45), Franju served in Algeria and
drew on that experience in his films—mainly by shocking spectators into acknowledging
traumatic history in the lull of familiar situations. In addition, Franju’s own brush with
collaboration (when he and Langlois partnered with a German official to establish the
Féderation Internationale des Archives du Film) shaped his filmmaking, as his work tends
to implicate the viewer in its violent outbursts. To cite just one example, Blood of the Beasts
(1949) juxtaposes graphic footage inside Parisian slaughterhouses with tranquil images of
the city’s outskirts and industrial activities. The documentary’s effect is to allegorically
force a “shocking recognition” of Nazi death camps and French collaboration “within the
fabric of the everyday” (Lowenstein 22).
Godard well understood Franju’s tactics. In his Cahiers review of Franju’s first feature
Head Against the Wall (1959), Godard writes that “the secret of Franju’s art” hinges on a
“flash of madness” which “suddenly rips apart the screen and forces the spectator to look
at reality in another light.” Elaborating this formal logic (and nearly echoing Langlois’
assessment of Surrealism noted above), Godard concludes that Franju “demonstrates the
necessity of Surrealism if one considers it as a pilgrimage to the sources” (Godard on
Godard 129–130). Later, in his third commentary on the same film, Godard maintains
that Franju “confirms the auteur theory, growing better as he grows older,” and Godard
again stresses Franju’s knack for violently transforming perceptions of reality. But this
time, he illuminates Franju’s “secret” by way of a syllogism: “One, reality. Two, madness.
Three, reality again.” On the basis of this three-part method of “decomposition,” Godard
aligns the style of Franju with “cinema of the past,” noting its eerie resonances with “silent
cinema at least from the mid-thirties” (148–149). As will become evident when we examine
Histoire(s) more closely, these formal aspects which Godard ascribes to Franju in some
ways prefigure his own conception of montage and his own to attempts to conjure up the
“cinema of the past.”
However, Godard withdrew his support for Franju upon the release of the latter’s next
feature, Eyes Without a Face (1960). The exact reasons for this are difficult to trace. Though
Eyes Without a Face—which follows the murderous deeds of a French surgeon desperate
to replace the mutilated facial tissue of his daughter with faces removed from victims his
accomplice has kidnapped—shows up on several other Cahiers critics’ “ten best” lists for
1960, it is notably excluded from Godard’s. In fact, Godard makes no explicit mention of
the film in his Cahiers articles of the period. So what might he have found so objectionable
or disappointing? What suddenly demoted Franju from a director who confirmed auteurism
to one unworthy of comment? It is tempting to refer to the film’s generic ambiguity, its
“double niche” of art cinema and body horror (Hawkins 53–113). Indeed, the one Cahiers
review of the film, written by Michel Delahaye, struggles to reconcile the major talent
of Franju with the “minor” horror genre, which Delahaye sneakily reframes as “gothic”
and “noir” (qtd. in Hawkins 73). But Godard, we should recognize, does include another
lurid (albeit much less graphic) horror film on his top ten list for 1960, Alfred Hitchcock’s
Psycho (Godard on Godard 165).
If Godard could accept the horror film under certain conditions, perhaps the ends
to which Franju employed the genre touched a nerve. Instructive on this score is Adam
Lowenstein’s account of Franju as a marginalized filmmaker whose “allegorical, horror-
inflected aesthetic” viciously opposed the New Wave’s tendency to neglect political and
historical concerns. In his detailed discussion of Eyes Without a Face—over and against
Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959)—Lowenstein illustrates how the film mingles
“the iconography of World War II with the iconography of torture so central to French public
perception of the Algerian War.” While obliging the viewer to confront and come to terms
with these two linked histories, Franju’s film “stages a reckoning” with French involvement
in “Nazi medical experiments conducted in concentration camps” (40–44). Granted, there
are traces of this strategy in Head Against the Wall’s concentration camp-like depiction of
a mental asylum, but is it possible that Eyes Without a Face interrogates traumatic history
in such a nationally specific fashion that Godard could not account for Franju’s “flashes
of madness” in strict formal terms, as he had done with the earlier film? While Godard’s
sudden unwillingness to see Franju as a New Wave figure remains open to speculation,
Franju’s attitude towards the emergent artistic school was most definitely one of cynicism.
As he said to Truffaut in a 1959 interview, “‘The New Wave’? There’s a film to make about
that. I’ve already got the title: ‘Low Tide’“ (qtd. in Lowenstein 33).
In Godard’s reconfiguration of the New Wave in Histoire(s), he not only rejects
the auteurist criteria by which he apparently demoted Franju years ago (he now stresses
the “politique” over the “auteurs,” the “works” over their “authors”), he also reconsiders
the significance of “Une Vague Nouvelle” in a manner which now includes Franju on a
short list of members, few of whom wrote for Cahiers. An early sign of this recuperation
occurs in Godard’s King Lear, which anticipates the essential arguments of Histoire(s) by
staging the reconstruction of cinema in the wake of an historical disaster (“Chernobyl”),
and which opened in New York not long after Franju’s death. During a scene in which a
character labors to recall the names of forgotten directors (while Godard, or his alter-ego
“Professor Pluggy,” cites Bresson’s theory of montage on the sound track: “If an image
8 Charles R. Warner
looked at separately expresses something clearly, and if it presents an interpretation, it will

not transform itself on contact with other images”), a still of Franju holding a dove on
the set of Eyes Without a Face flashes onto the screen. Here Godard makes explicit the
constellation of Franju, montage, and “cinematographic renewal.” To be sure, Eyes Without
a Face resorts to montage sparsely. In the face-removal sequence, for instance, Franju drags
out the ghastly operation to an uncomfortable length, cutting to several shots of the doctor
and his tools while sustaining the impression of duration (though in a sense he maps the cuts
of montage onto the human body). Even so, Godard aligns Franju with montage in figurative
more so than technical terms. The still of Franju holding the dove—which could just as well
have been taken during the filming of Le Grand Méliès (1952) or Judex (1963), two Franju
films which celebrate early cinema and use doves as part of conjuring tricks—positions the
director as a kind of magician. Just as the title character in Judex resurrects a dove (while
disguised as a hawk), Godard approaches montage as a practice of magically resurrecting
the dead: “Above all, the object during editing is alive, whereas during shooting it is dead.
It is necessary to resuscitate it. It is witchcraft” (qtd. in Ricciardi 178–179).
Godard riffs on this complicated linkage of Franju, montage, and regeneration
throughout Histoire(s), most often when dealing with the New Wave. For example, in
chapter 3B: Une vague nouvelle, just seconds after presenting the beach sequence that
concludes The 400 Blows, the same Franju photo flickers rapidly, this time overprinted
with a spinning Zoetrope which crudely animates a bird in flight. On the one hand, the
quotation reinstates Godard’s earlier argument that Franju represents the “cinema of the
past”—not an outdated school or genre, but cinema’s very origins. On the other hand, it
situates Franju in relation to perhaps the most emblematic New Wave film while alluding to
the final moments of Eyes Without a Face, in which the heroine/victim releases doves from
their cage. Ultimately, in the last minutes of the chapter, Godard’s recuperation of Franju
comes to the fore when a female interlocutor suggests a revised list of New Wave directors:
“Becker, Rossellini, Melville, Franju, Jacques Demy, Truffaut . . . . You knew them all?” To
which Godard responds approvingly, “Yes, they were my friends.”
Despite the implications of this sequence—from its conflation of the New Wave
and Neorealism to its omission of such figures as Chabrol, Rivette, Rohmer, Varda, and
Resnais—few commentators have examined it beyond Godard’s posthumous patching up
with Truffaut. But as I hope to have made clear, the inclusion of Franju, itself a gesture
of reconciliation, is absolutely central to Godard’s mission. By re-embracing the “bastard
child of surrealism” as a major figure in film history, Godard effectively adapts Franju’s
“aesthetic of awakening,” as Lowenstein terms it, within his own project of reversing the
New Wave’s inclination to forget historical reality. In what follows, then, I will tease out
the aesthetic consequences of Godard’s espousal of Franju in particular and Surrealism in
general. Insofar as Godard refuses in his videographic work to distinguish criticism from
practice, or theory from application, we can safely assume that his embrace of Surrealism
manifests itself in formal terms, through means more material than intertextual reference.
But in order to identify this materialization and situate its effects, we must turn to Walter
Benjamin’s rethinking of Surrealism in relation to historiography.
In the late 1920s, the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin developed an
attraction to Surrealism that shaded much of his work thereafter, not least his unfinished
Arcades Project. Far from adopting the artistic movement wholesale, Benjamin sought to
liberate the “Surrealist experience” from its “charmed space of intoxication,” to “open up
this romantic dummy” and determine “something usable inside” (“Surrealism” 208–214).
For Benjamin, this meant unleashing the concept of “profane illumination, a materialistic,
anthropological inspiration”—a shocking experience which initiates the modern subject
to an “image space” (217), recovers the “revolutionary energies” in “outmoded” materials

and objects consigned to habitual uses (210), and inscribes Surrealism’s political value as
a “cult of evil” aimed at eradicating “all moralizing dilettantism” (214). If the Surrealists
failed to realize this potential in their writings, this was due to their willingness to trade in
“surprises” instead of transformative “shocks,” and to their overemphasis on the “dream
experience” and its cognates, e.g. “religious ecstasies and the ecstasies of drugs” (208).
Benjamin, on the other hand, stresses the dialectical interchange of dreaming and
waking. As Susan Buck-Morss points out, Benjamin’s purpose “was not to represent the
dream, but to dispel it: Dialectical images were to draw dream images into an awakened
state, and awakening was synonymous with historical knowledge” (261). Benjamin thus
begins to refigure Surrealism along the lines of historiography, suggesting its capacity to
reveal the hidden exchanges of past and present (Cohen 198–205). Revisiting this idea in
The Arcades Project, he articulates his concern with the “constellation of awakening” in
opposition to Aragon’s “persist[ence] within the realm of the dream.” Whereas Aragon
restricts his work to its impressionistic, mythological elements, the task of Benjamin is to
dissolve those kinds of elements “into the space of history” (458). A few passages later, he
returns to this cluster of issues and highlights his debt to Surrealism:
Is awakening perhaps the synthesis of dream consciousness (as thesis) and

waking consciousness (as antithesis)? Then the moment of awakening would
be identical with the “now of recognizability,” in which things put on their
true—surrealist—face. (463–464)
Thus, while Benjamin appropriates aspects of Surrealism selectively and suspiciously, he

still locates “what is usable” at the crux of one of The Arcades Project’s most significant
epistemological formulations. When past and present, “then” and “now,” fuse together
to form an image in “a constellation like a flash of lightning” (463), the image becomes
recognizable—if not profanely illumined—as it exposes its “true Surrealist face.”
Benjamin develops this concept even further in his “Theses on the Philosophy of
History,” an enigmatic set of notes which configures “historical materialism” as an effort
to “blast open the continuum of history,” to “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a
moment of danger,” and to capture “the true image of the past” at the opportune “instant
when it can be recognized and is never seen again” (255, 262). Though the essay, which
he wrote in the months between the Nazi invasion of Poland and his suicide while trying
to evade the Gestapo in 1940, makes no conspicuous reference to Surrealism, we can see
how his rhetoric continues to associate the movement with historiographical rescue—that
is, with making history intelligible during the “now of recognizability.” And Benjamin’s
assimilation of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920) as the “angel of history” surely retains
the Surrealist focus on retrieving neglected objects and shattering ideologies of progress.
With “his face turned toward the past,” the angel sees not a causal “chain of events” but
“one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage” at his feet. Although he wishes to
“stay, awaken the dead,” and sort through “the pile of debris before him,” his wings are
caught in a fierce “storm of progress” that “propels him into the future” (257–258). Just
as the Breton-led Surrealists strove to violently undermine modernity’s progress, the task
of Benjamin’s historical materialist is to inhabit the space and perspective of the “angel
of history,” and then carry out the angel’s impossible task of rummaging through and
re-combining the material sediments of the past. Explaining this historicizing “principle
of montage,” Benjamin stresses the need to “assemble large-scale constructions out of the
10 Charles R. Warner
smallest and most precisely cut components. Indeed, to discover in the analysis of the small
individual moment the crystal of the total event” (Arcades 460–461).
In the initial version of chapter 1B: Une Histoire seule (“A Solitary History”) of
Histoire(s) du cinéma, which aired on French television in 1989, a reproduction of Klee’s
painting appears superimposed on a photo of Godard, in effect situating the filmmaker as
Benjamin’s backward-glancing angel—attendant to the catastrophic nature of history, and
eager to reclaim fragments of neglected material. While excised from the 1998 release of
Histoire(s), the image attests to the influence which Benjamin exerted on the formation of
Godard’s project. A relatively small number of critics have begun to investigate the links
between Godard and Benjamin, and almost no one has paid attention to the way in which
Surrealism mediates their relationship. Youssef Ishaghpour, in two 1999 dialogues with
Godard, suggests the conceptual affinities of Histoire(s) and The Arcades Project, noting
that both works consist almost “entirely of archive material and quotes through montage”
(20–21), and Benjamin, to be sure, proclaims that his work must exploit “the art of citing
without quotation marks,” a form “intimately related to that of montage” (Arcades 458).
This point of departure has led to a handful of interesting comparisons around questions
of montage, most notably essays by Alessia Ricciardi and Kaja Silverman. But in failing
to engage how Surrealism underwrites Benjamin’s “constellation of awakening” and thus
Godard’s historical montage, these critics have missed a crucial element of the shocklike
effects which both figures strive to provoke. I want to suggest that Godard’s deployment
of Benjaminian shock not only pulls together the multiple filiations between his work and
Surrealism, but also carries out his fundamental project in Histoire(s) of remembrance, of
reacquainting the cinema and its spectators with forgotten historical realities.
So how does this shocking historical montage work in action? Since Godard, in
Histoire(s) and countless interviews, hinges the death of cinema squarely on its failure
to confront and document the horrors of the Nazi extermination camps in World War II,
we might begin by examining a sequence in Histoire(s) which explicitly tries to redeem
this criminal negligence, this “erreur tragique.” Towards the end of chapter 1A: Toutes les
histoires (“All the Histories”), Godard juxtaposes images of a bathing-suit clad Elizabeth
Taylor holding Montgomery Clift on a shore in A Place in the Sun (1951) with footage of
emaciated corpses stacked in ovens at Ravensbrück; and Godard’s voiceover is quick to
inform us that these images were captured by the same filmmaker, George Stevens, who
used the first 16 mm Kodachrome film to record the camps before making his Hollywood
features. On one level, then, this montage of quotations crystallizes Godard’s argument
that the cinema regressed from “something” to “nothing” when it surrendered entirely
to fiction, stardom, and spectacle. But the sequence enacts something more powerful
than a reconciliation of fiction and documentary or a brutal rapprochement of beauty and
horror. As with most quotations in Histoire(s), Godard radically adjusts Stevens’ original
scene. He replaces the score and dialogue with a viola sonata by Paul Hindemith, he
stop-starts the action with uneven slow motion, and he converts Taylor’s outstretched
hand from a gesture of romantic love to one of Messianic redemption by overprinting
it with Giotto’s fresco Noli me tangere, which he rotates 90◦ so that Mary Magdalene
swoops down into the frame like an angel, her extended arms parallel to Taylor’s, and
the hands of Giotto’s resurrected Christ barely noticeable at the bottom right corner
(Williams 135). Godard’s voiceover, underlining the potential of montage, says, “O how
marvelous to look at what one cannot see/O sweet miracle of our blind eyes!” But then
the fresco vanishes, Taylor stands from her lover at a normal pace, the sonata comes to
a halt, and we cut to a black screen, where Benjamin’s “image of the past” is no longer
recognizable.
While Godard doubtless inherits his mixing of aesthetic and theological discourse
from Bazin, Bresson, and (to a lesser extent) Pier Paolo Pasolini, here we can see that his
historical montage also draws on Benjamin’s much-debated integration of mystical and
Messianic strands within his concept of historical materialism, and we should note that
Benjamin prioritizes the Surrealist “profane illumination” because of its ability to redeem
in a quasi-religious sense without languishing in the realm of intoxication (Buck-Morss
229–252). Just as Benjamin writes in “Theses” that an image of the past will materialize
in a moment “shot through with chips of Messianic time” (263), the montage of Elizabeth
Taylor and the Holocaust bears out Godard’s contention—which he states periodically in
Histoire(s), misquoting St. Paul—that “the image will come at the time of resurrection.”
Given that the sequence reacquaints the cinema with the possibilities of montage and
with a neglected subject, while at the same time staging a spectatorial encounter with
traumatic history, we might argue, as James Williams does, that it provides a “metapoetic
comment” on Godard’s “videographic process itself” (135). But how does Godard’s practice
impact on the spectator? His debt to Benjamin notwithstanding, what lodges his montage
in the domain of shock instead of surprise, and how does it recuperate memory? He
investigates these questions himself in 2A: Seul le cinéma (“The Cinema Alone”), when
he quotes Léonce Perret’s Le Mystère des roches de Kador (1912). In the original film, a
woman witnesses a criminal act, but loses her memory upon believing (wrongly) that she
has shot her fiancé. A professor claiming to have discovered a new treatment for amnesia
shoots and edits a film which restages what little the woman’s fiancé can recall. She views
the projected images, abruptly recovers her memory, and the crime is solved. Godard singles
out the exact moment of her recuperation before the now blank screen, when her memory
returns in a violent shock that causes her to faint into the arms of the professor—an effect
which Godard’s titles ascribe to “the cinema alone.” In this striking and richly instructive
citation, which explores in miniature Godard’s hopes that Histoire(s) will offer spectators
a belated reckoning with the traumatic real, it is crucial to note the necessity of forgetting
(Lundemo 380–395); or as a character puts it in Nouvelle Vague (Godard, 1990), blending
quotes from Nietzsche and Proust, “It is not enough to have remembrances. It is necessary
to forget them when they are numerous [. . .] and to have the patience to await their return.”
Kador’s amnesiac recovers her memory through re-encountering the traumatic events in
suggestive fragments in an unfamiliar context, not through trying to remember them as they
actually happened.
Thus, for Godard, the testimonial power of cinema resides in the image alone, in
the reality of its representation instead of its representation of reality, hence his aphorism
“just an image” (Landy 9–11). Sharing Benjamin’s disinterest in articulating the past “the
way it really was,” Godard undertakes a project of assembling historical relations through
montage, through combining fragments of scavenged objects. Like Kador’s filmmaking,
crime-solving professor—and rather like Benjamin’s historical materialism, which seeks
not to accumulate a mere inventory of “rags and refuse,” but to reactivate those materials
“in the only way possible: by making use of them” (Arcades 460)—Godard conducts his
investigation by collecting evidence and using the resources of montage to both regain lost
memories and remedy the weaknesses of human perception. The theme of optical detection
abounds in Histoire(s) du cinéma—from repeated glimpses of James Stewart handling
his telephoto lens in Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954) and Mischa Auer peering
through his magnifying glass in Mr. Arkadin, to non-fiction images of soldiers looking
through riflescopes and scientists hunching over microscopes—and we might remember
that Benjamin linked photography, modern criminology, and detective fiction within a
single constellation (Godard and Ishaghpour 65).
What role, then, does Surrealism play in advancing Godard’s detective work? To tackle
this question, I want to return to the quotation of Un Chien andalou which opened this
essay, and which we are now in a better position to unpack, having explored both the
historical and aesthetic points of contact between Godard and Surrealism. To be precise,
the quotation near the end of Histoire(s) echoes an earlier moment in chapter 2B: Fatale
beauté (“Fatal Beauty”), when Buñuel and Dalı́’s sliced eyeball follows images of death
and mourning, with Godard’s titles again stressing that the image will spring to legibility
in a time of resurrection. But even more central to Godard’s project, the quotation in 4B
overtly links Surrealism’s “disenchantment of the eye” with montage and its potential to
show “relationships between things” which are otherwise untraceable. After a collage of
titles illustrating the multiple ideas contained in “(Hi)story/ies of Cinema,” and another
image of Mischa Auer’s magnified eye in Arkadin, we cut to a freeze-framed and blown-up
image of the eye in Un Chien andalou, just before the razor starts its course. We then
dissolve to a shot of the blind editor in JLG/JLG, trimming a roll of celluloid in Godard’s
editing suite in Rolle, which looks more like an operating room, befitting his description
of montage as a “regard au scalpel” (Godard, Tome 2 427–430). As the editor’s scissors
rhyme with (or stand in for) Buñuel’s razor, an image of visceral horror merges with one
of formal manipulation and the re-structuring cuts of the editing process acquire a bodily
significance, a slight charge of medico-horror which recalls Franju. Just as Franju strove
to “work on the mind’s eye like an operation for a cataract” (Durgnat 19), Godard defines
montage in this sequence as a corrective surgery which both discloses interstitial relations
and enables the viewer to detect them.
The metaphor of dissection is especially relevant since Benjamin, in his “Work of
Art” essay, compares the operations of the filmmaker to those of the surgeon, over and
against the painter and the magician. Where the latter two keep a “natural distance”
from their subjects (reality and patient respectively), the filmmaker and the surgeon bring
theirs into close proximity and “penetrate deeply,” the suggestion being in part that the
filmmaker, equipped with montage, “cuts into” observers in a non-auratic fashion instead
of confronting them “person to person.” Yet Benjamin also asserts that cinema surgically
penetrates the body of everyday reality, revealing “another nature” which escapes human
consciousness (117–118). In Histoire(s), the moment in question overtly associates the
revelatory power of montage with a remedial optical surgery. Far from dully rehashing
Surrealism’s “disenchantment with the eye,” or Vertov’s machinic “cine-eye,” Godard’s
linkage of editing and eye-slashing draws on (and culminates) the relationship between
touch and vision which Histoire(s) persistently foregrounds, whether through juxtaposing
hand and eye imagery or through reiterating in titles Godard’s conception of montage as
“thinking with one’s hands.” On this score, it seems worth pointing out that JLG/JLG’s
sightless editor is meant to bear out Wittgenstein’s claim in On Certitude, quoted earlier in
Godard’s 1995 film-essay, that one can confirm neither that one has hands by seeing them,
nor that one has eyes by touching them. Hardly a simple gesture of seeing anew, Godard
formulates a montage-based way of perceiving things in which the optic and the haptic, or
more broadly sight and touch, work reciprocally and inseparably.
Following this citation, Histoire(s) concludes in a manner that further resonates with
Surrealist notions. Despite the palimpsestic layering of quotations on the sound and
image tracks, Godard’s final voiceover—which riffs on Borges, Coleridge, and Jean Paul
simultaneously—revisits the dialectical interchange of dreaming and waking: “If a man
traveled across paradise in a dream, and received a flower as proof of his passage, and on
awakening he found that flower in his hands . . . What is to be said? I was that man.” As
with Benjamin’s reworking of Surrealism, the stress falls on the moment of awakening, a
shocking and ephemeral encounter with history—in the “now of recognizability”—which

Godard simulates with a brief, flickering montage of photos of himself and a yellow rose.
The retrieved object, while nominally another trope on Borges, in particular his tale “Une
rose jaune” where a yellow rose moves a dying poet to imagine paradise (Lack 326–329),
could refer just as meaningfully to Benjamin’s “Blue Flower in the land of technology,”
his puzzling metaphor for the cinema’s capacity to synthetically produce (via montage) an
“immediate reality” that appears “equipment-free” even as it replicates the assaultive shocks
and the fragmentary impressions of modern experience (“Work of Art” 115–116). And
while this final burst of montage reconfirms Godard’s investments in a Surrealist-inflected,
Benjaminian “constellation of awakening,” it also relates Godard’s “passage” through a
dreamlike space to the conceptual design of The Arcades Project (Sieburth 20).
Despite the recent outpouring of scholarship devoted to Histoire(s) du cinéma, much
of which has served my own argument crucially, Godard’s ties to Surrealism have gone
relatively unnoticed, an oversight which is not surprising given the degree to which the
evidence remains deeply embedded in quotations. However, my contention has been that
the filmmaker’s mission of reacquainting the cinema and its spectators with forgotten
aesthetic practices (montage) and neglected histories (the horrors of World War II) owes
considerably to Surrealism’s repossession of outmoded and discarded objects, as well as
to the movement’s assault on teleological narratives of progress. When Godard reclaims
Georges Franju—a Surrealist heir who sought to awaken postwar audiences to traumatic
history—as a major figure of the Nouvelle Vague in Histoire(s), he effectively draws on
Surrealism to revise the political detachment and “l’amnésie de la guerre” which typified
the New Wave, atoning for his own errors and those of his Cahiers cohorts. And when he
practices montage as shock-inducing rapprochement, he not only revitalizes the Surrealist
chance encounter, he also takes on board Walter Benjamin’s retooling of Surrealism as an
activity in line with historiographical rescue. In short, Godardian montage strives to give
the viewers of Histoire(s) ephemeral access to the “true image of the past” when it erupts
onto the present, enters the “now” of its readability, and exposes “its true Surrealist face.”
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Shocking Histoire(s): Godard, Surrealism,

In the closing seconds of Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–1998), Jean Luc-Godard’s eight-part,

The image is a pure creation of the spirit.

“historical montage” (Smith 190).

Godard’s writing is made up of a mixture of familiar discourses, and that it can’t be

the documentary-like style of Breathless to the anthropological aesthetic of Jean Rouch,

looked at separately expresses something clearly, and if it presents an interpretation, it will

to an “image space” (217), recovers the “revolutionary energies” in “outmoded” materials

returns to this cluster of issues and highlights his debt to Surrealism:

Is awakening perhaps the synthesis of dream consciousness (as thesis) and

Thus, while Benjamin appropriates aspects of Surrealism selectively and suspiciously, he

shocking and ephemeral encounter with history—in the “now of recognizability”—which

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