Histoire(s) du cinéma Jean-Luc Godard took 30 years to compose his “Histoire(s).” It might take just as long to absorb it.In its singular form, the French word “histoire” connotes formal history; when made plural, its meaning is more casual, more anecdotal: tales of the cinema, or the stories that make it up.For the cinema, as Godard once said, is “transitory, ephemeral”, written on the wind; inscribed only in fleeting traces, some disconnected images and sounds, and sentimentally overloaded, scrambled memories. Cinema is hard evidence, but only fitfully can it serve as a testament; death is too much at work there. It is the form of this remembered, necessarily scrappy, haunted, sad history of the twentieth century that Godard evokes in all the prodigious techniques of his Histoire(s) du cinéma.