Naked, Deformed, Violated Body. A Montage in the Histoire(s) du cinema of Jean-Luc Godard

Abstract

The article analyses Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998), a cinematic essay by Jean-Luc Godard, and in particular it focuses on the controversial montage in which the French director aligns extracts from a pornographic film, Tod Browning’s Freaks, and footage from the concentration camps. With this sequence Godard inquires his own theory of montage: the idea of a productive reconciliation between opposing realities. This shocking sequence (the violence of images) is compared to a similar shock (the violence of asking to witness) produced by a scene of the documentary Shoah by Claude Lanzmann. The trauma of Godard’s editing choice induces the viewer to examine the issues of the degradation of the indexical status of the film, the limits of representation and the ethics of the gaze.