As we shall see, the figure of Clio, the muse of History, was also a focus for Frampton’s writing of the Metahistory essay. Godard’s citation of Frampton here suggests his concern in nominating film as the art-form appropriate to the era of the passing long 20 th century. Soon after, Frampton’s name appears just as the voice reads directly from a section from Frampton’s “Metahistory” essay:Īs one era slowly dissolves into the next, some individuals metabolize the former means of physical survival into new means for psychic survival. Over iconic images of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara (1928-1967), the voice-over leads into an epilogue for the Histoire(s) as a whole. A woman’s voice reads over the image of Clio : ‘I need a day to tell the history of a second, a year to tell the history of a minute, a lifetime to tell the history of an hour, an eternity to tell the history of a day’. A few minutes earlier, the auteur had returned to a persistent image in the montage mix, the cover of Charles Pegúy’s Clio (1931). 2 Four minutes and twenty seconds before the ending of episode 4b, entitled Les signes parmi nous, the words ‘Hollis Frampton’ appear in a yellow, sans-serif text on a black background (fig. Jean-Luc Godard’s indebtedness to the work of filmmaker and theorist, Hollis Frampton (1936-1984), and in particular his 1971 essay “For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses,” is made explicit in the final episode of Histoire(s) du Cinema (1998). …your proposal of any given film as a “fragment”, which I suspect you ran intuitively head-on into in the heat of discourse…well, it was suggestive to the point of vertigo, seen from the tangent of a meta-history of film such as I tickle myself with…

White metahistory