"It is time for life to give back to cinema what it stole from it."-Louis Delluc In his enthralling, demanding Histoire(s) du Cinéma, Godard examines the intersection of history and cinema in our century: our debt to cinema for giving us our history, and also the costs. "The filmmaker is recounting how it has been with his beloved cinema. Less a history of the cinema than history through cinema, Godard's fundamental premise hasn't changed: the cinema has always sought only one thing-montage, something that twentieth-century man has desperately needed. This history (is) constructed using cinema's own materials: the image...music, words and wordplay. Alone at last with the century's mementos, Godard looks more like an athlete or dancer in training than like an artist above the fray...a Renaissance man, between art and science." (Serge Daney). "It's the only way to do history....The greatest history is the history of the cinema...because it projects, whereas others reduce themselves....Cinema projected, and men saw that the world was there." (Godard)