LONDON: Let us look for links between Jean-Luc Godard and Martin Scorsese. I can think of two off the cuff: that slow, unsettling tracking shot into a fizzing glass of Alka-Seltzer in Taxi Driver, a visual quote from Godard’s Masculin Feminin; or the unforgettable opening sequence of Mean Streets, in which Scorsese splices three jump-cuts – in homage to, or maybe flat-out stolen from, A Bout de Souffle – to the sound of the Ronettes’ Be My Baby.

There’s also the day in 1979 when JLG showed up in Manhattan for lunch with Scorsese and, as Scorsese remembers it, told him – told the man who actually made the movie – that New York, New York was really about “the impossibility of two creative people in a relationship – the jealousies, the envy, the temperament. I realised it was so close to home that I wasn’t able to articulate that while I was making the film.”For a third, and far more abundant, set of links between the greatest living French film-maker and the most gifted American one of the past 35 years, we must examine two works inaugurated to mark the centenary of the cinema in 1995: A Personal Journey Through American Cinema With Martin Scorsese, made up of three hour-long sections, and Godard’s monumental Histoire(s) du Cinema, which took 20 years to dream up and another decade to film – or, more precisely – to assemble.

Each is in the broad tradition of the essay-film, and each takes as its launchpad a celebration of national cinema. Each is largely composed of footage from existing movies, plus a minimum of new footage shot by Godard or Scorsese themselves. Each is very much an expression of its director’s personality and obsessions, be they national, personal, political or historical. Scorsese’s is the more approachable and digestible, Godard’s the more daunting and complex. And it’s surprising how much they have in common, at least in terms of source material. The final, blazingly erotic gunfight between the lovers in the 1951 A Place in the Sun is a touchstone for both, as are the works of Hitchcock, Sirk, Val Lewton, Minnelli, Nicholas Ray, Sam Fuller, Frank Borzage, DW Griffiths and Victor Sjostrom/Seastrom.

Scorsese plays largely by the rules, so most of his quotes are from purely American movies (many of them difficult to find, such as Ray’s Bigger Than Life, Mann’s The Furies, Delmer Daves’ The Red House, or Phil Karlson’s The Phenix City Story). Godard, who never saw a rule he couldn’t break, ranges far more widely than either Scorsese or his own loose brief to depict purely French cinema. Ever the gourmand du cinema, he bought every classic movie he could find on video in the late 1980s and then – blithely assuming the Fair Use approach to artistic copyright – spent years hacking them down into bite-sized morsels for inclusion in a massive work of assemblage/collage, dense layering and wild, eye-popping juxtapositions (eg Captain Blood/Hitler, or Jesus/Rebel Without a Cause).

Thus Histoire(s) addresses all the American directors listed above plus dozens of French and European film-makers (and archivists and critics) from Renoir to Truffaut, the Lumieres to Henri Langlois, and Dreyer, Rossellini, Dovzhenko, Paradjanov and Eisenstein. All these Godard binds using his own lifelong obsessions: film as a 19th-century art-form documenting the 20th century; the lack of Holocaust footage that he deems the great crime/absence of cinema history; the centrality of French film criticism – which allowed non-American cinema to achieve full self-consciousness – to international film-making.

He also ranges over the interpenetrative, give-and-take/steal-or-fake relations between all national cinemas and all forms of film-making, from documentary (film’s original formal urge) to fiction to newsreel and even hardcore pornography (be it Edwardian or millennial), with numerous barbed asides directed towards the bastard offspring, television, on which Histoire(s) was of course first broadcast. To all of this, add painting and music – Mozart, movie soundtracks, Leonard Cohen, Otis Redding, Tom Waits – plus repeated shots of Godard sitting at his video-editing suite or his electric typewriter, or discussing the Nouvelle Vague with the late critic Serge Daney (and smoking, always smoking), or filming a young and exquisite Julie Delpy as she reads from Baudelaire’s Le Voyage.

There is little here that the conventional filmgoer would call sequential or straightforward; much of it is deliberately alienating or extremely visually audacious (try hardcore three-way porn, intercut with a grinning pinhead from Freaks and then with concentration-camp footage), and some of it is just breathtakingly, wilfully obscure. But most of Godard’s symphonic assemblage is deeply beautiful and moving. His juxtapositions of paintings and movies, of newsreel and new footage, of competing voices or music on the thickly layered soundtrack, coalesce to spark multiple associations and ideas, to set the mind and the intellect on fire. It is one of those works of art you feel you may never get to the bottom of, and some very plausible comparisons have been made between Histoire(s) du Cinema and other gargantuan, all-encompassing works such as Finnegans Wake or In Search of Lost Time. Its themes are not merely cinema and history, but language, memory, art, love, death. It is, in many ways, the climax of Godard’s half-century career, and it looms over his other work as a cathedral might dominate a medieval city.

Against all this, Scorsese’s Personal Journey may seem jejune and a little naive, but it, too, offers a way of understanding its director. Godard is a wealthy Swiss-French intellectual immersed in the history of ideas; Scorsese is a working-class autodidact whose intellectual framework derives from the “great books” syllabus of the postwar American public universities. But each man found similar passions aroused in him by Duel in the Sun, or Written On the Wind, by Kiss Me Deadly or Merrill’s Marauders.

A Personal Journey is a more chronological piece: it moves film by film, genre by genre, director by director, from one formal innovation to the next – from silence to sound, black and white to Technicolor to Cinemascope. But it is coloured by fond personal reminiscence and communicates enormous, infectious passion for the medium. A neophyte film student may need a million movies under their belt before Histoire(s) du Cinema yields up even half its riches, but A Personal Journey offers an admirably clear, energising introduction to how movies were and are made, and will set the beginner on the right path. This is a lot less prosaic than it sounds, and something to be grateful for.

One signal attraction of Personal Journey is Scorsese’s use of rare, old movies to make his points: when I first saw it, I hungered after such hard-to-find masterpieces as Red House, The Furies, The Naked Kiss, Byron Haskin’s I Walk Alone or Irving Lerner’s Murder By Contract. And Scorsese knows his movie history well enough to disprove notions such as the conventional wisdom that the arrival of sound locked the camera to the floor and retarded the development of film-making (a single fluid tracking-shot from Tay Garnett’s 1930 film Her Man, directly quoted in the famous Copa sequence from Goodfellas, puts paid to that notion). His knowledge of cinema transfixes the viewer; his passion keeps us in our seats, breathless.

Godard and Scorsese are both lapsed Catholics whose early devotion was displaced from God on to the cinema, and no matter how far each has travelled in life – no matter how many wives, how much cod-Maoism or cocaine abuse, acclamation or obloquy – they both still display that same Jesuitical intensity towards their new, albeit profane and fallen church, and each still fights for the best pew with the best view: that seat in Row 12, in the middle, right where the curtain splits. The lights go down, the projector fires up, and they are enraptured anew by the flickering light of their secular god. These are their confessions.—Dawn/Guardian News Service