A recurring image in Jean-Luc Godard's eight-part video series Histoire(s) du cinéma (1989-98) shows a man and woman staring intently at a film projection, taken from an early film by Ingmar Bergman, Fängelse (1946). Along with shots of James Stewart peering voyeuristically through a zoom lens in Rear Window (Hitchcock, 1954) the image is developed through the series as a figure of cinema's gaze upon history. Citing a line from Alain Resnais' Hiroshima mon amour (1959), the sequence of titles inscribed upon the Fängelse image as it appears in chapter 4B of Godard's series evokes a failure of witnessing that contrasts with the couple's absorbed gaze: ‘tu n'as rien vu’ (you saw nothing). The juxtaposition recalls the original context of the words in the Resnais film, where a French actress, visiting Hiroshima, claims to have seen it all and her Japanese lover reminds her that she has in fact seen nothing, because she has not witnessed the cataclysm designated by the word ‘Hiroshima’. Godard then multiplies the signs of historical violence in his rendering of the critique by following Hiroshima with the inscriptions ‘Leningrad’, ‘Madagascar’, ‘Dresde’, ‘Hanoi’ and ‘Sarajevo’. The words superimposed on the image of James Stewart in Rear Window, ‘les signes parmi nous’ (the signs among us), also form the title of the episode, another inscription that appears repeatedly throughout the series. It implies, particularly when juxtaposed with the subsequent image of Hitler giving a speech, that cinema's signs can be read historiographically but also that cinema has often failed to read the signs of history.