2018 ‘Le Livre d'image’ Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard returns with a bracing, beautiful and confrontational essay film. Splicing together classic film clips and newsreel footage, often stretched, saturated and distorted almost beyond recognition, The Image Book interrogates our relationship with film, culture and global politics.
이미지 북, El libro de imágenes, O Livro de Imagem, El libro de imagen
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1. "To think with [one's] hands" -- There's a reason why Godard has called this film The Image Book, why he has elevated the primacy of montage and visual rhyming in this piece and, even more than in previous efforts, minimized the making of verbal sense. I discovered that the less I tried to hang on every word, the more I got out of this film. And while Godard's decision to only subtitle (approximately) every other line of dialogue is not unprecedented, and pertains to his desire to keep English-only speakers at a distance from his work, it also has to do with keeping language itself in the background.
This is a film to be understood as if we…
"Or one meaning of here is 'in this world, in this life, on earth. In this place or position, indicating the presence of,' or in other words, I am here. It also means to hand something to somebody—Here you are. Here, he said to her. Here both recognizes and demands recognition. I see you, or here, he said to her. In order for something to be handed over a hand must extend and a hand must receive. We must both be here in this world in this life in this place indicating the presence of."
- Claudia Rankine
Jean-Luc Godard, you unintelligible and possibly deranged man. I drove myself to learn French, because not even your translator bothers to try to decipher what you are saying half the time. The haphazard commentary flowing with images from the films of other auteurs. The sound design from this film and most of Godard's films is irritably jumpy and serves no purpose other than the same one as a tennis racket hitting someone's head.
The cinephiles that fall over themselves worshiping this man who has long since fallen into the shadow of his own reputation. Love him if you must.
However, I rate this film based on my feelings based on the actual work and not for the poor fool he's become.
Vegan alert:
A short clip features a bullfight.
The end of the world? No, just the end of western civilization. It's hard to say where I stand on this, because I do **kind of** like it, maybe against my better judgement. But it's more of a confused epilogue to a career rather than a work in and of itself - if I ultimately find The Image Book disappointing, it's because it's the first of Godard's films in what seems decades to offer no new ideas. The associations made within the films opening section (REmakes) are often far too oblique and interiorized to make much sense out of the filmmakers own personal relationship to the material - Godard has always been willfully oblique, but certain sections of The Image…
the last picture show.
a primordial soup of sights and sounds and images constantly in conflict, fried and violent and chaotic, looping back on each other like cinema is eating its own tail. i absolutely understand how someone could see this as godard dangling keys in front of pretentious cats...but as someone who's felt disconnected from movies for a few weeks due to outside influences like a troubling amount of schoolwork and other things, this was a much needed hour and a half adrenaline shot to the heart. i wish i could sit in a dark room with strangers and watch things like this for the rest of my life.
In my freshman year photography class, my professor explained to us that there comes a late period in almost every renowned photographer’s career—specifically ones who are white, male, and incredibly wealthy—where they use their status as “one of the legends” to release work that’s clearly lackadaisical but, because of the status that they hold in the art world, is considered as something great and therefore allows them to profit off of it and gain even more unwarranted acclaim from it. With The Image Book, it becomes abundantly clear now more than ever that Godard applies that logic to the world of cinema.
For all of Godard's increasingly abstruse modernism, his modern work is shot through with an undercurrent of sorrow that neither historical knowledge nor the mass-culture possibilities of film and other art have broken humans of their destructive cycles. The Image Book may not be his best statement on this theme, but it's his purest since Histoire(s) du cinéma, with which it shares much DNA and more than a few direct quotations. Film violence, historical wars and the present Arab crisis all intersect, history not so much a circle but a train constantly barreling forward but locked on the same path. That trains, in this film like much of Godard's late-period work, carry heavy Holocaust connotations makes the metaphor all the…
Flowers are merely the blood & guts spilled by those standing with prejudice on banks and high towers.
