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…
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.
"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
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…
Ce n'est pas un film.
This is an image book.
If Jean-Luc Godard’s “Histoire(s) du cinéma” is his epic magnum opus on the present and past of his craft, then “The Image Book” is the same document, aged over time into a future where it has lost all recognition.
What began in “Histoire(s)“ as a collective reckoning of an medium at the peak of its realization, in “Image Book” rapidly ages forward; to when film ceases to be film. It becomes, instead, an image book.
Godard’s work of deliberate desecration is as much a cacophony of overlapping narration, archival footage, and music as its predecessor and partner. But where “Histoire(s)“ was an enlightening and even loving bibliography of Godard’s inspirations…
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.
I feel no different than the last time I wrote on this like 4 years ago, but now I like it more - maybe it's because I'm sentimental. The reason should be obvious but maybe it's also because of the sheer dearth of avant-garde cinema that's emerged since this one. In any case, it is most inspired when functioning as an expanded version of the final section of Film Socialisme, crosscutting clips from all sorts of different films to depict a cyclical movement of history, like making his Intolerance Part II. But what hit me this time was how he incorporates clips from his own films, as though depicting this repetition as not just through all of history but as…
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…
