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…