Film: "The Image Book"
French master Jean-Luc Godard adds to his iconoclastic legacy with this mind-blowing collage film essay on the state of our world.
Introduction by Prof. Mark Williams.
The legendary Jean-Luc Godard adds to his influential, iconoclastic legacy with this provocative film essay, which dissolves all barriers between the artist, his art and his audience. Winner of the first Special Palme d’Or to be awarded in the history of the Cannes Film Festival, The Image Book is possibly the final addition to the 87-year-old French master’s vast filmography.
Displaying an encyclopedic grasp of cinema and its history, Godard pieces together a mesmerizing collage of fragments and clips from recognizable classics, from La Belle et le Bête to Vertigo. Then he digitally alters, bleaches and washes them, all in the service of reflecting on what he sees in front of him and what he makes of the dissonance that surrounds him.
But, as always with Godard, the key issues he raises have to do with the legacy of the last century and its horrors: the incomprehensibility of Hiroshima and Auschwitz, events that coincided with cinema but which have somehow eluded its gaze. He poses questions about the violence of representation—and demonstrates this by doing violence to representations—before examining depictions of orientalism and the Arab world. Although much of The Image Book is a meditation on the cinematic past, this last chapter of the master’s filmography reveals a sense of urgency and grounds his new film very much in the present.
