Kritiken

A dense and cryptic essay film in the vein of his magnum opus, Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1988-'98).

A head-scratcher and a mind-bender, The Image Book . . . is gloriously obscure and brutally unpretty, yet lucid and even gorgeous all the same.

A work of such stabbing angularity, exorbitant allusiveness, unyielding digression, and exhausting doom that the film’s sole justification, the thing that joins and stabilizes all the rattling fragments, is the totemic allure of a name: Godard.

A work of vast visual inventiveness; it’s almost entirely made up of images that are so elaborately and personally crafted that they seem handmade, like cine-paintings. But the images are onscreen so briefly, and edited together so boldly and so surprisingly, as to suggest that the film is meant to be used, perused, and pondered, privately and slowly, bit by bit, like a book.

Caveats aside, this is, in my estimation, a typically stimulating but opaque and deliberately frustrating late-period Godard film.

As Godard’s montage moves from culture to culture, through different eras of reportage and make-believe, The Image Book considers nothing less than the irony of classical art in competition with political reality. It’s a poetic analysis that achieves its power through metaphor and allusion, linking not-random images to specific mythic resonance.

I found it haunting, thrilling and confounding in equal measure. It is a work of ecstatic despair, an argument for the futility of human effort that almost refutes itself through the application of a grumpy and tenacious artistic will.

The Image Book is a new step for Godard, a foray into a world decentered from its European ground. It is a provisional film, feeling its way and testing analytic and aesthetic categories. It doesn’t always succeed, but it has the sense of a beginning, and that gives hope that it is the start of something new.

Manipulation . . . is everywhere, closely allied with the operations of the digital, from the Latin digitus, ‘finger’ or ‘toe’. And through it all, to the end, when Godard coughs his way through proclaiming the need for “ardent hope” in the face of the “strongest nights”, The Image Book contemplates what possibilities of salvation and beauty might still reside in our horrific and uncertain world.

There may be logic to the constant barrage of text, sound and image, but it is very much in the eye of the beholder. What this film does is make it feel exciting to look, listen and feel.

Just as Goodbye to Language acknowledged—no, embodied—our inability to function without the structures (symbolic, semiotic) and hierarchies (ideological, cultural) that make up our specific existence and which come part and parcel with language, The Image Book does so with a visual lexicon of which cinema is but a part.

If cinema, for all its polysemous potential to complicate the fateful, scriptural marriage of word and image, offered a kind of Plan B, but also ultimately failed to subvert (or liberate us from) the fixed subject-object representation whereby power is reiterated and reproduced, this is why Godard turns (again) to the Brechtian "fragment" as a last refuge of that malleable, polysemous potential.