Complex cultural commentary
Controversial filmmaker offers look into desensitized and disjointed society
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/05/2019 (2615 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
With his new experimental essay film, Jean-Luc Godard — a founder of the French New Wave and now a cantankerous, still triumphantly controversial 88-year-old — has created an angry, opaque, often obstreperous work. A collage of distorted fragments, The Image Book is engineered to be hard to read.
If you give yourself over to its hostile barrage of cinematic effects, however — and viewers who aren’t committed Godard-heads might not reach this point — the cumulative effect of all this dislocation and disorientation is potent.
Godard is concerned, as ever, with the relationships between words and pictures and between representation and political realities. He is examining the effect of more than a century of cinema on our ways of looking, seeing and thinking.
Film collages generally offer viewers the simple (slightly smug) satisfaction of recognition. Godard is having none of that. Movie buffs might light on some of these images (the face of Ingrid Bergman or Buster Keaton, iconic scenes from Eisenstein, Ophuls, Hitchcock and, of course, from Godard’s own work).
Much of The Image Book’s material is obscure, however, and even familiar films and iconic scenes are often altered beyond the edge of easy identification. Godard uses super-saturated colours — flaming oranges and neon blues — for effects that can be lyrically gorgeous or luridly ugly. He reduces some sequences to what look like low-fi videotapes of videotapes, with blurred-out black and white.
There are images from art history (Delacroix, Masaccio, Manet), the music of Bach, the words of Bertolt Brecht and Edward Said. Godard includes archival footage — mostly of war, atrocity and unspeakable human cruelty — and recent documentary sequences.
Sometimes sound and picture line up; sometimes they fight each other. The weary voiceover narrative, often delivered by Godard himself, fades in and out, at one point dissolving into a harrowing coughing fit. Not all the audio (which is in various languages) is fully translated into the English subtitles, which seems like a deliberate decision.
The structure is at first elusive. In the first part of the film, Godard presents Soviet visions, Hollywood dreams and the nightmares of history.
These strands of idea and image ultimately coalesce into a critique of colonialism, the western gaze and “the violence of representation,” with Godard juxtaposing the exoticist tropes of old movies with works by Arab filmmakers and contemporary footage of the Middle East.
This specific argument in turn builds to the larger notion that 21st-century culture risks drowning in a sea of desensitizing and disjointed images, their meaning and moral weight flattened into an undifferentiated digital feed.
Godard perversely seeks to cure our glut of images with more images, tortured and transformed in ways that force us to reckon with them anew. Easy to dislike at times but hard to dismiss, The Image Book is a difficult, contradictory, complex work.
alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca
Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto’s York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian. She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992.
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Movie review
The Image Book
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
● Cinematheque
● Subject to classification ● 84 minutes
★★★★ out of five
I found it haunting, thrilling and confounding in equal measure.
— A.O. Scott, New York Times
(The Image Book) is a film that derails itself constantly and self-consciously.
— Christina Newland, Paste Magazine
Further complicating things in this challenging 84 minutes are his seemingly random format changes and manipulation of iconic images… as if he just got new software and just had to push it to the max.
— Ken Eisner, Georgia Straight
Disjointed and direct, exhilarating and soporific, cerebral and squirrelly: The Image Book is lots of contradictory things at once.
— Stephanie Zacharek, Time
As with his previous idiosyncratic, often inscrutable late works, this will be seen only by a highly select audience of dedicated Godardians, and genuinely liked by just a fraction of those; one can essentially name them.
— Todd McCarthy, Hollywood Reporter
Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto’s York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian. She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992.
Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber.
Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
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