Movie Review: The Image Book

The Image Book *** / *****

Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard.

Written by: Jean-Luc Godard.

 

The last feature film that the legendary Jean-Luc Godard made – Goodbye to Language 3-D – was my favorite from the ornery master in years. That was because Godard seemed to be in a more a playful mood that usual with that film, and was experimenting with 3-D imagery, in a way that so few directors have done since the technology re-emerged a decade or so back. In that film, even if you didn’t understand all of Godard’s intellectual rhetoric, you could at least sit back and see some genuine experimentation and originality – something in short supply in many films these days. So it’s with more than a little disappointment that I report that his latest film, The Image Book, sees Godard going back to being the old crank he’s been for years (decades?) now, except this time, everything is more tinged with sadness and despair. It seems like Godard thinks that humanity is beyond saving – and we don’t really deserve to be saved anyway.

 

The Image Book is basically an 85-minute montage of degraded images from other films or news reel footage, or whatever other images have struck Godard’s fancy when assembling the film. He has digitally degraded the images, so they appear not as they did originally in whatever context they were in, but as copies of copies of copies of images. The sound is more often than not deliberately out-of-sync, or altered so we aren’t hearing what we originally would. What we hear most often is Godard’s own voice as he chides the audiences, condescends to us, challenges us, or just cries out in silent despair. Seeing the film in a movie theater is the best way to see it, perhaps more for the sound mix than the images, as Godard is certainly playing with that as well – the surround sound is put to good use here, as the sound could be coming from anywhere – sometimes it confronts us head on, and sometimes from the back, as if Godard were behind you, whispering into your ear.

 

Godard’s main point – if there is one here, and it’s always tough to tell with Godard, because however much a great thinker he may be, he has never had much interest is expressing those thoughts in a clear manner for those in the audience to get – is that we don’t care – or at least, we don’t care enough. The last third of the film focuses on the Middle East – and how it has been portrayed in films, and how the Western world has exploited it – all while those same forces have never attempted to even understand it.

 

This, in the end, seems to be what Godard is saying – that the power of films and images have been misused over the years, and we don’t seem to care. Or maybe I’m misreading the whole thing, because as with everything he has done since his Magnum Opus Historie(s) of Film series, Godard’s overarching goal seems to be to provoke, chide and annoy his audience. Godard wants to let everyone else know what he thinks of them, while at the same time, remaining his fascinating enigma status as a reclusive genius. Mission accomplished, I guess.

 

As with most of the films of this latest, and last, period of Godard’s films, I find it best to let the images and sounds in The Image Book to simply wash over you. Pick up snippets here and there, piece together some thoughts on what is being seen, and discard the rest. This was hard for me for years – I tried to figure out just what Godard was trying to say, and when I failed, I resisted the films. But perhaps the best way to look at it is that Godard himself doesn’t always seem to know what he’s saying – like the rest of us, he struggles to figure out his own films – and it’s the process of trying, more than the destination, that matters.