BY STEVE JANKOWIAK
The Image Book (Le Livre d'image) is the latest offering by octogenarian auteur Jean-Luc Godard. It is a
cinematic essay likened by some reviewers to be a sequel of sorts to his
encyclopedic Histoire(s) du cinema (1989-1998). However, the cinematic essay
or cine-essay is the mode of discourse Godard began to employ half a century
ago, at the end of his avant-garde period, starting with Le
Gai savoir (1969). His goal in doing so was to
dispense with the classic bourgeois narrative and employ extra-diegetic devices
such as film clips, intertitles, musical scores, photos, etc., even his own voice-over
commentary to address the audience. When The Image Book premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2018
it was awarded an honorary Palme d'Or by Jury President Cate Blanchett
for Godard’s effort “to define and redefine what cinema can beâ€.
The image of the upward pointing right hand in
Leonardo da Vinci's "Saint John the Baptist" is the organizing
principle of Godard’s book of pictures. The five fingers of the hand represent five
chapters: Remakes, St. Petersburg's Evenings, Flowers Between the Rails Travel
Without Steam, Spirit of Laws and La Région Centrale. The first chapter
contains a generous sampling of clips from Godard’s own films: Le Petit Soldat (1963), Les Carabiniers (1963), Allemagne année 90 neuf zero (1991) and Hélas pour moi (1993). Chapter Two,
“St. Petersburg's Eveningsâ€, juxtaposes the tsarist period typified by War and Peace (Bondarchuk, 1966) to
the brave new world of Soviet collectivization represented by Earth (Dovzhenko, 1930). The third
chapter is a meditation on trains as agents of industry, modernity and the
Holocaust. Chapter Four, "Spirit of Laws", references Young Mr. Lincoln (Ford, 1939) as
an example worthy of emulation. The focus of the fifth and final chapter is the
Arab world and Godard's audio-visual assault on Orientalism. He appropriates multiple texts including Edward
Said's critique and footage from an unfinished Dziga Vertov documentary of the
1970 Black September conflict that ultimately became the subject of inquiry in
his cine-essay Ici et ailleurs
(1976).
Kino Lorber has released the film on DVD and Blu-ray. Bonus features
include interviews with researcher Nicole Brenez and producer Fabrice Aragno.
The conversation with Brenez at the 2019 International Film Festival Rotterdam
is conducted in heavily accented English and quickly becomes tedious. The
interview with Aragno in which he responds to clearly formulated questions in
much less heavily accented English is much more fluid. The accompanying essay
booklet features James Quandt's "Facing the Void: Jean-Luc Godard's Book
of Images" which provides some useful context for interpreting the film
but does presuppose some knowledge of Godard's recent output. And if one is
uninitiated then The Image
Book is a great introduction to the late work
of one of the greatest and most seminal filmmakers alive today.