THE IMAGE BOOK ***
Jean-Luc Godard
2018
IDEA: An essay film by Jean-Luc Godard.
BLURB: In its anarchic stream of images, atonal rhythms, and general stream-of-consciousness formlessness, The Image Book evokes something of the sensory experience of media in the digital era. It is an archive by way of cuisinart, a corpus of images and sounds from the last century and a half that flicker and mutate with their own unruly life, their cultural origins often obfuscated by their sheer volume and intensity. Godard’s digital-montage frenzy both embodies and eulogizes our hyper-mediated world; if the superfluity of his images, on one hand, speaks to an excess visuality that has overtaken our social and perceptual economies, their disjunctive presentation simultaneously refigures them as signs of a world lost to fracture, apathy, and violence. And if there is any consistent language in the erratic syntax of The Image Book, it is that of this fragmentation, manifested formally in randomly dropped soundtracks and abruptly curtailed video, and textually in the loaded images of historical atrocity, whether news-based or fictional, that conflate real-world violence with the violence of its representation. Because Godard does not hierarchize these images – viral videos freely mix with ISIS footage and classic Hollywood – we are left with a disconcerting sense of how mass-mediated images tend to flatten their contents, a desensitization Godard partly redresses in his jarring de- and re-contextualizations and myriad audiovisual manipulations. Whether the director is simply replicating the disorienting deluge of this media or engaging with it in a more politically efficacious way is sometimes questionable, but his beliefs about the cyclical failings of Western civilization, most explicitly communicated through raspily emphatic voice-over, remain unmistakable. The Image Book may be a repository of and meditation on the images that have marked the last century, but it is also a glimpse into the mind of this legendary artist, filled with his customary navel-gazing pomposity, ingenuity, and wearied but ever-revolutionary spirit.
BLURB: In its anarchic stream of images, atonal rhythms, and general stream-of-consciousness formlessness, The Image Book evokes something of the sensory experience of media in the digital era. It is an archive by way of cuisinart, a corpus of images and sounds from the last century and a half that flicker and mutate with their own unruly life, their cultural origins often obfuscated by their sheer volume and intensity. Godard’s digital-montage frenzy both embodies and eulogizes our hyper-mediated world; if the superfluity of his images, on one hand, speaks to an excess visuality that has overtaken our social and perceptual economies, their disjunctive presentation simultaneously refigures them as signs of a world lost to fracture, apathy, and violence. And if there is any consistent language in the erratic syntax of The Image Book, it is that of this fragmentation, manifested formally in randomly dropped soundtracks and abruptly curtailed video, and textually in the loaded images of historical atrocity, whether news-based or fictional, that conflate real-world violence with the violence of its representation. Because Godard does not hierarchize these images – viral videos freely mix with ISIS footage and classic Hollywood – we are left with a disconcerting sense of how mass-mediated images tend to flatten their contents, a desensitization Godard partly redresses in his jarring de- and re-contextualizations and myriad audiovisual manipulations. Whether the director is simply replicating the disorienting deluge of this media or engaging with it in a more politically efficacious way is sometimes questionable, but his beliefs about the cyclical failings of Western civilization, most explicitly communicated through raspily emphatic voice-over, remain unmistakable. The Image Book may be a repository of and meditation on the images that have marked the last century, but it is also a glimpse into the mind of this legendary artist, filled with his customary navel-gazing pomposity, ingenuity, and wearied but ever-revolutionary spirit.
