But what is "The Image Book" about, you ask? Or maybe you don't, if you've seen a Godard film made after about 1980.
Godard, one of the original pioneers of the French New Wave, has been an international celebrity for decades, and a controversial one. He's feuded with some of the major figures in world cinema and major film festivals, and with luminaries in the arts and politics. He's been a vocal activist for Palestinian causes and has been accused of anti-Semitism, always insisting that he's anti-Zionist but not anti-Jewish; the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which gave Godard an honorary award in 2010, said in a statement, ""Antisemitism is of course deplorable, but the academy has not found the accusations against Godard persuasive." In interviews about his movies he comes across as alternately prankish and sour, well-read and a bit of a charlatan, somewhat like Orson Welles back in the day. He conducted a press conference at the 2018 Cannes film festival via iPhone. For the 2005 press conference for "Notre Musique," he invited a representative of the French Actors and Technicians Union to appear in his place, then sat in the audience while a list of grievances against the French government was read.
None of this will necessarily inform your appreciation of "The Image Book"—except maybe the Zionism part, and only in a roundabout way; the Arabic section plays like a semi-coherent love letter to a region and its artists, albeit one that frequently oversimplifies and renders exotic the thing being praised. As I've said in previous writing on this director, Godard's montage films are best experienced as a direct tap into the restless mind of the director who wrote, directed, produced, and edited them, and also narrated, in the portentous, croaky voice of a fairy tale creature muttering prophecies from a bog. It moves in fits and starts, deliberately. Even more so than in other recent Godard essay movies, the images, dialogue, music, sound effects, black screens, and moments of silence seem to operate at cross-purposes.
As hard as it is to assign star ratings to certain movies, it's even harder with a work like "The Image Book," a free-associative meditation on language, the image, extinction, and a lot of other things. The movie itself often seems to be disintegrating as you watch it, or trying and failing to cohere. Godard is one of those directors who can't really be evaluated in relation to other filmmakers, only to himself, so distinctive and often impenetrable is his style. Just as it's difficult to articulate why certain Robert Altman, Spike Lee or Terrence Malick films hit your sweet spot and others do very little for you even though they're using many of the same techniques, it's hard to articulate why one post-millennial Godard picture comprised mainly of chopped-up film clips and discontinuous sound, dialogue and music hits the intellectual and visceral bulls-eye, but another leaves you cold.
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