The Image Book (Before and After Review)

The Image Book is the new “film” from the French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard. The reason I put film in quotation marks is that ever since his first film in 1960 ‘Breathless’ he has continuously pushed the rules of cinema as a tool of escapism and adventure. He has been quoted as saying “all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun”. Except since the late 80s and early 90s he has thrown this out the window. He is a man that turns his back not only on accepted movie-making conventions but his own as well.

I am seeing The Image Book tonight at Sydney Film Festival later tonight and I expect there to be plenty of walkouts. People who don’t know Godard’s later work will undoubtedly be baffled. Where is the narrative? What is the point? Where’s the emotion? All valid questions that you won’t get an answer to.

While I probably will be baffled too, I am familiar with his later works such as Historie(s) du Cinema and Goodbye to Language. Essays on film that defy film conventions. I wanted to do a before and after the film to let you know what I expect and my reactions. I know a few tiny details surrounding the film. Some trivial like it won the first special Palme d’Or at Cannes this year and Godard face timed in for the press conference. For the film itself, I am just going to list some expectations.

• There will be no narrative but only a collection of ideas.

• I don’t know how ideas will be presented or how they will flow (if at all) from one to another

• The picture will look ‘amateurish’ and the sound will seem like a mess

• Godard likes to superimpose images and sounds on top of one another so that they become incoherent as two separate images and create something new. The sound will often present another idea and Godard will want us to combine the two ideas.

• It will talk about modern-day politics, the history of cinema and mention the French new wave

• Godard has always been a political person. It wasn’t apparent until about 1966/67 but his early works are laced with his Marxist ideals and I have no doubt they will show up again. He was also a film critic before he was a director. He has been public about his tastes and who he admires before. He will use shots from filmmakers he likes or even doesn’t know of (I heard about a clip from a Michael Bay film in here somewhere). All the new wave directors like mentioning they’re a part arguably the influential time in cinema’s history since the days of DW Griffith. How this comes off I don’t know. Varda does it well his late career docos but Godard is pretentious.

• If I like I will probably get called pretentious

• But, if that title is bestowed upon me because I enjoy this film so be it.

• I might not give this movie a score/rating

• If this film pushes the medium in a way I have not seen or heard of before how can I give it a rating? If myself (and everyone else) inherently compare a film to everything else they have ever seen how can I compare it to something that I have not been exposed to? If you showed a film to someone who has never seen a film and ask them to rate it out of 10 how can they? For them what is a 10 and what is 1?

Regardless of expectations (of which I try not to have too many most of the time), I am looking forward to seeing the “film”.

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*Watches film*

Imagine you have a nice big dinner ready to eat and you decide to take 90 minutes to savour it. Well, Godard eats that dinner in five minutes and just keeps going for the next 85 minutes. You could watch this movie five minutes at a time and think about that five minutes for a while then come back and repeat. Once I soon realised this I realised I needed to take the film in as a whole, not individual cuts or sound bites or the few subtitled lines.

Overall I got pretty much everything I expected. A string of ideas, incoherent sound and image, walkouts, and a thought-provoking film.

I’m writing this on the train home after the film and I am still trying to work out what it’s all about. It’s somewhat defined by chapters.

The first is called “remake”. We are constantly reminded about this and with everytime different clips follow. Then it starts to click. He’s not talking about remakes of films but other shapes cinema takes (or other forms of media take on cinema) on such as paintings, book, plays, ideas and what I think the most important one is cliches. If I had only watched this chapter of the film, the shortest one, I would have had more time to think about it but I couldn’t help but go off on my own tangent of thought. There’s a bit of nudity in this part of the film and I couldn’t help but think of the overuse of the word ‘porn’. Not only did porn become a commonly used word, we started to use to describe words. It has gone from a noun to an adjective. We have torture porn, poverty porn (this is described to use films that exploit lower class stories), etc. We also use the suffix 'gate' after a scandal of any kind since Watergate. Sand paper gate is a recent example.

The presence of Godard’s view on the media is felt throughout and here the word remake seems to relate to outsourcing journalism. With more and more news outlets buying footage from the general public who were at the event, even though the footage was shot on a phone. We have been inundated with crappy reflections of the world and we don’t know it. At the Cannes press conference, Godard said “oh my all this machine gun fire” as the photographers were taking pictures of the phone he was face timing too. I kinda think Godard spelt out the message here. We’re not living in an age where the pictures that make a difference are taken my professionals anymore. For all I know the man sitting next to me on the train, on the phone, could have been in the right place at the right time for a car crash, film it and sell it to the highest bidder.

By the time the 2nd chapter comes around it become apparent that I need to take in the whole before I look at the smaller things. The 2nd chapter is about (from what I wrote in my notes but I think it’s wrong) “St Petersberg Evenings”. It’s obviously the next important subject for Godard after media and ‘content’. This moves onto a third topic which was broader and the then the fourth which was about the middle east. The latter seemed to tie into each previous idea. If Godard was obsessed with the war in the Algiers in the 60s then it’s Iraq in the 10s.

Godard has superimposed images on top of one another and heavily distort as well. He cuts up sounds into individual sound bites so that they become incoherent. He even plays with stereo mixing. Certain moments obviously have a sound of coming out of only one side of the theatre. Image and visuals become two separate pieces of information. This in turn something new. The sound will often present another idea and Godard will want us to combine the two ideas.

I can only imagine the process of Godard’s editing both the looks of the shots and sequences strung together but it’s certainly no accident. I think the festival staff thought something was wrong with the film, delayed the screening by about 15 minutes then noticed it was meant to be that way. By doing something different with each shot he makes you think about the parts. It’s as if he knows you’re taking it in as a whole so he tries to get you to focus on the small things.

The broken sound does the same. He doesn’t even bother laying down an atmos (or room tone) track to cover up the gaps. The sound often jumps at you, totally unprovoked. He does something similar to the image. He puts a bright white shot after a dark one and suddenly the whole cinema is squinting. This may be an audio-visual essay but it’s still a cinema experience. Possibly one of the defining ones of the decade.

Like every other film at the festival, it’s obvious that Godard doesn’t intend for there to be an emotional arc. Rather going through an emotional arc there’s one of the ideas. There’s still a structure that somewhat follows a conventional narrative if you can follow it.

Godard also seems to have this odd sense of humour. He often puts in the last sound you would expect into a moment. There’s also a moment when an old man runs his finger along the edge of a record and music plays as he does it. This aspect of his editing is probably the most grounded thing he does. It’s obvious and clear.

A lot of critics will think this is a poorly made film. My first point to tell them would be that is it really a “film”. I’ve heard Godard is turning it into an art installation, so it’s definitely leaning in that direction of not being a traditional film. I would also tell them what’s a good version of this? Goodbye Language is dissimilar in so many ways. It’s kind of similar to Historie(s) du Cinema but the ideas presented here are different.

The only negative takeaway I had from this is that someone needs to do subtitles for Godard's late career works that isn't Godard. Not everything he says is subtitled and we can only try and pick up the words similar to English.

Cinema is barbaric and Godard always was and always will be at the forefront of the medium. How Historie(s) du Cinema, Goodbye to Language and The Image Book lead the way are yet to be seen but I think it’s started a conversation. Even if it often self-indulgent and pretentious. No matter if you despise this or adore it you’ll be talking about it for ages.

I have decided to give this a rating. I like movies that I don't encounter but become intertwined with and it's hard to explain why that happens here but it does.

Overall Score: 10/10

The Image Book is playing at Sydney Film Festival

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By: Jean Luc Godard