The Image Book

Awarded a special Palme d'Or, this film essay by the 88-year-old Jean-Luc Godard is a brilliant, radical-in-form and provocative intellectual take on the film medium. Long before its premiere, Godard explained to journalists from the Russian magazine Séance that the structure of the film is like a human hand. Each of the chapters (including the ones on travel, wars and law) is a fragment of history and of life. Only when they are collected together do they give us a complete picture. Made up of fragments of classic works, news and videos from ISIS and YouTube, the erudite The Image Book talks about the terror of images, which do not so much explain the world as shape it in accordance with the wishes of politics. In the Middle East, Jean-Luc Godard looks at the issues of representation and the lack thereof, as well as the curse of the image imposed by the West, which influences how we see it. Shuffling images on the screen like cards, manipulating sound, the maker of Breathless asks what role cinema has played in 20th and 21st-century history. Has it been a chronicler of violence, a virus spreading dangerous ideologies, the guardian of the existing order, a passive observer?