Should you watch The Image Book?
Who it’s good for, who it isn’t, and what’s in it. No ratings, no scores.

The Image Book
Documentary · 2018
In Le Livre d’Image, Jean-Luc Godard recycles existing images (films, documentaries, paintings, television archives, etc.), quotes excerpts from books, uses fragments of music. The driving force is poetic rhyme, the association or opposition of ideas, the aesthetic spark through editing, the keystone. The author performs the work of a sculptor. The hand, for this, is essential. He praises it at the start. “There are the five fingers. The five senses. The five parts of the world (…). The true condition of man is to think with his hands. Jean-Luc Godard composes a dazzling syncopation of sequences, the surge of which evokes the violence of the flows of our contemporary screens, taken to a level of incandescence rarely achieved. Crowned at Cannes, the last Godard is a shock film, with twilight beauty.
The sides of The Image Book
- A collage of film clips, paintings and archives
- Godard's voice over fragments of music and books
- Five chapters about images and violence
The Image Book is good for you if…
- you like images cut, saturated and set against each other.
- you're happy to be left with ideas rather than answers.
- you enjoy working out why Godard puts two images side by side.
The Image Book is bad for you if…
- you need people and a story, and there are none here.
- you won't read subtitles over dense French narration.
- you can't stand archive footage of war and killing.
About: cinema · violence · memory · the Arab world
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