LE LIVRE D’IMAGE – Film Review
Jean-Luc Godard had said goodbye to language. Now he ignores everything else.
“Do you still remember how, long ago, we trained our thoughts? Most often we’d start from a dream… We wondered how, in total darkness, colours of such intensity could emerge within us. In a soft, low voice. Saying great things, surprising, deep and accurate matters. Images and words like a bad dream written on a stormy night. Under western eyes. The lost paradises. War is here.”
A story in 5 chapters like the fingers of a hand, “a revolutionary song”.
Le Livre d’Image (The Image Book) is nor a film or a book. It’s a philosophical pasticcio made of other’s film extracts, archives, tv reports, textual and musical fragments. A video dissertation that invites us “westerns” to reflect upon the Arab world.
Note: the film is called “Le Livre d’Image”, image without an “s”. Countless images are shown in order to bring us to one unique image, the big picture, perhaps, the one that has been hidden from us, willingly covered up by many others.
Distractions.
A powerful and compelling distorted visual experience, just like a “bad dream”. Apparently random in its messiness, but like every dream, every single image, word or sound has a meaning.
The author presents us his vision as a carousel of “historical facts” accompanied by his raspy voice reciting verses.
It starts out with film sequences, seemingly unrelated in their nature and ends up with unarranged news reports (many from Al Jazeera) and a short Arab history lesson.
The videos are encrypted, just like that “big picture” that society encrypted from our consciousness. They go back and forth, interrupted by a voice-off, a song, a silence, or yet another image.
Godard recites about art, social classes, war, communism and world history (with dedicated attention to the Orient vs occident imagery). “The only thing that survives is art” he says.
Everything is bestowed in a dream-like manner. Even the end-titles (used for the teaser) are not at the end of the film but in its heart. A profoundly smart choice used as a sort of natural selection. In fact, many left the auditorium during the faux end-titles, something that a cinephile would never dare to do. If you can’t take it, you better leave.
Le Livre d’Image could come off as a pretentious museum-like installation at a first glance, but this overdose of images is disposed in such a way that settles into your subconscious. A film slow to digest. It will make you question it, and yourself, over and over again.
This is not propaganda– that’s what many think, but as Godard reminds us: many don’t think.
He’s not trying to convert us to his political credo. The author is above all that voodoo.
To make something of endless meanings. Here lies the genius of an artist.
This is a Manifesto of Freedom. An invitation to think for ourselves.
You have the right and the duty to decrypt an image in an encrypted book.
Thank you for this gift, Maestro.
