Jean-Luc Godard released Le livre d’image in 2018. It is a montage film that stitches together brief film images – from the history of cinema, from the news and from his own films.
While it uses the same strange score editing as Farwell to Language, the overall effect is much more hypnotic – and beautiful.
The quick edits are overlaid with narration by Godard himself. At a certain point, his reflections turn to France’s relationship to the middle east and there is some original footage that Godard shot.
Montage films are kind of wonderful. There’s Wong Kar-wai’s film Hua yang de nian hua that stitches clips from Asian cinema totally unfamiliar to Western audiences. Watching it feels like glimpsing into a secret world. The beautiful scene in Cinema Paradiso that collects all the scenes deemed by the Catholic censors to be too explicit is a celebration of life, sexuality and cinema all at once. A recent discovery for me was The Road Movie from 2016, which basically takes dashcam footage uploaded by Russians and serializes it. Most of the footage involves car crashes. The best parts of it, though, are the moments before the sudden car crashes where you listen in on friends chatting, spouses fighting or the Russian version of AM talk radio. There’s a strange feeling of normalcy to those moments that makes one feel that we are all the same, wherever we are, whatever language we speak.
And then the crash happens.
The Image Book doesn’t contain any crashes. Instead it feels like a journey through Jean-Luc Godard’s mind while looking at the world through the eyes of one of cinema’s great masters.