The Image Book

Another infuriatingly incomprehensible Godard movie made up entirely out of archival images... Having said that, some of the imagery is powerful.

Is The Image Book really a film? Godard himself has re-engineered it as an art installation, to be shown on a TV.

A rumination on art, politics, history, and mankind's eternal folly disguised as a cinematic collage. It's plotless but it has shape; random but with purpose.

"The Image Book" is an 85-minute cinematic brainstorm, a swirling, dazzling, maddening frenzy of disconnected sights and sounds that have been compiled and arranged according to a rhythmic and rhetorical logic that only its maker can fully divine.

"The Image Book" lives and breathes cinema; the cutting and sound games (up and down and all around) remain arresting and instinctive and inspired.

Concerned neither with telling stories nor even making rational sense, Godard aims straight for lyrical beauty, and he almost always hits his target.

Episode 47: Doc Talk Part 3 / Hail Satan? / American Factory / Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese / Honeyland / The Image Book

The last chapter of The Image Book transpires as a deconstruction not only of the Arab narrative imparted by the West since the invention of cinema, but of the occidental control of cinema history.

As in the rest of [Godard's] filmography, the written text also complements his audiovisual language [Full review in Spanish]

The Image Book is undoubted flawed; it is very much imperfect. But it also has its stretches of pure, imperfect avant-garde cinema that would just be rude to decry.