Translator: Chen Sihang
Proofreading: Yi Ersan
Source: Sight & Sound
Translator's note: There is no doubt that Jean-Luc Godard is a living cinematic myth. From "Breathless" during the French New Wave in the 1960s, to a series of political modernist films later, and then to the jaw-dropping "History of Cinema", it can be said that Godard has been subverting tradition and overturning people's definition of "cinema" from beginning to end.
In 2018, Godard's "Book of Images" won the "Special Palme d'Or" at the Cannes Film Festival. It's certainly special and it's difficult to juxtapose this film with other Palme d'Or nominees.
"Book of Images"
Like all of Godard's middle and later films, "The Book of Images" challenges traditional film concepts from various angles and seems difficult to be understood by the vast majority of audiences. This film review from the famous film review magazine "Sight and Sound" may provide the audience with a way to understand Godard.
The first image we see is Leonardo da Vinci's "John the Baptist." In this painting, John the Baptist is gazing at the viewer with something of a smirk. His right hand points to heaven, to salvation. There is still debate even among art historians, but according to the most common view, this mysterious painting is considered to be Leonardo da Vinci's last work.
Eighty-eight-year-old Jean-Luc Godard quoted one part of this oil painting at the beginning of "The Book of Images", which is the hand pointing to heaven. The hand is severed from the composition and enlarged until it fills the entire screen. Godard drained it of color, leaving a pattern of light gray on a black background, like the result of a photocopier repeated several times.
"Book of Images"
"The Book of Images" is full of ambiguous intertextuality. However, in this first "gesture", the central idea of Godard's sad image essay is already clearly discernible.
Godard scoured all kinds of multimedia resources and reorganized these image fragments in unique ways, turning them into some kind of strange replicas. He sacrifices the authenticity of the image and pursues a certain kind of abstraction, damage and imitation, which refers to the flexibility and changeability of contemporary visual culture.
Throughout the five chapters of the film, the idea of "manipulation" – etymologically speaking, "manipulation" comes from the Latin "manipulus", meaning "handmade" – is ubiquitous, which is closely related to the digital form of the film ("digital" comes from the Latin "digitus", meaning "finger" or "toe").
Throughout the film, "The Book of Images" ponders what possibilities are contained in redemption and beauty, which can allow us to survive in this terrifying and uncertain world for a long time. Until the end, Godard coughed and declared his own way, calling on us to have the "most earnest hope" when facing this "deepest night".
"Book of Images"
In his epic series of films "The History of Cinema" (1989-1998), Godard turned to digital video media and a collage-like creative method to "shoot" a special, non-linear film history.
His "History of Film" is a story about degradation and redemption, mainly based on the tradition of European and American films, serving more the director's personal views than the facts themselves. Godard called it "La réponse des ténèbres" (The Reply to Darkness). The darkness he spoke of was not just catastrophes like the Holocaust, but the growing sense of disappointment and frustration in the postwar era.
However, all this did not erase his love for movies. Godard has always shown a passion for those unforgettable images, as well as a certain unique belief. This belief can be defined in the discussion of film critic Serge Dardenne: "Cinephilia does not refer to the relationship between people and movies, but to the connection between people and the world through movies."
"Book of Images"
One way to approach "The Book of Images" is as an extension of the "History of Film" series. Of course we can't forget the short film "Origins of the 21st Century" (2000), which also uses this technique.
In The Book of Images , many of Godard's concerns, many of the images he uses are the same, and even the stylistic elements of the film are the same. In his hands, montage was a form of expression of thought.
The title of the first chapter "Remake", as well as countless cases in his previous films, can be evidence of this. Generally speaking, the task of viewers of Godard's films is not only to find the sources from which he quoted the films, but also to find the place of these sources in "Godard's universe": "quotes for quotation madmen".
At the end of The Book of Images, Godard expresses some kind of utopian hope in a black screen. The need for counterargument and defiance, he claims, will never go away. After that, he cut into a dance scene from Max Ophuls's Euphoria (1952).
An old man disguising himself as a young man and dancing on the dance floor until he faints from weakness – this is a perfect example of the expression just mentioned, and the old man can also be seen as an incarnation of Godard himself.
Our interpretation can stop here, but it can also go one step further: this exquisite image shot by the Jewish director who just returned from exile depicts the joy of burning and the depletion after the flames burn out. The melancholic soundtrack to this image comes from Hans Otter’s piano.
In "The Origin of the 21st Century", we also heard Hans Otter's piano music, accompanied by a subtitle board indicating "1900". Godard's first article for Cahiers du Cinema was about "Pleasure" (but it was rejected).
In 1962, Godard called Euphoria the best French film since the end of World War II. This beloved film by Godard, with its inferior and dirty copy, carries many layers of time and meaning – from the birth of cinema, to World War II, to the French New Wave, and to today. Film history became a way to discuss politics and Godard himself.
"Happiness"
In the late 1960s, Godard issued a call to "return to the origin"; and at the end of "The Book of Images", he made another declaration of returning to nature.
The second and third chapters of this film make a lot of references to World War II, trying to demonstrate how civilization became an accomplice of barbarism. This is also the core proposition of "Film History". Through Godard's montage, the Lumière brothers' train picks up the train transporting people to the concentration camps. We also see traces of Hollywood films: Hitchcock, Aldrich, Browning and so on.
However, The Book of Images also touches on new themes. Because Godard has long adopted the method of "remaking", the authenticity of the image has never been his highest ideal – this is the connection created between "The Deserter" (1954) and "The Little Soldier" (1963) in the early stages of the film. If "The Book of Images" is indeed a recreation of history, then this "repetition" must contain some differences.
"Book of Images"
Godard rethinks his early creations, when "cinema" was understood as a kind of architecture, a technology or a site of practice. Today, this concept is replaced by the new concept of "image". Images are regarded as independent individuals, not bound by any rules, separated from any real material materials, and can be circulated around the world. With the click of a mouse, they can be compressed, uploaded, and changed in form.
The collision between image and text embodied in the title of The Book of Images is more than just a tribute to Alexander Aschuk’s caméra-stylo. Godard gives equal importance to how digital imaging essentially becomes a means of writing. Based on the code, the film's images become a field of change and transformation under the author's instructions.
Although Godard did not deny the documentary power of indexical images, he was more inclined to express the various ways of manipulating images: including suddenly changing the frame of the film, making the image appear highly unnatural colors, animation-like effects and intermittent "glitches."
"Book of Images"
The sky suddenly turns orange or vermilion; the movements of characters are broken down into intermittent still images. High-definition images are mixed with heavily processed copies, just as masterpieces of film and art history are mixed with vulgar videos of sex and death.
In The Book of Images, Godard explores the unique plasticity of these new images and the highly variable effects when they are mixed together. It can be said that this film simultaneously understands the evolution of media history from two levels: "rupture" and "continuation."
Cinema was no longer a dictatorship, for Godard used all his techniques to create a broader catalog of images. Like digital visual culture itself, The Book of Images is confusing, highly overloaded, extremely mixed, intermittent, layered, and endlessly repetitive. The film's soundtrack shares these characteristics: it is both multichannel and multilingual.
At times, many different sounds appear simultaneously, vying for the audience's attention, while staccato music plays. Godard’s murmurings are heard throughout, but they are less of a lead-in and more like another element in this chaotic hodgepodge of sounds, with the same status as the other sounds.
"Book of Images"
The geopolitical scope of The Book of Images is completely different from that of The History of Cinema. Perhaps in response to the new conflicts of the twenty-first century, and in response to the increasingly prominent issues surrounding Eurocentrism, Godard chose a more global image.
Images discussing the Middle East occupy a very prominent position, especially in the fifth chapter "Central Area". It can be said that almost half of the images in this film are related to the Middle East.
And this fifth chapter is the closest that The Book of Images comes to any other kind of narrative form. The film tells the story of the fictional Gulf kingdom of Dofa, a country that unfortunately – or fortunately – lacks oil resources and is home to a failed revolution.
In this chapter, Godard spends a lot of time collecting evidence and analyzing the concept of "Orientalism," a prejudice against the Middle East that pervades many cinematic representations of the region. A subtitle board reading "In Western Eyes" flashed across the screen several times.
"Book of Images"
We see passages from the films of Pasolini and Raoul Walsh, and we even ride on a magic carpet from classic Arab films like Youssef Suchin's The Algerian Girl (also known as Gamila, 1958) to new, high-definition images of everyday life.
Godard abstracts a common stereotype from these images and points out the important role of the photographer's subject, who exists outside the subject. In the narration, Godard points out the violence inherent in the act of "speaking on behalf of" others, contrasting this brutal essence with "the inner calm of the act."
If most of the fifth chapter of "The Book of Images" is mainly an indictment of the West and its films, then its tone suddenly changes in the last few minutes of the film. Even before the end, the quote to Elias Canetti is so sad and true – "If we always want the world to be better, then we will never stop grieving" – but Godard ends what may be his final film with a plea.
This plea is not just about the movie, but about every action for justice, every moment of life: "This fact does not affect our hope even if it does not change anything."
