The Image Book, Cannes 2018, review: Jean-Luc Godard's vast mosaic of image and sound

Nearly 60 years after his debut Breathless in 1960, he is still managing to tease, confound and antagonise audiences

(Wild Bunch Films)

The poster for this year Cannes Festival shows French cinema legends Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina leaning across two open-top cars and kissing in a scene from Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 feature, Pierrot Le Fou. Karina was at the Cannes opening ceremony.

Godard hasn’t come to the festival but, well over 50 years since he burst onto the scene, he is still at the centre of events. There has been much talk of his role as agitator in chief in May 1968, when he helped bring Cannes to a halt during the nationwide student and union protests of that year.

The old Magus is now 87 years old, a Prospero-like figure living far away in Switzerland. He may be the oldest director in the main Cannes competition but he is also the most radical. While other directors stick to conventional storytelling with actors and scripts, Godard bombards us with images, ideas, jarring sound effects, cryptic voice overs and bursts of classical music.

While other filmmakers dutifully endure press junkets and round table interviews, Godard conducted the press conference for his new feature, The Image Book, by Face Time.

The frame of reference in the new movie is extraordinary. Its first images are of hands holding strips of film being laced through an old Steenbeck-style editing table. Literary figures from Arthur Rimbaud to William Faulkner and Honoré De Balzac are cited.

We hear philosophical asides from French Eighteenth Century diplomat, The Count De Maistre. We see snippets from westerns and action movies one moment, and then horrific newsreel footage of Isis barbarities or footage from Abu Ghraib the next.

One section is devoted to trains (this includes clips of Buster Keaton in The General) and we also see images from Tod Browning’s horror classic, Freaks. We hear some Scott Walker. We see Laurence Olivier in Hamlet and the naked torture victims crawling towards fresh humiliations in Pasolini’s Salo. Hitchcock’s The Birds and shots of Marilyn Monroe find their way into the mix.

Godard scavenges through archives and libraries, looking for the most telling images or words. He doesn’t show much patience. The archival material he uses is seen only very fleetingly. This is a perfect film for an online era in which audiences are used to processing multiple sources of information and blizzards of imagery.

There are slithers of narrative. Godard imagines a fictional Arab state which doesn’t have oil. Its citizens are brutally suppressed.

The film is full of sententious and often very gnomic one-liners. One key theme here is that the “act of representation almost always involved violence toward the object of representation.” Artists exploit their subjects. Man’s true condition is to “think with his hands.”

Some will find The Image Book incomprehensible and pretentious. It’s a conceptual work that could easily be seen in a gallery rather than a conventional cinema. Some of the political posturing here feels very old fashioned.

The polemics about western intervention in the Arab world sound remarkably similar to the arguments Godard used to make about French colonialist excesses in Algeria. Even some of the formalist devices - the way he continually bares his own devices and reveals his own storytelling tricks - seem a bit creaky.

He was doing exactly the same in all those Maoist films he made in the late 1960s and 19709s. His basic message that “men in power are bloody morons” isn’t exactly revelatory either.

However, again and again, Godard takes familiar material and persuades us look at it in a new way. His use of slow motion makes clips from old Hollywood westerns and thrillers seem very eerie. He is dealing with war and exploitation but this is more than an old Marxist piece of agitprop.

It has moments of unlikely beauty. He makes us aware of the craftsmanship behind old genre pictures. Their dialogue has been taken away and so we concentrate on the imagery instead. He spots illuminating connections between radically different sources.

The Image Book must have taken a small eternity to put together. It is a vast and intricate mosaic of image and sound. It is also surprisingly easy to watch. Godard doesn’t indulge in false nostalgia.

Nearly 60 years after his debut Breathless in 1960, he is still managing to tease, confound and antagonise audiences- and that’s an achievement in itself.