The Image Book

Jean-Luc Godard's Image Book (2019) is a fantastically complex collage of film clips, laconic aphorisms, enigmatic intertitles, and bits and pieces of accompanying music.  The film is 86 minutes long, but it will take you all your life, if you are so inclined, to watch, study, and understand.  Whether there is something in this film worth laboring over is not wholly clear to me.  This analysis must be regarded as purely provisional, preliminary, and incomplete -- indeed, there is something about the film that defeats any notion of a final analysis or last word on this movie.

Walter Benjamin speculated about the possibility of creating a work of art wholly derived from quotations from other works.  With the exception of a three or four minutes of new footage -- most notably some shots of Godard's fingers manipulating an editing machine to cut film -- every image in the picture comes from some other source.  (And, it may be, that the pictures of an old man's fingers laboriously operating a film editing machine come from other late movies by this director, possibly Goodbye to Language.)  A cineaste will recognize about half of the film sequences that comprise the movie -- I was able to identify, perhaps, a third of the footage. Godard's strategies in making this collage are so politically and thematically dense that knowing where the pictures originate adds an important dimension to the film -- but he doesn't annotate the images until the very end and, then, only incompletely.  On all levels the viewer, even if approaching the film with a generous heart, encounters obstacles -- in fact at the end of the movie Godard actually shows the chain-link fence and the daunting "no trespassing" sign with which Citizen Kane begins (as well as a similar sequence in some French film unknown to me).  The pictures zip by too fast to be contemplated -- you are always "catching up" to Godard's vertigo-inducting mélange of punning, multi-lingual (Joycean) subtitles, the pictures, and the aphoristic statements on the soundtrack that the pictures seemingly illustrate -- although I may have this backward, perhaps, the aphorisms illustrate the pictures.  The relationship between foreground and background information is perpetually shifting -- sometimes, it seems that the soundtrack is foreground; other times, the pictures are obviously more important than the words or music; most of the time a hierarchical relationship between the different ways that the film means simply is too complex too articulate.  Some of the pictures are horrific and leave a shadow darkening other images that are obviously light-hearted, fragments of movie musicals or comedies -- the range of emotions triggered by the images and the soundtrack is as broad as possible and this also disorients the viewer.  Finally, Godard's growled bearish asides on the soundtrack often seem to be gibberish -- he says something that is neatly balanced and aphoristic in structure, but you generally have no idea what he means or to what he is referring.  Hot-button political issues heave into view for a moment, but, then, are dismissed with dizzying rapidity.  The viewer's experience is one of playing "catch up, chasing a significance or paraphrase that remains always fugitive.  With these caveats, I make several observations:

First, Godard regards images as meaningless, without any significance, unless their context is defined somehow.  An image can have any number of meanings depending on the way it is used.  In the modern world, images are vorhanden -- that is, to use pheonomologial terms "on hand" to be used as equipment in the world.  The sense derives from Martin Heidegger.  Godard uses the concept of images being "on hand" as a kind of equipment (for either good or evil) by physically showing hands.  The emblematic image in the movie is a hand pointing skyward with fist clenched -- this image is extracted from a painting by Leonardo da Vinci.  The hand means that images are tools that can be manipulated (within the word "manipulated", we hear the world "hand" -- the mano in Spanish).  Godard calls the hand a "fairy with five fingers" and the notion of a hand-made film, a film that is manually constructed of images is central to the picture.  An image is without impact unless someone takes it in his or her hands.

The images of hands, particularly Leonard da Vinci's skyward-pointing finger and fist, punctuate the film and divide it into two parts.  After introducing the hand motif, Godard devises five sections, each of them enumerated and associated with a quotation or title.  The five sections equate to the hand's five fingers and may also have other thematic associations (for instance, the five senses) that I am unable to divine.  The five enumerated sequences, then, end in a hand-montage that signifies the principal division in the movie -- this division which occurs at about the half-way mark is between the essay-like thematic collages in the first point of the movie and, something, that is nominally narrative, that is, plotted in the film's second part.  The second half of The Image Book has an elliptical plot but also invokes imagery of the Middle East -- "Joyous Arabia" as a title tells us.  This imagery is avowedly "orientalist" to use Edward Said's notion that the West has constructed a series of caricatures and stereotypes of the Middle East that it, then, treats as politically accurate and, therefore, instrumental -- Godard's Arabia is palm fronds,  gorgeous calligraphy and the Koran, picturesque villages on the Mediterranean littoral, oasis palms and mud-brick houses, brightly colored paintings basking in the glorious sunshine, genies, harem girls, and, of course, terrorist (there are several images of horrific explosions).  At the conclusion of the "Joyous Arabia" sequence, Godard lists sources on a black title but the film doesn't end -- it has a deeply personal and moving coda, a l'envoi to the viewer and to the world of images.

The first section of the "five fingers" portion of The Image Book is entitled "Remakes".  This collage argues that we understand the world by using images to "remake" it.   There is no original or radically first perception of something -- we always see reality as a remake of some movie or TV show that we have earlier watched.  Images are continuously recycled.  The pictures cut together in this sequence include US soldiers interrogating a wounded Vietnamese girl (obviously a predicate for a similar scene in Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket -- which Godard does not show.)  We see shots from Pasolini's Salo:  naked youths on leashes panting like dogs in front of their Fascist tormentors.  ISIS hurls prisoners into a canal; Kim Novak dives into the water in Vertigo but is saved by Jimmy Stewart.  Some girls get out of a taxi cab and approach the camera; in Murnau's Last Laugh some women are squired to a waiting taxi by Emil Jannings chivalrously holding an umbrella for them.  Sterling Haydn and Joan Crawford talk about lies and love in a clip from Johnny Guitar interrupted by empty frames of black.  Some patterns are visible -- for instance, Godard shows the harrowing end of Paisan with the Germans shoving the captured partisans into the Po River to rhyme this image with Kim Novak's plunge into the San Francisco bay and the ISIS executions (and possibly with Salo's portrait of atrocities and dying Vietnamese girl in what seems to be documentary footage), but it's also maddeningly obtuse and oblique.

The second finger is called "Le Soirees of St. Petersburg" and seems to be about images of war.  Indeed, the sequence begins with a famous shot from Sergei Bondarchuk's War and Peace, Natasha's first appearance, and, then, shows a ballroom sequence, cavalry charges, and battle scenes from that movie -- this imagery is heavily manipulated, much of it colorized with blinding oranges and blues leaking all over the screen.  We see little boys playing at war -- an image that will return at the end of the film in a different series of shots concluding "Joyous Arabia."  People are tortured. Bodies lie in heaps.  On the soundtrack, we hear citations from King Lear. (Cordelia is like the dying Vietnamese woman.)  A young woman is raped and speared, a shot from Mizoguchi's Ugetsu.  A man sits on the edge of a cold sea, back to us and holding a gun -- a dead woman is sprawled across the frame behind him.  War is one of film's great and perpetual subjects.  All war films remake one another.  At the end of sequence, we see rabbits gunned down in Renoir's Rules of the Game (the rabbit hunt scene) and a crocodile chases water-birds in a psychedelic-colored swamp -- nature also is war. 

The third finger is gentle and lyric -- it's a study of how trains have been used in films.  This is the most esthetically rewarding sequence of the movie and, in fact, I think it's a kind of masterpiece.  The first images in film history were Lumiere brothers Actualities showing trains pulling in to stations and Godard plays on all of the implications that trains have had for film and narrative:  we see Soviet armored trains (possibly from the movie Reds), corpses next to a train track, Nazi trains with gaunt, ghostly Jews peeping from them, Japanese triumphal trains, romantic partings in train stations, trains entering tunnels and ancient footage of trains thundering through great blizzards.  Westerns are mined for pictures of trains in the Southwestern deserts and gunslingers riding in passenger cars.  (Recall 3:10 to Yuma, a film that Godard doesn't cite).  Godard states his thesis in the middle of this section -- when something is no longer needed for survival it can become the subject of contemplation, that is, an art object.  (Trains no longer are wholly instrumental -- they are now sliding into becoming the subject of art.)  Godard reminds us that no citation is neutral:  "The words of Goethe," he says enigmatically, "become terrible when said on a small Russian railway" -- referring to some atrocity that I (fortunately) don't know (or, perhaps, an imaginary atrocity.)  The sequence ends with a glorious shot -- a man  trotting along side a train that is departing beyond a thicket of trees and brush.  The image is an elegy for every sequence in film history in which someone wistfully watched a train bearing away from them the object of their desires or carrying a young man toward his future destiny.  (For instance, the train at the end of I Vitelloni, not in this film -- my citation of these movies to which reference is not directly made in The Image Book shows how the picture works on the imagination:  it causes the viewer to supplement the collage on-screen with remembered images more significant to the viewer then the rather obscure stuff actually shown.)

The fourth finger is called "The Spirit of the Laws".  It's about law and violence, beginning with a riot scene from Peter Watkins' film on the Paris Commune, then, showing barricades, images of Montesquieu and his book, Henry Fonda as young Abe Lincoln reading the law in an idyllic meadow or by the river.  The law implies execution and we see Ingrid Bergman as Joan of Arc burned at the stake, the execution of Charles the First, Fonda as the tormented priest in The Wrong Man, and a sinister Judge in Dreyer's Day of Wrath.  Less obviously related to the theme of law and its execution are images of the Columbine shooting (from Gus van Sant's Elephant), men buried up to their necks in sand with horses thundering around from  Eisenstein's Que Viva Mexico, an man using a switchblade to kill a woman that he loves, and a grinning pinhead from Freaks intercut with shots from a porno film.  Godard tells us that "Everything done in Europe is done by Europe" -- he cites his own Weekend for a shot of burning cars and corpses.  "All is grace", the country priest says in Bresson's film of the diary of such a priest, pronouncing one kind of law (and referring us back to Fonda in the Hitchcock movie) and, then, we see tanks rumbling through a shadowy, green forest. Where there is law there is virtue and terror -- rioters rush through the streets of Athens, a reprise of the Paris Commune images with which the sequence began.  With law comes cruelty and the knowledge of sin (perhaps, the meaning of Bresson - Bernanos reference).  But law is the foundation for human society.  A lawless society can't make films.

The fifth finger, named after Michael Snow's experimental film La Region Centrale, is the shortest and most poetic.  Snow set a mechanical device on a barren hilltop in northern Onatario and, then, attached a camera to the machine.  The machine was programmed to undertake various tracking, zooming, and rotating motions -- filming the hills and forests around the camera without human intervention.  Several minutes of the film are cited in The Image Book while Godard mutters about the extinction of the species.  He says that nonetheless "we must learn to love those capable of doing this." -- That is, destroying entirely our natural world and making extinct the animals that live with us in the wilds upon which we have encroached.  We see a woman's face.  In my view, the "central region" is the human heart -- the place from which originates both the mandate of love and the will to power that has destroyed nature around us. 

The movie is punctuated at this point with another montage of hands.  Then, "Joyous Arabia" begins.  This part of the film is actually an adaptation of a 1986 novel by the Egyptian writer Albert Cossery -- Cossery spent most of his life in Paris and wrote I French. Godard shows various paintings of Moroccan and Algerian scenes, then, haltingly narrates a story about a fictional country named Dofa, somewhere near the Persian Gulf, a place without oil and, therefore, of no interest to the United States.  Godard intends some kind of commentary on the so-called Arab Spring, the wave of revolutions that toppled rulers in the Maghraib.  But the story is very unclear and hard to follow:  it seems to involve a subversive organization rebelling against Ben Kedem, the country's ruler.  Ben Kedem's younger cousin is Samantar, who may support the rebels.  This part of the film contains several iconic shots of turbulent wildly blue seas, a home on the edge of the ocean where rebels seem to be plotting and an older man in a red fez, probably representing Ben Kedem.  The revolt against Ben Kedem fails despite some car bombings.  Godard intones:  Everyone wants to be King, no one wants to be Faust -- implying I think that Godard who has dispensed with King Lear in the earlier part of the film is like Faust, searching through the images of his youth, looking for a picture to which he will say:  Remain with me.  Thou art so fair.  But the restless nature of the film seems to show this as an impossibility.  As far as I can determine, Ben Kedem abdicates, confessing his crimes to Samantar. (The pictures of a beautiful young man who I took to be Samantar -- and who is, I think, an image for Samantar is actually Albert Cossery.) Samantar leads a "counter-revolution of children" using "dynamite discovered at the derrick".  We see boys running and leaping, playing at war, and a child rolling an ecstatically red hoop across the seaside dunes.  Revolution is now a children's game.

Here is where the film seems to end with another montage of hands.  But Godard isn't willing to let it go.  He cites Ann Mieville's book Image et Parole -- something like "for the world to be better... earth, abundance, letters which overload reality... we must listen."  (Godard supervised the English subtitles and he often translates statements made in French only in fragments -- this is in keeping with one the film's final citations:  "Brecht says 'only a fragment bears the mark of reality'.")  Godard's voice is increasingly hoarse.  He says that when "the I talks to myself, then, I produce the words of another."  The last sequence is intensely moving -- Godard cites Ophuls Le Plaisir (the first de Maupassant story "The Mask":  a man is dancing wildly with several young women.  The man wears a mask.  Suddenly, he whirls about and falls down.  One of the young women with whom he was dancing stares at him horrified -- her beautiful smitten image ends the film.  On the soundtrack Godard is making a phlegmy congested statement about "youth" and "ardent hope."  Godard doesn't show the next shot in Ophuls film -- someone removing the mask from the dying dancer to show that the bland, youthful disguise conceals an elderly man.  This is Godard's comment on this film and his relationship to it -- to live, he has told us, is to produce.  But the dance is now potentially fatal.  A mask turns us into an image but, one day, the mask must also must fall away.