I guess I am not an audience for whatever Jean-Luc Godard did during his last two decades. Sure, he has occupied a big and irreplaceable spot in the history of cinema along with those legendary filmmakers of the French New Wave during the 1960s, and he did made several masterworks such as “Breathless” (1960) and “Vivre sa vie” (1962), but then he somehow became far less cool and interesting as trying to be cool as before during next several decades, and his later years look rather pathetic compared to how some of his notable colleagues such as Agnès Varda actively lived and worked to the end while he made himself all the more inaccessible and impenetrable with his perpetual self-absorbed attitude.
His late feature film “The Image Book”, which received the “Special Palme d’Or” at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival simply because, in my inconsequential opinion, he was Godard, will definitely frustrate and annoy you a lot if you dislike “Film Socialisme” (2010) and “Goodbye to Language” (2014) as much as I did. As he did in these two previous works of his, he made a supposedly cerebral video essay consisting of many different bits of sound and image, but, seriously, do all of these stuffs actually gel together to mean or signify anything? I still have no idea even at present, so I will just simply describe what I observed and felt when I tried to give it another chance today.
What I noticed first is that the film surely amasses lots of excerpts from a bunch of various films ranging from “Vertigo” (1958) and “Seven Samurai” (1954) to “Johnny Guitar” (1954) and “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom”. Many of these excerpts are often accompanied with baffling intertitles or Godard’s aimless ramblings on many different subjects such as the history of cinema or the Middle East politics, and the result may look interesting for a while, but I eventually found it as frustrating as James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake”. One of my online friends once argued that Joyce actually made a fun of critics and reader in that oddly jumbled work, and now I come to suspect more that Godard’s later works during his last several decades were in fact a sort of one-upmanship jokes on critics and audiences out there.
Anyway, the last part of the film gets a bit more interesting when Godard seems to focus more on not only the Middle East politics but also the numerous obscure Middle East films out there, but you may be still as baffled as before. Sure, it is nice to get some glimpses into the history of Middle East cinema, but I doubt whether this will actually enlighten you to considerable degree, though it will be probably more appreciated by Middle East critics and audiences because of their local background knowledge.
Godard might have been sincerely passionate about Middle East cinema and the Middle East politics, but he somehow gives me the impression of a haughty white European intellectual who has nothing but lots of time and privilege to waste. Sure, he did not have much influence on the Middle East politics, but I must point out that he could have been as active as, say, Martin Scorsese, who, as many of you know, has always been not only very passionate but also quite active about the restoration and preservation of many different movies around the world.
In case of his rambling musing on the Middle East societies, this feels rather condescending at times. Especially when he says the Middle East is more philosophical than the West, he makes the same racially insensitive mistake which hundreds of western intellectuals made on many non-Western countries for more than a century, and whatever he shot along with his cinematographer/co-editor Fabrice Aragno in the Middle East areas do not help much even while glimmering in striking visual quality from time to time.
Even in the end, Godard keep rambling without looking like actually going anywhere. As a matter of fact, the most interesting moment in the film is when Godard seems to sound rather fragile in the middle of another rambling of his a few minutes before the film is finally over, but you cannot be entirely sure about whether he really shows a little more of himself and his declining health to us, and you will not be that surprised when the movie eventually ends with the same image shown at the very beginning.
On the whole, “The Image Book” does not leave much impression on me as only reminding me again of how Godard seemed to be tumbling down to nowhere during his last two decades. After enthusiastically devouring his works during the 1960-70s, I instantly moved onto “In Praise of Love” (2001) and “Notre musique” (2004) as your average young passionate cinephile in the early 2000s, but I only became quite disillusioned instead, and I later agreed with one older cinephile wholeheartedly that Godard was not making cinema anymore.
Even at this moment, I still think so, and the hollow impression of “The Image Book” somehow made me remember more of what a sh*tty prick he was to Varda in Varda’s Oscar-nominated documentary “Faces Places” (2017). Instead of contributing a bit to his old colleague’s little precious project, he deliberately sabotaged her project in addition to blatantly hurting her feelings a lot, and that has been more memorable to me than whatever he did during his last two decades. He was indeed one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of cinema, but, let’s face it, he was not that good as a person in real life, and I personally think what he cruelly did to Varda will be remembered a lot more than his last several works.
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