The Image Book is a 2018 Swiss avant-gardeessay film directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Initially titled Tentative de bleu and Image et parole, in December 2016 Wild Bunch co-chief Vincent Maraval stated that Godard had been shooting the film for almost two years "in various Arab countries, including Tunisia" and that it is an examination of the modern Arabic world. Godard told Séance magazine that he was shooting without actors but the film would have a storyteller. It was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. Although it did not win the official prize, the jury awarded it the first "Special Palme d'Or" in the festival's history. According to Godard, the film is intended to be shown on TV screens with speakers at a distance, in small spaces rather than in regular cinemas. It was shown in this way during its first run at the Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne in November 2018.
Synopsis
In line with the rest of Godard's late-period oeuvre, The Image Book is composed ofa series of films, paintings and pieces of music tied together with narration and additional original footage by Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville. Similar to his earlier series Histoire du cinéma, the film examines the history of cinema and its inability to recognise the atrocities of the 20th and 21st centuries, the responsibilities of the filmmaker and the advances in political discourse with the introduction of consumer-grade digital cameras and iPhones.
Reception
The film has an 89% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 75 reviews, with an average rating of 7.49/10. The critics’ consensus on it being stated as, “Potentially insurmountable for viewers not attuned to the director's wavelength, The Image Book is typically confounding - and ultimately rewarding - late-period Godard.” It also holds a 76/100 on Metacritic. Richard Brody of The New Yorker gave high praise to the film, seeing it as "a sort of epilogue or sequel" to Godard's earlier work Histoire du cinéma, and stated that the film centers around one theme: "the inadequate depiction of what he calls 'the Arab world' and, in particular, the dearth of iconic movie images from the Middle East—which he presents as a failure of the cinema itself, as well as of the world at large." For Bilge Ebiri, film critic for The Village Voice, he was engaged by the film in its editing of footage taken from varying sources, but he also shared an initial bafflement toward the film and the meaning of its chosen imagery until he conversed with Egyptian critic Joseph Fahim; he shared to Ebiri that with the film's informed use of images from Middle Eastern cinema, Godard was attempting to deconstruct the Western narrative given to Arab societies and the Western influence on how cinema's history is recorded. Fahim added that "The images introduced by Godard in here are unknown to most Western critics who waxed poetic about the film."
