The Image Book

In Le Livre d’Image, Jean-Luc Godard recycles existing images (films, documentaries, paintings, television archives, etc.), quotes excerpts from books, uses fragments of music. The driving force is poetic rhyme, the association or opposition of ideas, the aesthetic spark through editing, the keystone. The author performs the work of a sculptor. The hand, for this, is essential. He praises it at the start. “There are the five fingers. The five senses. The five parts of the world (…). The true condition of man is to think with his hands. Jean-Luc Godard composes a dazzling syncopation of sequences, the surge of which evokes the violence of the flows of our contemporary screens, taken to a level of incandescence rarely achieved. Crowned at Cannes, the last Godard is a shock film, with twilight beauty.

Cast

Jean-Luc Godard

as Narrator (voice)

Anne-Marie Miéville

as Narrator (voice)

Jean-Pierre Gos

as Narrator (voice)

Buster Keaton

as (archive footage)

Jean Gabin

as (archive footage)

Douglas Fairbanks

as (archive footage)

Jean Marais

as (archive footage)

Jean Cocteau

as (archive footage)

Wallace Beery

as (archive footage)

Jules Berry

as (archive footage)

Reviews

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