Movie

The Image Book

2018 · 88 min

A dense, hypnotic collage of images and sounds that demands close attention and rewards it with unsettling beauty.

Tagline: Nothing but silence. Nothing but a revolutionary song.
Overview: 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.

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How it feels

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Tone: darkstrength 2 of 3
melancholicstrength 2 of 3
earneststrength 2 of 3
satiricalstrength 1 of 3
Pacing: slow-burn, 1 of 4, from slow-burn to relentless
Attention: demanding, 4 of 4, from background-friendly to demanding
Themes: memory
violence
media
art
politics
Places: None
Era: contemporary
Audience: adult
Form: nonlinear
documentary
ensemble
Content intensity: Gore mild
Language mild
Violence mild
Sex mild

All scales, 0 to 10

Scales, 0 to 10
Scale	Value	0 to 10
Action	1
Horror	2
Humour	2
Realism	6
Romance	1
Tension	4
Darkness	7
Complexity	10
Emotional weight	8

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Details

Genres: documentary, drama
Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard
Written by: Jean-Luc Godard
Starring: Jean-Luc Godard, Anne-Marie Miéville, Jean-Pierre Gos, Buster Keaton, Jean Gabin, Douglas Fairbanks, Jean Marais, Jean Cocteau
Runtime: 88 min
Country: France, Switzerland, Iran
Languages: English, Arabic, French

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The Image Book

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