In Berlin Cinemas: Jean-Luc Godard - The Image Book

JLG - as he now calls himself - is 88 years old and has been making films for 60 years. Films that are bulky and with every new Godard we ask ourselves: Is he a little less stiff this time? The Image Book begins with the recording of a hand. The fingers point upwards. It lies on an old-fashioned video editing table. Then a few hands on a cutting table from the 20th century. And then some who write on paper. The rise of the image and the fall of the word. There is no more information, instead a flood of "content". Amen. Connections are made between the colonial period and the Holocaust. And of course there are many film excerpts (are these "trains of thought"?). Footnote: JLG is one who romanticizes the Arab world as much as my father's generation during the 60s: "Let's go to Kabul! That's a beautiful aspect, isn't it? But now the question I ask myself with every Godard film that appeared after 1980. Oh what, after 1970! Nonsense, after 1965! What is it all about? Of course, JLG is a luminary. A man with connections. While he was honoured in Cannes, he simply put an actor on his stage chair. He enthroned himself in the audience. And he conducted a press conference via iPhone. JLG is quite a modern grandpa! And The Image Book? The film loves simplification. A free meditation on language and images and the extinction of certain cultural techniques. Or? And the exotic promised land (the Arab world). It seems to me that The Image Book keeps falling apart. Maybe JLG is trying to keep his material together. But he fails. There are filmmakers who work with similar techniques and hit the bull's eye. But Godard's essay film leaves me cold. Often cleverly done, but opaque. Actors don't appear at all. The Image Book is about monuments stacked on monuments and thoughts packed on thoughts. None of it is completed. This should not deter the Godard disciples of our video store. Those who borrow his early work with shining eyes. After all, nothing in The Image Book looks like old age or routine! Sometimes he even seems to have used coarse-grained YouTube clips. Who knows, maybe this is the future? The YouTube movie? And if everything is "content" and "data", it doesn't matter! And JLG? I did a test once: I watched old movies of him and directly afterwards movies of the hated "Rene Clement" from the same time. I liked Godard's specially chosen ore enemy at least as much. Ätsch!
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator