THE IMAGE BOOK. You Have Already Seen This Film

I’ll note this right at the outset: the 5/10 rating was drawn at random. I honestly left it to chance. The same randomness must have governed the creative process of Jean-Luc Godard. The Image Book is not a film. It does not belong to that category of cultural works that can be subjected to any kind of evaluation. Godard’s images are difficult to compare with anything, to measure, or to classify.

Dear reader. You have already seen The Image Book. You know this film perfectly well. You watch it every day while riding in a tram packed to the brim. Morning news from the radio reaches one of your ears; in the other you hear the conversations of the remaining passengers. The background is filled with street noise and a set of random squeaks, screeches, and impacts. On top of that, you are holding smartphones in your hands—windows onto the entire world. You browse fragments of videos on YouTube (a cat clip, the British royal family, animal migration in Africa, bombings in Syria, behind the scenes of the Watergate scandal, yet another protest somewhere—anywhere—against something), you scroll through Instagram photos, and you pass indifferently over a Facebook feed.

You hold a newspaper on your lap. Your eyes jump between paragraphs, photographs, sports results; you glance at an advertisement for laundry detergent and at lottery numbers. Outside the window you see movie posters and giant billboards tv hits, markets logos, and homeless people waking from sleep. Walking dogs, falling leaves, and an overturned trash bin.

Now transfer this entire audiovisual experience onto a cinema screen. Glue together each of these elements. Do not try to give this collage any meaning. Do not follow logic, do not look for similarities or striking differences. Throw everything into one cauldron, pour in paint (any colors you like), add filters in post-production, and spill it all onto a large white sheet. This does not even have to be an intentional spill. You can place the bucket on a busy sidewalk and wait for a passerby to accidentally knock it over. Do not worry if it starts raining during this performance. The result will be identical. Without any obstacles, you will create your own The Image Book. You will achieve exactly the same thing as Jean-Luc Godard. You will be Jean-Luc Godard.

I usually avoid creating negative definitions, but to do justice to The Image Book, one must write not only what this film is, but also what it is not. Godard’s film is not a documentary. It does not recount any specific event or recognizable phenomena, movements, or trends. The Image Book is not reportage; it is not a film essay. The successive images are not connected by a guiding idea, nor are they bound together by any recurring motif—whether in the words displayed on the screen, graphics, film clips (often interrupted by black screens), or images of dogs, cows, and cats. The Image Book is probably closest to impressionistic cinema—an impression made blindly, about everything and about nothing in particular.

I will add one more obvious thing. The Image Book has no plot, no story, no actors, no dramaturgy. It is an anarrative, aideological, apolitical non-work. I would be just as helpless and lacking in tools if I were required to review or analyze a film recorded by a phone camera accidentally left on for ninety minutes, randomly registering everything around it. What if something like that were signed by a great, world-famous director? Stop. This does not need to sound hypothetical. It has already happened. We do, after all, have The Image Book.

If Jean-Luc Godard wanted to conduct an experiment, he did not succeed. The Image Book brings no measurable results—no effects that could be related to anything at all. Perhaps the French director created this cinema-bricolage solely for himself? Perhaps only he can discern a pattern in this torrent of symbols and signs. In that case, The Image Book would be a fulfilled film—cinema made for a drawer, cinema whose only viewer should be its creator alone.