RIP Train: Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022) & THE IMAGE BOOK (2018)

 

End of Cinema, 50 years later...

(Bela Lugosi looking down on this series of scattered movie clips, with the occasional but repeated intertitle like "1: REMAKES" even though there arent any, like a drunken Godard was flipping channels on his mega-cable package): Look at them... all of those cinemas... with their own... personalities...

Or, the longest and most deranged-poetic Alamo Draft-house Pre-show ever - for a movie about Trains, apparently.

Ok, trains, we have something to tether ourselves to here... as for the region of Dofa where Godard is often in whispers ruminating on political strife and corruptions and slaughter of a kind... shrug.

Well... it is pretty, even if it's there simply because... ocean. Waves. Serenity. Or madness?

Here's what I can tell you that I gather from the Swiss-Franco anarchic poetic Madman on his final outting: I don't know what all of this means. The Image Book is less of a documentary or a video essay than it is, like several of Godard's late era work up to and including the Histor(ies) of Cinema (where even putting 'ies' in parentheses is part of the semantic goof or provocation) that the idea is to throw a lot at the proverbial wall and that some of it may stick and some of it may shock you. At the least for me it was a pleasure to not see like I did with Goodbye to Language 3D the equivalent of someone poking me in the eye and 20 minutes of home video of a dude's dog (not saying his dog isn't in this but maybe 30 seconds at most, but I digress... can I digress here?)

I can vibe with many of the film clip choices that Godard plays around with here, and sometimes it appears like a carefully crafted but still precisely scattershot series of classic bits from some films that Godard maybe wrote about back in his Cashiers days (Johnny Guitar and Vertigo) and some not (Freaks and yep there are some of the more notorious bits of Salo 120 days of Sodom too), and it creates this impression of a delirious cinematic fresco, like action and romance and intrigue - Bergman reaching for an object in Notorious for example - and even if I cant get the full meaning of how his words spoken in whispery/gravely narration add up, it's still arresting on a pure stylistic level.

Where it loses me more and where it feels like I should have the Press Notes or footnotes to keep up, and that shouldn't ever be the case for anybody, is when in the 2nd half (or fuck what half, isn't it more like 5/8ths I dunno) when he gets into more of the material around an Arab region called Dofa I think, and while it's clear he knows what he is talking about, it's mostly from his own perspective. In other words, there is a story about political strife and corruptions and even what sounds like religious persecution and murder, but it's obtuse. There was a time Godard said he believed a movie should have a beginning middle and end but not necessarily in that order, but now it's less like that and more like he had an assortment of a few dozen words he had from playing Wordle and threw up the words in the air and arranged them at random.

I think there could be something to Godard telling this story, or even just the horrific and tragic events, of Arab disagreements even down to who is who and what to believe about what's happening (does it skirt up to the line of anti antisemitism... uh, maybe?) But there's nothing here for one to latch on to who is who - if I knew about these people before or even the circumstances of the strife then I might engage on an intellectual level. Emotionally, it's still nill.. so what's accentuated is experiencing like disassociative identity disorder in action, with brilliantly harsh colors and hard edits, and it becomes so much while not being a lot substantively. Or, no that's not true, Godard is making a few deep or true points, in his odd poetic verbiage. But since it's all chaos, nothing can stick for me.

I was so flabbergasted by this i took a photo with my phone...

He even has echoes to some of his past movies, some groundbreaking (Week End), some less so (King Lear), and I dont think he means it as some grand summation about what Cinema means, to him or even to wider culture, or about how violence or devastation is seen or processed on screen or in other media (internet videos more than TV news is where he seemed to get the footage of unrest and destruction/bombs in these Middle East regions). It's not a totally flat or uninteresting experience, which I can't say about all Late era Godard. It doesn't make The Image Book any less frustrating at some/many points (I did did a real laugh out loud to the intercutting between one of the people from Freaks laughing at a video of someone eating... ass), and being bewildered isn't the same thing as being in awe.

All this said, and admitting this didn't work for me on the whole, considering this as Godard's final... long-form musing, I'll kind of miss what he did with these free-form works. It's not that I can't see any other filmmakers or essayists or (dare I say) crackpots with Adobe premiere and a decent Canon 5D or whatever camera couldn't make one of these, but it's hard for me to think of any other filmmaker getting the distribution Godard got, even in his limited art-house spaces and on an international level; many of these films of the past 20 years, even the ones with something close to a "story" like with actors and staging like In Praise of Love got screened at festivals and to mostly wide acclaim by critics probably wiser or just more "into" this than me.

Rest in fragmented montage, Jean Luc.