Le livre d'image [The Image Book] (Jean-Luc Godard, 2018)

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zedz
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Re: Le livre d'image (Jean-Luc Godard, 2018)

#26 Post by zedz » Wed Dec 12, 2018 2:55 pm

Yeah, it was that or a gong, and Godard doesn’t seem like the J. Arthur Rank type.

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Noiretirc
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Re: Le livre d'image (Jean-Luc Godard, 2018)

#27 Post by Noiretirc » Wed Dec 12, 2018 5:57 pm

There seems to be several good/great reviews out there, yet a few long-time-Godardians here do not like it.

Isn't that the opposite of what usually happens with recent Godard releases?

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Petty Bourgeoisie
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Re: Le livre d'image (Jean-Luc Godard, 2018)

#28 Post by Petty Bourgeoisie » Thu Dec 13, 2018 5:02 am

I haven't seen it yet, but my expectations were diminished by a review that states a high point is when Godard uses the dancing/unmasking scene from Le Plaisir. The first time Godard used this footage in an essay, it seemed profound. The second time, less so. And now a third time?

accatone
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Re: Le livre d'image (Jean-Luc Godard, 2018)

#29 Post by accatone » Thu Dec 13, 2018 5:53 am

I have not seen it yet too. But the Ophüls scene is a great example of what might be interesting here. It probably was already in the Histoire(s) but in my opinion it had its high point at the end of De l’origine du XXIe siècle (2000). Ophüls (personal -lify) story (Le Plaisir) connected to the story (small and large) of the 20th century is painting with a heavy brush (maybe thats what zedz meant with banging the bin) but very funny and interesting and to my knowledge unique in the world of cinephilia. A story told from inside the story, unfinished as history itself, thinking with ones hands as Godard likes to quote Rougemont. Personaly i find the quotation of the Plaisir scene (a film i have seen of course) and the story of Ophüls (that i know and read of as well) coming together in the De l’origine du XXIe siècle much more interesting than the film Le Plaisir itself. It opens doors to think about. The dancing/unmasking scene may resembles Godards (The Idiot) own "dance with cinema" at a very old age facing mortality. One could even go back and say it resembles the final scene of À bout de souffle i.e. the death of Michel Poiccard.
As for the reviews i have read, especially with some, often to me unknown online "platforms", i must also admit to have found them very boring, repetitive and often fanboyish in a very flat way. But there were some texts over here in quality papers/feuilltons that worked out some interesting details. I will try to see the film asap anyway.

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domino harvey
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Re: Le livre d'image (Jean-Luc Godard, 2018)

#30 Post by domino harvey » Thu Dec 13, 2018 11:53 am

Petty Bourgeoisie wrote:
Thu Dec 13, 2018 5:02 am
I haven't seen it yet, but my expectations were diminished by a review that states a high point is when Godard uses the dancing/unmasking scene from Le Plaisir. The first time Godard used this footage in an essay, it seemed profound. The second time, less so. And now a third time?
This is one of the fundamental problems of the entire film (and I think it only being the third time he's used this clip is a generous assessment), and why I wouldn't trust any critic trying to assess this without having familiarity with Godard's other films of this ilk (many of which are not in the periphery of mainstream critics, period). Imagine a positive review of Jurassic World from a reviewer who'd never seen Jurassic Park and is just delighted at seeing dinosaurs on-screen

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DarkImbecile
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Re: Jean-Luc Godard

#31 Post by DarkImbecile » Sat Jan 05, 2019 2:09 pm

Amy Taubin interviewed Fabrice Aragno, Godard's cinematographer on Le livre d'image, as part of Film Comment's cover story on the film in their latest issue.

Stefan Andersson
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Re: Jean-Luc Godard

#32 Post by Stefan Andersson » Fri Jan 25, 2019 3:43 pm

Godard interviewed on Le Livre d´image:
https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/jean-lu ... -like-ants

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Noiretirc
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Re: Le livre d'image (Jean-Luc Godard, 2018)

#33 Post by Noiretirc » Fri Jan 25, 2019 5:01 pm

Thanks for that. Maybe this is his last film? (He looked frail on that Cannes face-time.)

J-L.G.: We're free to do or not to do anything. Or to be unable. And I'm also tired, I don't want to anymore or I don't know. Because if I won the lottery, I wouldn't make anymore films.
D.: Really?
J-L.G.: Yes. Maybe a small film, something, but I don't know. No, still... There's a point when one must stop because afterwards it's...it's no longer the same thing.

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knives
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Re: Le livre d'image (Jean-Luc Godard, 2018)

#34 Post by knives » Sat Jan 26, 2019 8:19 pm

I'm a bit surprised he made these last two to be honest because he already sold off most of his stuff and has seemed ready for death for a while.

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hearthesilence
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Re: Le livre d'image (Jean-Luc Godard, 2018)

#35 Post by hearthesilence » Sun Jan 27, 2019 3:04 pm

I dug this, but I should add that for me it came off as a new installment of Histoire(s) du cinéma, so I didn't have the same grievances about going back to the same scenes from Johnny Guitar and Le Plaisir - it might as well have been revisiting themes from earlier installments of the same work. (In the case of Le Plaisir, it was especially poignant when used as the ending to this film.)

What really makes the film is the last part, and given what's happened in the world in recent years, it's a point that really needed to be made - paraphrasing but as it's mentioned in the film, the Middle East has become the driving force behind global politics, and yet our grasp of the Middle East remains poor and simplistic. (I shouldn't even be referring to it as the Middle East - as Godard has pointed out, everything just gets lumped together as a two-dimensional region of the world, as if culturally and politically there was little distinction between countries and within them as well.) There's also the convincing suggestion that film history's role in this is vital - film is often praised as a universal art form that's understood everywhere, and yet film history is shaped more from the Western perspective than any other.

Aesthetically, this was charming. It's a video work, a very dated medium, and Godard goes hard in that direction. I just read an interview with his technical collaborator, Fabrice Aragno, who's credited with many roles, and he mentioned that Godard more or less made this film with his old pre-HD (maybe even pre-digital) video equipment. He wanted to preserve all the quirks with that obsolete equipment. The changing aspect ratio is something the console does with ALL playback, regardless of format and aspect ratio - when you fire up the video, and it takes a second or two to correctly interpret the aspect ratio, but it plays back picture and sound even before it does. Aragno was given the video tapes and asked to basically make a digital master from it. It was more than a blueprint though - all the fiddling with picture, color saturation, and everything else was to remain intact. Aragno even tried to upgrade clips from presumably new Blu-Ray and HD reissues, but Godard told him to undo all of that work - the degradation that comes with video was important to him.

I really hate video. Its failings has none of the grace or pleasing character of film. (Think about when you oversaturate, overexpose or underexpose film and what happens when the same faults are done in video.) It's still ugly here, but far more than Lynch in Inland Empire, Godard leans hard into those faults, and like Lynch's ugly looking work, I find it hilarious. Not in a condescending way - it's genuinely charming to me, and it's an artist not giving two fucks about the ugliness, and so I'm more than willing to look at the result from their perspective.

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Noiretirc
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Re: Le livre d'image (Jean-Luc Godard, 2018)

#36 Post by Noiretirc » Sun Jan 27, 2019 6:07 pm

hearthesilence, may I ask you if the sporadic/arbitrary subtitling bothered/baffled you? (I have not had an opportunity to see this yet.)

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hearthesilence
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Re: Le livre d'image (Jean-Luc Godard, 2018)

#37 Post by hearthesilence » Sun Jan 27, 2019 7:39 pm

Noiretirc wrote:
Sun Jan 27, 2019 6:07 pm
hearthesilence, may I ask you if the sporadic/arbitrary subtitling bothered/baffled you? (I have not had an opportunity to see this yet.)
No but I know some French and was able to fill in some gaps. The subtitling really is sparse but it’s possible they tell enough. Honestly it felt like film literacy was far more important - it helps to know the films he’s referencing ahead of time.

stepps
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Re: Le livre d'image (Jean-Luc Godard, 2018)

#38 Post by stepps » Thu Feb 28, 2019 10:35 am

To provide a different view to some others here, I have seen various post 80s Godard works. I saw Image Book on its single day showing in my local cinema (absolutely baffles me that it had one day only, it just signals that the exhibitor doesnt think it's worthy). I've been trying to get hold of a copy ever since and have seen reference to Kino Lorber releasing a bluray in May.

As to the charge of it retreading, the fifth section that takes up almost the entire second half of the movie is new ground.

Visually I felt the movie was unabandoned, it was simply a joy to watch.

It was also a very dark movie, an old man's movie, that reminded me of the peinturas nigras.

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hearthesilence
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Re: Le livre d'image (Jean-Luc Godard, 2018)

#39 Post by hearthesilence » Thu Feb 28, 2019 2:05 pm

stepps wrote:
Thu Feb 28, 2019 10:35 am
As to the charge of it retreading, the fifth section that takes up almost the entire second half of the movie is new ground.
It's quite stirring, possibly the best bit of film criticism I've witnessed in a long time. It's stunning no one else here's mentioned it.

accatone
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Re: Le livre d'image (Jean-Luc Godard, 2018)

#40 Post by accatone » Tue Mar 12, 2019 5:44 pm

Just found out that for the German cinema release there will be a german dub/voiceover made by JLG himself, very nice:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x2jLCoycgM

accatone
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Re: Le livre d'image (Jean-Luc Godard, 2018)

#41 Post by accatone » Thu Apr 04, 2019 8:47 am

For those in France / Germany, the film will be shown on arte TV April 24. It will be available for streaming too up untill June
https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/082224-000-A/bildbuch/

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Noiretirc
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Re: Le livre d'image (Jean-Luc Godard, 2018)

#42 Post by Noiretirc » Wed Apr 17, 2019 4:20 pm

(Kino Lorber Blu May 21st. I bet this has been posted elsewhere, hasn't it?)

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Le livre d'image (Jean-Luc Godard, 2018)

#43 Post by therewillbeblus » Fri May 31, 2019 12:59 am

Well I really liked this. Sure, a lot of the thematic material and visualizations are recycled, but recycling isn’t so bad when one takes the familiar and shows it a bit differently to strike the same chords in new places (or new chords in the same places?). Perhaps it’s just that I never tire of Godard using collages of images and verbal analysis to spark deep cognitive processes and critical thinking. He takes some of Histoire(s) du cinéma, Notre Musique, and a bunch of other works, waters down some of it, condenses parts, funnels others through different cues, all using the same tools of cinema, to create something no one else can. I agree with others that the second half of the film worked much better than the first, perhaps not treading completely new ground but finding new combinations of specific images and sounds to create a piece of art that stands within Godard’s oeuvre as well as on its own as a powerful statement, of which hearthesilence perfectly outlined in his post upthread. Some of these ideas are presented more clearly here than other Godard films, and I found myself having a few strong emotional reactions at times, responses the director doesn’t often go for or elicit in me. I appreciate how often I read people here and elsewhere passionately defending a different late period visual essay from Godard as a personal favorite, which cements the subjectivity of art and Godard’s ability to reach different people via similar methods tweaked just enough to create a new effect. Most of all, it highlights how what may be a dud for one person could be a masterpiece to another, the key to accessing what Godard has to offer, and if this is the case I’ll take however many more movies the man has in him, recycled or not.

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knives
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Re: Le livre d'image [The Image Book] (Jean-Luc Godard, 2018)

#44 Post by knives » Mon Nov 11, 2019 7:06 pm

I'll bring more sour grapes here. As the first part makes abundantly clear Godard sees today as a reflection of the '90s and this as a reflection of For Ever Mozart discussing the new Balkans. Ignoring for a second how shallow this idea is the set up causes the the basic technique Godard presents to come across as motivated primarily by resources. He can't afford to be the Godard of the '90s building his own tanks and instead scurries to a bad redux of his cinema tales. That could offer up an interesting bit of self reflextivity or at least a state of the arts address, but the film acts as if nothing is the matter making it's own cheapness distracting rather than enlightening.

That leaves the film and its repetitions open to derision as gormless babble lacking any distinction. Why not just watch For Ever Mozart and just pretend it is in Afghanistan?

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