Note: This film review was released for the theatrical release of "Bildbuch" on 4 April. The film is now on television for the first time: Arte shows it on April 24 at 11.15 pm.
"These are the five fingers, the five senses, the five continents, the five fairy fingers, all together forming the hand, thinking with the hands is the true purpose of man." Summoning, Godard begins his picture book. One sees a cutting table, hands: A quotation from "Histoire (s) du Cinéma", in which Godard manually rearranged film history in 1988. The copying and assembling of film snippets has established his reputation as a cinema philosopher.
"Bildbuch" was awarded the Palme d'Or Spécial in Cannes last year. At the age of 88, Godard has now recorded a new voice-over for a German-language original version. His voice now sends out the typical Godard sound in an unusually understandable way, giving an alarming account of the state of the world.
photo gallery
6 pictures
"Picture book": Beyond understanding"Bildbuch" is a five-part Orpheic journey to the pictures of the cinema. One can imagine Godard as the mythical hero who descends into the underworld and tears the cinema pictures from oblivion. An emblematic beginning is an index finger that rises admonishingly and meaningfully, a detail from Leonardo da Vinci's painting "John the Baptist", which later finds its echo in the Breton comic maid Bécassine. Then Part 1, "Remakes," is the central term for Godard's understanding of the story.
In an almost painful retrospective that brings terror, morality and love together, the images blend together like an endless imaginary museum. Short scenes call "People on Sunday", the "Great White Shark", "Apocalypse Now", "Dr. Mabuse", the "Rules of the Game". His own films also cited Godard, Lemmy Caution, the "Carabinieri". There are also documentary death pictures, the mushroom cloud, IS flags, concentration camp bodies. Then there are pictures of the sea and a colorful sunset, children playing in Tunis. Fabrice Aragno, the cinematographer and producer of picture book, filmed her.
In many layers, quotes, notes, music and Godard's voice overlay this assemblage of images. The meanings multiply, collide, collapse. "Bildbuch" is a discontinuous, experimental flow of film, which deliberately eludes intellectual understanding.
"Picture Book"
Original title: Le livre d'image
International Title: The Image Book
Switzerland, France 2018
Director and screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard
Performers: Jean-Luc Godard, Dimitri Basil, Buster Keaton
Distribution: Grand film
Length: 85 minutes
FSK: from 12 years
Start: 4th April 2019
In the fifth part, "La Région centrale" (quoted by the avant-gardist Michael Snow), the historical longing for Orient comes to the fore. The "happy Arabia" and the "lost paradises" are for Godard, who is also a romanticist, counter images to the present view of the West in the Middle East. In an inland narrative about the fictitious state of Dofa, taken from an 1984 novel by the anarchist Albert Cossery, he says from the off: "If you ask me, I'm always on the side of the bombs." He quotes Hicham, a character of the novel, but at the same time there is a dazzling play in the incorporation of the quotation about who is speaking here. It is not always clear how Godard might have meant it.
Despite the monumental musealism enjoyed by the co-founder of the Nouvelle Vague worldwide, Bildbuch is neither narcissistic nor overbearing. Among the quotes, the author's concept dissolves, they let the author of the film in the background. This is anti-authorial and anti-authoritarian. Like a masterful picture jockey, Godard samples the fragments of the work into a rhizomatic composition that only the viewer can put together. The intention becomes clear above all on the meta-level: Bildbuch brings to light the mediality of the pictures, the film is at the same time criticism and celebration of the image and image become world.
The trailer for the movie "Bildbuch"
Grand movie
"In reality, only the fragment is authentic," Godard quotes at the end of the film with an increasingly quavering voice Bert Brecht from Peter Weiss' "Aesthetics of the Resistance". It is closest to the innermost function of the production act, a production that corresponds to breathing. The breathing voice of Godard, which at the end overlaps German and French from all corners of the cinema and discharges in a huge cough, is the actual medium of his film.