THE IMAGE BOOK
Celebrated French New Wave auteur Jean-Luc Godard returns with a blistering cinematic collage pondering the state of the world through a terrifying barrage of film clips, readings, and sound.
Few filmmakers ignite such fervor in cinema with a new release than Jean-Luc Godard. During his legendary run in the 60s, Godard reshaped classic Hollywood tropes and genres with intellectual musings and meta-commentary for the international art house scene. Not one to rest on his laurels, during the 21st century he has continued to push the boundaries of what the moving picture can offer and insight in a viewer, including his monumental experiment with 3D in PFF23’s GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE. With his latest confounding, and often horrific, mosaic from this year’s Cannes competition, Godard has quite possibly achieved his greatest foray into “pure cinema” by denouncing all notions of narrative and conventional methods while exploring its relevance in a world of disarray and war. Grainy YouTube videos of ISIS are mashed with the nude men and women of Salò, the romance of old Hollywood starlets is marred by explosions and a bombastic soundtrack, that is before the film torments by cutting to black at will. It is an exhilarating and harrowing experience that would never work unless viewers sat in a large, dark room with strangers enrapt by these larger than life images and something tells us Godard wouldn’t have it any other way.
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