The Image Book

Wisconsin Premiere • experimental • France, Switzerland • 2018 • DCP • French with English subtitles • 85 MIN

section: New International Cinema

Winner of the first-ever Special Palme d’Or at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, the latest cine-essay from living legend Jean-Luc Godard appropriates all manner of found footage in order to reconcile the history of the 20th century with the history of image-making. Just as its purposefully degraded video images achieve a fractured beauty, The Image Book thrives on contradictions—it is alternately cosmic and cryptic, discursive and pointed, ancient and of-the-moment. From the jump cuts of Breathless to the cortex-melting 3D of Goodbye to Language, Godard has been cinema's most consistent innovator for over five decades. With The Image Book, his boldest explorations are found in the radical sound design, which pushes Dolby surround sound to its fullest disorienting potential, making the theatrical experience a must. "A dense visual and aural collage that I’ve seen twice and expect to see several times more" (Manohla Dargis, New York Times). "A thrillingly dissonant, deafening synesthesia. Godard's eyeball-frazzling video essay bewilders and delights" (The Guardian). "A conclusive statement in this far-reaching work from one of the great media artists of the last century" (Indiewire). 2018 Cannes and New York Film Festivals. (MK)

Presented with support from the Kohler Fellows at the Wisconsin Institute of Discovery