Cinema, Jean-Luc Godard said via FaceTime, is X+3 = 1. The X, of course, is -2.
"When you produce an image -- that of the past, present and future -- you have to delete two images each time to find a really good one. It's like an equation."
The Cannes Film Festival, which runs until Saturday, is a festival of images -- bad ones, fair ones, baffling, obsessive and infuriating ones. Ones on the theatre screen, ones trafficked onto the TV screen, and even one on a phone screen: 87-year-old Godard didn't attend the premiere of his film, but he appeared at a press conference through FaceTime, like a pixelated avatar. The meaning and manipulation of image, as well as sound, is the stuff that makes Le Livre D'Image (The Image Book), the latest concoction in the 58-year career of the French New Wave pioneer who can still show us that cinema -- image, sound, montage -- remains in a state of irrepressible evolution.
Feverish, fast, delirious, violent, inscrutable, addictive, The Image Book is the cinema of our times because it defies an attempt to define what cinema is. In the age of streaming, viral videos, online supercuts and mash-up remixes, Godard's film arrived in Cannes like a hammer of fate and proclaims the anarchic, catastrophic nature of image -- and perhaps of mankind itself.
It's impossible to describe the film. The Image Book, as the title suggests, is a collection of images; the film is made up almost entirely of archive pictures, footage, YouTube clips, Isis propaganda videos, and even a short passage from a Michael Bay movie, laid over by a surging orchestral score. What is it about? It's about those images themselves and the sound which sometimes accompanies them, sometimes veering off from them, ricocheting through the inter-dimensionality of the theatre. It's about history -- histoire du cinema -- and how images are a part of world history. In the latter part of this 82-minute film that bursts with colour and sound, the topic is about the Middle East, the real and literary Middle East, again told through archive images.
This is a master supercut, one that appears random, livid, bewildering, but also one that follows a pattern of thought that, admittedly, requires more than one viewing to decipher (and a lot of people won't even survive one viewing). That Cannes puts the film in the main competition deserves a salute; the festival could have put The Image Book in a smaller, more specialised section). Again, that's the point. Godard's masterful mash-up of image is a much-needed critique of the idea of film and film festival at a time when cinema as an art form is going through a transformation brought by technology, distribution and the fuzzy lines that disintegrate a clear distinction of everything.
"I'm interested more in facts, given my age," Godard said in the FaceTime press conference, probably the first ever for the festival. "But what interests me about facts is not just what is happening, but what is not happening. The two are linked together. You can't just talk about what's happening, and yet people don't talk about what's not happening. And what's not happening can lead to a total disaster, a catastrophe."
