This is undoubtedly a "chat with a madman" New Wave film master Godard's new work "Book of Images"

Jean-Luc Godard. (Oriental IC/Photo)

<h3>"Did anyone watch?" </h3>

After four years, the new film leader of the French film wave and film giant Jean-Luc Godard's new work "Book of Images" appeared in Cannes again, and was shortlisted for the main competition unit of the 71st Cannes Film Festival. Prior to this, his most recent appearance in Cannes was "Goodbye Language", which won him the Jury Prize at the 67th Cannes Film Festival, which was his first award at Cannes.

However, Godard did not care at all about winning the prize. Eight years ago, the 84th Academy Awards awarded him the Lifetime Achievement Award, but he did not go to collect it.

Godard doesn't care, maybe the audience. In his later years, his work had departed from the category of art cinema, and he completely left the audience behind, creating his own, Godard-like cinematic language—no storyline, fragmented image presentation.

If "Goodbye Language" still has actors and a story line, "Book of Images" simply abandons both. In the 80-minute film, no actors appear, and what happens repeatedly is the video clips of some old movies, fragments of documentaries, sound clips, music, explosion clips, Godard "plays" with these old images, sometimes accelerating, sometimes distorting, sometimes deepening, or diluting the color of the image, sometimes removing the sound, or removing the image, leaving only a single element.

The Book of Images opens with a series of consecutive images of hands and fingers taken from different images, with Godard himself accompanying the narration: "The real situation of man is to think with his hands." Another set of image fragments is taken from images on trains in World War II, as well as images related to the Holocaust, which is partly Godard's presentation of Western history.

Another theme of the film, which turns to the Middle East, is godard's use of a large number of images taken from the Cinemas of the Arab World to synthesize images from Western and Middle Eastern television news reports, with images of Arab women being abused and prisoners on trial, presenting a violent, chaotic and ambiguous picture of the Arab world. Godard uses these fragmentary presentations to tell the audience that in this modern world that is increasingly dependent on images, images are actually unreliable, they can be distorted or reorganized, and the Arab world that the Western world thinks it knows is only what they imagine, not the real Arab world.

"For many viewers, watching The Book of Images is undoubtedly a 'chat with a madman', and meeting a director like Godard who is not domesticated by modern cinema is a nightmare, but for a small number of viewers who can read the language of his films, watching the Book of Images will be a privilege and a pleasure." Screen magazine commented.

Variety magazine argues that Godard's obscure Book of Images "is like a kaleidoscope of contemporary world conditions, but the question it raises may be equally applicable to Godard's work itself: Is anyone watching it?" ”

<h3>"Death and film festivals are things I'm trying to avoid right now"</h3>

"Death and film festivals are things I'm trying to avoid right now." Godard once wrote a note to Thierry Fumao, artistic director of the Cannes Film Festival.

Godard has not been to the Palace of Cinema on the Côte d'Azur in Cannes for a long time, and this time, he made an exception because of the Book of Images. On May 12, 2018, at the press conference of "Book of Images", he appeared on the big screen and said hello to the live media through Facebook. Godard confirmed "on the spot" that he put the audience aside: the film was made to raise money for the small film association he founded, and it would only be screened on a small scale, not on a large scale in theaters.

The 71st Cannes Film Festival welcomed Godard with great fanfare, not only was Book of Images shortlisted for the main competition section, but the festival's official poster used Godard's 1965 film Piero the Madman, where Jean-Paul Belmondo kissed Anna Carina in a sports car.

In 2014, after Film Socialism was shortlisted for the "One Kind of Attention" unit in 2010, Fumao asked Godard to come out of the mountain again. Godard filmed and produced the 3D film "Goodbye Language" to participate in the main competition unit, at the age of 84. Known as 3D, "Goodbye Language" actually satirizes the now ubiquitous 3D blockbuster, the film is full of chaotic, fragmented, complex color images, put on 3D eyes, the audience will only feel more dizzy, remove the glasses, but will get a normal viewing experience.

Godard also used the example of Hitler to satirize. In 1925, the Englishman John Bader invented the television set, and Hitler subsequently took advantage of this "new medium". His provocative speeches were repeated on television and amassed many fans. "Hitler didn't invent television," Godard mocked with a narrator. Godard's usual intransigence is evident in Goodbye Language, with the film even ending with a "no comment."

Two years later, the official poster for the 69th Cannes Film Festival paid homage to Godard's 1963 film Defiance: a coastline dyed golden by dusk, long golden staircases and men's backs. French director Michel Hazanavicius, who won the Academy Award for Best Director for The Artist, presented at the 70th Cannes Film Festival an autobiographical film about Godard, Awe, based on the memoirs of Godard's ex-wife Anne Wiazemsky.

Hazanavicius parodies Godard's cinematic style, such as jumping cuts, shifting speeds, positives into negatives, subtitle mismatches, often breaking the fourth wall, documenting Godard in the 1960s, and the story of him and his ex-wife from love to stranger. In an exclusive interview with Southern Weekend reporters, Hazanavicius mentioned that on the first day of filming, he wrote a cover letter to Godard, but quickly received a return from the post office - Godard did not want to comment on the film.

In Hazanavicius' view, Godard "is difficult to define." He wouldn't let anyone just put him in a box. Godard was "very generous, tolerant, brave, open-minded, and sometimes timid and cowardly, and he refused to be sympathized with." He thought Godard could be multi-faceted, which was free for a screenwriter to have to make a statue for him and fix him.

"He was a director, and I had a lot of respect for him, and he created his own cinematic language; he was a political figure that I didn't appreciate; as an audience, I had a lot of respect for the 1960s, a period of films that, although not as entertaining later, had a lot of deep reflections on social reality." Hazanavicius said.