Lichtblick-Kino

On the occasion of the English release of the book Jean-Luc Godard: The Permanent Revolutionary by Bert Rebhandl, ExBlicks invites you to a special screening of Livre d’image (French OV with English subtitles), Godard’s last full-length feature film.

With this provocative collage film essay, the legendary filmmaker added to his influential, iconoclastic legacy a vast ontological inquiry into the history of the moving image and a commentary on the contemporary world.
Splicing together classic film clips and newsreel footage, often stretched, saturated and distorted almost beyond recognition, “The Image Book” interrogates our relationship with film, culture and global politics.

Displaying an encyclopedic grasp of cinema and its history, Godard pieces together fragments and clips from some of the greatest films of the past, then digitally alters, bleaches, and washes them, all in the service of reflecting on what he sees in front of him and what he makes of the dissonance that surrounds him. While at times he reflects on the metaphysical properties of the world – time, and space, and where meaning is found – more importantly, it is the image, the thing that has obsessed Godard for his entire career, that anchors this film.

But, as always with Godard, the key issues he raises have to do with the legacy of the last century and its horrors: the incomprehension of Hiroshima and Auschwitz, events that coincided with cinema but that have somehow eluded its gaze. And, movingly, “The Image Book” also reflects on orientalism and the Arab world, grounding the new film very much in the present.

In this biography, now translated into English for the first time, Bert Rebhandl provides a balanced evaluation of the work of one of the most original and influential film directors of all time: Jean-Luc Godard (1930–2022). In this sympathetic yet critical overview, he argues that Godard’s work captured the revolutionary spirit of Paris in the late 1960s as no other filmmaker has dared, and in fact reinvented the medium.
Rebhandl skillfully weaves together biographical details; information about the cultural, intellectual, and cinematic milieu over the decades; and descriptions of Godard’s most significant films to support his assertion that the director was a permanent revolutionary – always seeking new ways to create, understand, and comment on film within a larger context. He views Godard as an artist consistently true to himself while never ceasing to change and evolve, often in unexpected, radical, and controversial ways.