By Andréa Picard

Published in Cinema Scope 75 (Summer 2018)

“There is a real contrast between the violence of the act of representation and the internal calm of representation itself.”—Le livre d’image

Last summer, the Institut Lumière in Lyon run by Cannes chief Thierry Frémaux announced a full Godard retrospective for its annual restoration festival; rumours had it that JLG’s latest film, Le livre d’image, would premiere there in October. Excitement had naturally been building around the film, one said to tackle the Arab world (raising eyebrows for some, fearing a tone-deaf tone poem).

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The second section, “Les Soirées de St. Pétersbourg,” takes its title from a book by Joseph de Maistre and features a sombre meditation on trains (and annexation and death). Endemic to cinema itself—its origins as much as its theoretical steam—trains are the traumatic carriers of death but also symbols of modernity, transitoriness, collectivity, migration, and exile. Exquisite black-and-white scenes from Tourneur’s Berlin Express (1948) to von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express (1932) are juxtaposed with locomotives penetrating a glitch art aesthetic rainbow-coloured landscape—an excerpt reminiscent of French experimentalist Jacques Perconte’s digital impressionism. Connecting history and images through serial movements, the successive frames like train tracks, Godard’s sense of movement through time and space is, to take up Blanchett’s claim, “almost beyond.” The images are uncontainable to the screen and spill out forward, backward, and in the round, as the isolated yet immersive sound amplifies the sense of collective grief, despair, and pain, but also hope, love, and romance to which humans are susceptible. At the heart, as in so many films, there lies a love story between a man and a woman, here suggested by Dovzhenko’s masterpiece Earth (1930).

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