In Le Livre d’Image, Jean-Luc Godard recycles existing images (films, documentaries, paintings, television archives, etc.), quotes excerpts from books, uses fragments of music. The driving force is poetic rhyme, the association or opposition of ideas, the aesthetic spark through editing, the keystone. The author performs the work of a sculptor. The hand, for this, is essential. He praises it at the start. “There are the five fingers. The five senses. The five parts of the world (…). The true condition of man is to think with his hands. Jean-Luc Godard composes a dazzling syncopation of sequences, the surge of which evokes the violence of the flows of our contemporary screens, taken to a level of incandescence rarely achieved. Crowned at Cannes, the last Godard is a shock film, with twilight beauty.
Jean-Luc Godard
as Narrator (voice)
Anne-Marie Miéville
as Narrator (voice)
Jean-Pierre Gos
as Narrator (voice)
Buster Keaton
as (archive footage)
Jean Gabin
as (archive footage)
Douglas Fairbanks
as (archive footage)
Jean Marais
as (archive footage)
Jean Cocteau
as (archive footage)
Wallace Beery
as (archive footage)
Jules Berry
as (archive footage)
Eddie Constantine
as (archive footage)
Roberto Cobo
as (archive footage)
