Day 67 (26th
October)
After watching 4 films at MAMI, I am dying to
hit the sack. But this post begs to be written. The film I want to write about
is Godard’s The Image Book. Extremely challenging to make sense, it is a film
that does away with plot and actors. What we have instead are a series of
images strung together often whimsically. Some of them are clips from Black and
White films from the past. Other images include landscapes in lurid colours.
Many images are fleeting, they are gone before they have registered in our
consciousness. Despite having no narrative, the film is structured into five
chapters. Godard provides a slight clue after the credits have rolled out at
the end with a quote from Bertolt Brecht – only a fragment carries a mark of
authenticity. Clearly the onus is on us to make our own construct out of the
thousands of fragments the film is made out of. The sounds that accompany the images are
discordant. The voice-over, by Goddard himself, is not always translated and subtitled. Text is another obsession of
Godard in the film. Text has so many connotations in our present times. And ironically
Godard is making a statement from a string of images not text. The anarchic and
chaotic format of the film is another statement in itself. This film is going
to haunt my intellect for several days to come.
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