Day 67

Day 67 (26^th 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.