Le livre d’image

“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, , 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). Then the Lyonnais festival came and went and not a word about Godard was uttered, let alone one of his films screened. Not the new one, none of the older works, not even a restoration. No erratum was issued either. The rumours persisted: Godard had managed to obtain money from Iran to buy back the rights from his sales agent, and that he wanted to release the film solely as an art object and was selling it (both ironically and fittingly) to the Pompidou, which in 2006 hosted his brilliant, inevitably doomed, and infamous exhibition-as-detritus, . And while a three-channel installation version is forthcoming, and a touring exhibition with attendant photographs has been announced for select major cities, of course debuted in the 2018 Palme d’Or. A special Palme. Not an honorary one for career achievement, but a special one for the film’s magnitude and originality—a film “almost outside of time and space,” said jury president Cate Blanchett. An , then, that could not be judged against the rest as it is so clearly in a league of its own.