8.0
"The Image Book is a work that reprises many of Jean-Luc Godard’s familiar ideas, but with an unexpected urgency and visceral strangeness. It’s an essay film with the body-language of a horror movie, avowedly taking Godard’s traditional concerns with the ethical status of cinema and history and looking to the Arab world and indirectly examining our orientalism – Godard cites the Conradian phrase for a culture held “under Western eyes”. Appropriately there are some amazingly fierce images, and the screen of Cannes’s Grand Theatre Lumiere is a colossal canvas over which to spread them."
