The Image Book belongs to that robust genre, the soaring lament of the humiliated Marxist. The fifth section, “La Région Centrale” (also the title of a work by Michael Snow, as Amy Taubin reminds us in her Artforum review), features a line uttered by the strained voice that begins the film: “C’est l’angoisse.” 

In Godard’s Maoist period, he filmed fists defacing or punching through the screen; in Goodbye to Language, it merely flexes and ripples. Freed from the rigors of dialectics by the failure of the New Left, Godard now stalks Lear-like over the heath of his own devastated feelings. “There must be a revolution,” he announces at the end of The Image Book—but the militant’s devotion to theory and praxis has lapsed into a wistful wobble between experience and loss. So Godard is thrown back on a desperate messianism. At the film’s end we hear track over track of his hacking, failing, heaving, spluttering, now-ancestral voice, which says, beneath the layers of pain: “Ardent espoir”—ardent hope. The words arc through the mind.

Tobi Haslett