Jack and Robby chat with registered Kaiju-nut, Mike Burdge, about the latest G-Man joint, Godzilla: King of the Monsters , and all the ways this thing operates (mostly) successfully even with all of its moving parts. Check it out: Listen on SoundCloud #Newsletter #Podcasts #Godzilla #HotTakes #MikeBurdge #RobertAnderson #JackKolodziejski #KingoftheMonsters #Horror #Kaiju #Fight #MichaelDougherty

Jack and Robby checked out the anticipated superhero-horror-mashup flick, Brightburn , and have things to say about it. So, in case you wanted to hear them, they recorded it and uploaded it to the internet for you. All for you. That's how it works. #brightburn Check it out: Listen on SoundCloud #Newsletter #Podcast #Brightburn #JamesGunn #Horror #Superhero #Superman #HotTakes #JackKolodziejski #RobertAnderson

From the same animation team that brought us the narcissistic romps from Hollywoo, creator Lisa Hanawalt takes us to a different city with the same Postmodern issues that plague our more than human animal friends. Tuca & Bertie is a synergy between fem-powered sitcoms like Broad City , with the beautiful Surreal art style of Bojack Horseman . The plot of the show is simple, if not a little familiar, following two thirty-year-old bird women who live in the same apartment building. Tuca, voiced by Tiffany Haddish, is messy, high energy, and not afraid to stand up for what she believes in. She is perfectly juxtaposed against Bertie, voiced by Ali Wong, who is shy, introverted, and a little too “type A” for her own good. These BBFF (Best Bird Friends Forever) go through thick and thin over the course of these ten episodes and deliver one of my favorite Netflix series to date. PSYCHEDELIC SURREALISM AT ITS FINEST The animation team behind Tuca & Bertie has already shown us that they can make a comedic show about talking animals look beautiful, but this series kicks the visual flairs up by several notches. Transitions, montages, and explorations through their beautiful city makes BoJack seem like it’s based in reality. Our characters travel from point A to B on roads that twist and turn as if they were on rollercoasters in a Dr. Seuss novel. Tuca travels down a flight of stairs to visit Bertie and the entire art style changes to mimic a “Super Mario Bros.” level. The world of the show is so playful and interesting that the audience can never assume what exactly can happen within it. The series’ visual language occasionally presents us with rules, but the show constantly and gleefully breaks them. Sometimes cats are just normal-sized civilians, interacting with other characters, but later on we meet a jaguar that can’t talk and acts like…well…a jaguar, and no one questions it. The show’s visual style helps blur the lines between literal and metaphor. Rules are broken but with purpose. There’s an episode where a rooster in Bertie’s office makes an inappropriate comment about her chest, which causes one of her boobs to be so fed up (the boob is voiced by Awkwafina) that it separates herself from Bertie’s body and leaves to have a drink. Awkward texts will take shape and literally annoy characters who attempt to ignore them. These are just some of the many examples of aesthetics bending at will to what our characters need or feel. But this isn’t some trip into someone’s head; this is the world of Tuca & Bertie . This incredible psychedelic orgy of visuals is punctuated by a bombastic score done by Jesse Novak ( BoJack music veteran), and helps to keep the show’s fast pace and high energy moving. The series is like a locomotive of sight and sound, and somehow in twenty minutes or less, we receive a series of beautifully animated montages, as well as deep and meaningful character arcs and story beats. MORE THAN WISE CRACKING ANIMALS Amazing visuals and bumpin’ tunes aren’t the only thing that makes Tuca & Bertie special, it also has great characters and meaningful stories. BoJack tackles the cynicism of fame and Hollywood, but T&B is a more whimsical approach to friendship and relationships, but also to womanhood in modern society. Over the course of ten episodes, we learn so much about Tuca and Bertie’s backstories, developing these characters so much that you forget you’re watching a show about talking animals. Workplace sexism, family trauma, and plot threads that dance around the real world (#MeToo movement) are all present here. There’s a sense of comfort that even in a world with no rules, talking animals and surreal adventures, the issues that plague our own reality are still present. It is when tackling these issues, that the series uses its greatest skill set: utilizing Surreal imagery to make these real world hurtles take literal shape. From escaping boobs to the struggles of staying sober, Tuca & Bertie alchemize, (like turn the mundane into the insane) blowing up these social issues and arcs, turning them into literal cartoons, making hardships both colorful and palatable. Feminism is as loud as the insane world it takes place in, and with metaphor as a reality, these intense subjects are handled beautifully. By the end of the first season, you care about these characters and want what is best for them. FUTURE OF BIRD CITY This first season checks all the boxes: good laughs, good music, great art style, and great characters. The season doesn’t end on a cliffhanger; there are still plenty of threads and directions for the series to continue onward. A welcomed entry into stories about anthropomorphic characters, and seeing how the sprawling tragic epic that is BoJack Horseman has unfolded, I can’t wait to see Tuca & Bertie evolve over time, and most likely become one of the strongest animated series on the small screen. Robert Anderson Co-Head of Podcasting Robert has a degree in Screenwriting and Playwriting and works in multiple genres. He's just your typical man-child who enjoys most things nerd culture. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram @RoBaeBae #Newsletter #Review #Netflix #RobertAnderson #TiffanyHaddish #AliWong #TucaandBertie #BoJackHorseman #Animation

Dem Hot Take bois, Jack Kolodziejski and Robert Anderson, have been satiated by the inevitable release of the next chapter of the tale of Mr. Bullet-Sponge himself, John Wick. So, what did they think? Check it out: Listen on SoundCloud #Newsletter #Podcast #JohnWick #Chapter3 #Parabellum #HotTakes #JackKolodziejski #RobertAnderson #Action #Sequel

Bernadette Gorman-White has a delightful discussion with guest Robby Anderson (noted comedian) about the Netflix sketch-comedy show that is bursting at the seams with talent. Check it out: Listen on SoundCloud #Newsletter #Podcasts #BernadetteGormanWhite #RobertAnderson #CathodeRayCast #Comedy #Netflix #TV #Sketch #IThinkYouShouldLeave

I've noticed an interesting trend over time in the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills ; the women in this show have been imbuing inanimate objects with profound meaning. The amount of airtime over objects and minutiae in this series has increased exponentially from season to season. They are taking abstract concepts and notions and expressing them in a concrete form, more so than any other program I have seen. As if it was a bizarre way to study Physics, the feuds on Real Housewives used to be about the potential energy of the person in control of the object being set forth into motion. But as the seasons have progressed, they have become disassociated from the person, and more about the emotion and the thoughts imbued in the object. The plot now merely revolves around the kinetic energy of the object in motion itself. Also, let us not forget that the unit in which to measure energy is a Joule e.g. a homophone for a housewife's favorite inanimate object (or at least Erika's favorite object). The earliest instance of this I can recall is the bunny. Specifically, the first of the endless amount of “gates” in this series: Bunnygate. It does get a little blurry considering this happens during the same season as Pantygate, which I'll get into later, but the bunny doll I believe happened earlier. To quickly catch up readers who have not watched, Lisa Rinna (hereafter referred to as Rinna to alleviate confusion with Lisa Vanderpump) gives the gift of a bunny to Kim Richards upon the birth of a grandchild. This seems innocuous enough, but sadly it was not well received. Specifically, it was never received in the first place, as Kim felt that this bunny was a disingenuous gesture and was actually something that “had bad energy.” I wish I could give back gifts that I don't want with that same excuse and earnestly mean it. When the reunion episode occurred, some reviewers hyperbolically wrote about it as if it was as devastating as D-day, (sorry to our WWII veteran readers out there) Kim gave back the bunny and Rinna immediately started to cry. If I recall correctly, the jaws of the other housewives were literally dropped. Any negative energy associated with the bunny, I believe, was merely a manifestation of Kim's perceived shortcomings at that time. Perhaps any time Kim looked at it, she reminded herself of her own bad behavior along the way. This didn't necessarily set off a domino effect of plot points, but it did have a full narrative arc. Again in season 7, Pantygate, or as another housewife, Eileen Davidson, mentioned the Crotch Chronicles, (which sounds like a terrible mystery channel made for TV movie in which she'd star) starts at a white party. Two of the newer housewives, Erika Girardi and Dorit Kemsley, were having one of their first sit-down chats and P.K. (Dorit's husband) noticed, focused, presumably drooled over, licked his lips, and rubbed his hands together furiously over, the fact that Erika declined to wear underwear. However, thanks to PK and Dorit being the dirt fucking worst, Dorit goes on to defend her, crusty dairy under the screwable cap of a milk container of a husband, and somehow, determines that Erika is to blame for PK looking. In later episodes, it is revealed that Erika had no idea that she was visible. (If you are interested in more sadly accurate and amazing descriptions of PK, I will refer you to the beautiful and vivid work of Brian Moylan). In this case, I believe Dorit took a producer's recommendation to stir the pot, and looked to cause a conflict for the sake of the continued success of the series. This is one of many instances where a season long conflict begins, not because of the object or action itself, but because it is alluding to a larger idea or mindset. Specifically, this larger idea (in my opinion) is decency overall. It is no secret that Erika Girardi's alter ego (nee Erika Jane) is a provocateur. I think the duration of the Pantygate argument is more about having the rest of the housewives attempt to draw their lines in the sand, determining what they feel is decent vs. too provocative for their own personal taste. Ultimately, I'd like to believe that this alignment is how they determined the final couch positions in the reunion episode, but I'm probably overthinking it at that point. In the following Season (8), Dorit is the reason of another gate in the series: Glassgate. In a surprise to no one, when Dorit and her terrible pseudo-British accent (that makes even Madonna take a step back and wonder what the hell she is doing) is encountered with an accountability coach (newcomer Teddi Mellencamp), it goes as poorly as one would expect. At a housewarming/manicure party that Teddi throws at her house, Dorit is served champagne in a wine glass; Dorit makes an aside comment about how she only drinks champagne from champagne flutes. This innocuous comment is somehow turned into a running plot line in the series and is akin to the “shot heard 'round the world.” I think this is another instance of a strawman in place of the actual reason for this conflict. If I had to theorize on it, (which I don't, I'm the one who chose to write this article) this is more so about the newer housewife being a threat to the existence of the older housewife a la All About Eve . What may be happening to these inanimate objects is a type of metonymy, where the object because indicative of and symbolic of something else. In the same vein of how a crown represents a king. As Saussure and Lacan have not so briefly touched on in their work, metonymy seeks to combine, but ultimately displaces meaning. This notion, I believe ties in directly to Lisa Vanderpump's (LVP going forward) current obsession with redoing her kitchen. It might not be the best time to be in the LVP camp, but it is easy to see that she is having a tough time with the suicide of her brother. This is more than understandable. Her emotional duress has manifested itself in redoing her kitchen for a multitude of reasons. The kitchen itself is another emotional metonymy for the comfort feeling that is imbued within a home. In order to attempt to move past the loss of her brother, which certainly is imbued with the feeling of her home life, (albeit her childhood home, as opposed to her current one) she is currently combining her feelings of her tumultuous home life (only further compounded by Kyle's gestures of bad will and accusations) and displacing them into a new kitchen as an act of shedding her old skin and moving forward. To shed LVP's skin however, it needs to be under $300,000, and needs to have the nicest marble slab countertop she can find. That being said, no judgement here and you do you girl! That finally catches us up, to the latest, very loose plot line of Puppygate. What once was a brief, bookended story to Bunnygate, is now a full damn storyline with a preamble, a frame narrative, multiple cause-and-effect instances, plot twists, and even a “choose your own adventure” component (based on who you believe). To briefly recap: the poor excuse of an amateur English actor auditioning as a person from South Carolina with a distinct southern drawl and not getting a call back, known as Dorit, adopts a dog from Vanderpump Dogs, named Lucy Lucy Apple Juice (LLAJ). Dorit then neglects to tell LVP that after LLAJ bites PK (otherwise known as the oft-forgotten, discarded piece of foreskin post-circumcision) and their daughter, they give up LLAJ to another shelter. (As I write that sentence, I think of the fact that I'm still paying student loans off for a creative writing degree, and I shed a single tear). Also, I am aware that Lucy Lucy Apple Juice is not an inanimate object, but supposedly an animated dog (though I remain skeptical). This action then becomes even more heightened and ridiculous when it is accused that LVP planted a story to Radar to shame Dorit when she hears of what happened. In a disappointing crescendo that seemingly never ends, one of the event coordinators of Vanderpump Dogs, named John Blizzard, (whose name is faker than, you guessed it, Dorit-I-give-night-terrors-to-polyglots-Kemsley) invites Teddi over and has a dog that looks like LLAJ as a way to bring the housewives into the fray. Now, we are in an endless war of convoluted she-said she-said with no end in sight. Stunningly, Rinna makes the most salient point in that the tactics of deflection and obfuscation mirror that of the post-fact society we are in: the era of Trump. Everything is cyclical, and can be easily mocked up, or repurposed to dissuade anyone from actually determining the facts and the source. It has been a stunning journey to watch the plot revolve around the actions of these women, to the objects of these women. Who knows how further abstracted this series will become? It is also extremely curious how this is the only series on Bravo out of all of the Housewives franchise that's plot is driven by objects, the feelings imbued in them, and the meaning that can be extracted from them. Even in the absurd world of the rest of these shows, Beverly Hills remains the trailblazer in disassociation. Four point five out of five stars. Alright readers. Now that I'm done spilling the tea, I'm off to do something ferociously masculine like watching wrestling, Die Hard , or, you know, not talking about my feelings. Jordan Young Jordan graduated in 2009 from Susquehanna University with a degree in Creative Writing and Film Studies where he met his wife. In spite of God's will, he published his first book PESTS with Lloyd Kaufman; the CEO of the independent stalwart Troma Entertainment. You can see him being snarky and cynical on Twitter and Instagram @settlingstatic , and you can find him being deeply, deeply nerdy on Reddit @SkywardJordan. #Newsletter #Article #TV #JordanYoung #RealHousewives #Reality #Representation

Host Mike Burdge sits down with guest Linda Codega to discuss the quickly forgotten and downright under-appreciated 2015 Wachowskis effort, Jupiter Ascending . Check it out: Listen on SoundCloud #Newsletter #Podcasts #JupiterAscending #Wachowskis #Overdrinkers #SciFi #MikeBurdge #Tequila #LindaCodega #ChanningTatum #MilaKunis #SeanBean #EddieRedmayne

Host Mike Burdge sits down with super duper special guest, Bryan Kopchak, to discuss Damien Chazelle's 2014 effort, Whiplash , as well as the 1994 Disney masterpiece, The Lion King . Along the way, they also discuss some super weird stuff movies seem to do when conveying themes of morality and possible societal mind control. They also drink a bunch of Tom Collins. Naturally. Check it out: Listen on SoundCloud #Newsletter #Podcast #MikeBurdge #BryanKopchak #Drums #Whiplash #TheLionKing #DamienChazelle #Disney #Marvel #Conspiracies #Overdrinkers #Gin #TomCollins

Mike Burdge, Bernadette Gorman-White, Robert Anderson, Diana DiMuro and Jack Kolodziejski all sit down to discuss the biggest movie of the year (well, until December anyway) and dissect one of the most anticipated films in recent memory. Check it out: Listen on SoundCloud #Newsletter #Podcast #MikeBurdge #JackKolodziejski #BernadetteGormanWhite #RobertAnderson #DianaDiMuro #Avengers #Endgame #Marvel #Superheroes #Disney #TimeTravel

The latest episode of Cathode Ray Cast finds host Bernadette Gorman-White chatting with guests Diana DiMuro and Stamper about one of the greatest, however short-lived, comedy shows of all time: Freaks and Geeks . Check it out: Listen on SoundCloud #Newsletter #Podcast #FreaksandGeeks #TV #CathodeRayCast #BernadetteGormanWhite #DianaDiMuro #KatelynStamper

Host Mike Burdge and special superstar guest, Tim Irwin, took on the Michael Bay directed robo-franchise that has been consuming the world for over a decade. They also throw in an old time animated classic, as well as a recently released reboot attempt. Let's see how these true heroes of cinema feel about this popular franchise now! (Fun Fact: Just about all of these movies are 2 1/2 hours! YAY!!) Check it out: Listen on SoundCloud #Newsletter #Podcasts #Transformers #MichaelBay #MikeBurdge #TimIrwin #Overdrinkers #Rye #Whiskey #Bumblebee #Robots #Franchise

At the reckless age of 88, the eternally iconoclastic French-Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard is enjoying a career peak at a time when most directors (assuming they live so long) are inclined to rest on their laurels in advance of their impending burial. His latest, 45th feature-length work, the essay film by way of philosophical reverie-cum-virtuoso remix The Image Book (Le Livre d'image ) received the first Special Palme d'Or ever to be awarded in the history of the Cannes Film Festival last year. In typically Godardian fashion, the elder subversive undercut his own significant achievement with yet another first: the first Cannes press conference to be conducted via FaceTime, with the reclusive director safely ensconced in his home in Rolle, Switzerland. As Image Book cinematographer Fabrice Aragno held up his iPhone, an international press corps peppered the director with questions gamely dispatched with Godard’s trademark mixture of gnomic detachment and direct engagement. Some examples: “Your film contains a clip from the Michael Bay film 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi . What is your opinion of Mr. Bay’s work? [Pause] Remind me of what you actually see in that part of my film. [Someone describes the contents of the clip.] I do not remember the title of that film or the name of that director. But if I inserted the footage, it must have contained something I couldn’t find anywhere else.” “The cinema should consist not so much as showing what’s happening. That you can see around you every day. Films should show what’s not happening, which you never see anywhere, including on Facebook.” The reviews of the film have been equally praiseworthy, even (or especially) when critics own up to the film’s thoroughgoing inscrutability and the manifold contradictions — art vs. war, images vs. text, power vs. rebellion, analog vs. digital, life vs. death, etc., etc., etc. — which find a wealth in division throughout. “A head-scratcher and a mind-bender,” enthused J. Hoberman on The New York Review of Books blog, “ The Image Book …is gloriously obscure and brutally unpretty, yet lucid and even gorgeous all the same.” Stephanie Zacharek of TIME Magazine wrote: “…if it’s hard to understand exactly what Godard is trying to say in this brief scrapbook scamper—it clocks in at one hour, 25 minutes—just watching it is a strange, melancholy pleasure, and an open window into the world of things that worry its creator.” And the ultimate Hollywood-industrial final word, Variety, printed a flat-out rave for The Image Book from their chief film critic, Owen Gleiberman: “…it’s something of a paradox that The Image Book is more accessible and vibrant than much of the work of the past 30 years that Godard has been reflexively praised for…He has now gotten rid of actors entirely and found a free-associational mode of sound-and-image collage that suggests MTV crossed with the Beatles’ “Revolution 9.” He’s no longer a cracked storyteller — he’s an audio-visual poet.” Not bad for an indie foreign film which, as of March 8, has amassed a whopping U.S. domestic box office take of $86,429. Godard, who must be fully aware of his status as one of the greatest living directors, and the high regard cinephiles in the U.S. and around the world have held him for many decades, appears to have now become the ultimate cultural vegetable: someone people feel more comfortable talking about than actually engaging, and not least his shockingly vital and still daring late work. He’s lived long enough to become the lion in winter, one so declawed and unthreatening that it’s easy to praise his potent critiques both historical and cultural — each one informing the other until they’re virtually indistinguishable — without suffering any consequences. But a consideration of the long arc of Godard’s career culminating in The Image Book , first as critic, then as a director who viewed filmmaking as a natural extension of his criticism, reveals him to be of fathomless consequence to the history of cinema. __________ It was as a charter member of the French New Wave or Nouvelle Vague that Godard cemented his status as cinema’s greatest provocateur — and/or, if you buy his argument, the world’s longest continuously-serving film critic. Alongside his cohorts (and eventual sometime nemeses) François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette, Godard stormed the barricades in the pages of the French film journal Cahiers du cinéma. Fueled by a movie-mad culture in Paris, Godard and his fellow critics resisted a creeping classicist “Tradition of Quality” in the early-50’s global cinema, and championed a director-focused appreciation that came to be known as la politique des auteurs — generally translated as “auteur theory,” though this neuters the undeniable political implications of the phrase — which posited the director as the true “author” of any film, and the more cinematically flamboyant, the better. It’s difficult now to appreciate what a radical proposition auteur theory represented at the time, although a comparison of the opening credits of films from the 50’s and today will demonstrate how much the focus shifts from say, a David O. Selznick production to a Michael Bay film. Godard articulated the New Wave’s stance in an article for the French magazine Arts, where he praised his fellow-critics for having, “led . . . the fight for the film auteur,” further declaring, “we have won by gaining acceptance of the principle that a film by Hitchcock, for example, is as important as a book by Aragon. Thanks to us, the auteurs of films have definitively entered into the history of art.” It’s also hard to recapture this disposition towards Hitchcock in the early 50’s, then considered a merely stylish entertainer by the comparatively tepid mainstream American film critical community of the era, while the director rose to the occasion of the Nouvelle Vague’s exaltation as the 50’s proceeded, going on to create his greatest works, which remain some of the most indelible masterpieces in the history of film. Godard has naturally gravitated to maverick directorial sensibilities throughout his career, but especially during this early period of his published criticism. In a review of the director’s 1957 film Bitter Victory , Godard simply states: “Cinema is Nicholas Ray.” He went on to dedicate his 1966 film, Made in U.S.A . to both Ray and Samuel Fuller, whom he claims, “taught me respect for image and sound.” And his statement in honor of Orson Welles has redounded through the decades: “All of us will always owe him everything.” Although it was Truffaut who was the first New Wave figure to direct a feature film with his still-influential The 400 Blows ( Les Quatre Cents Coups ) from 1959, Godard would supersede that film’s importance and influence with his own first feature-length work, one that introduced a million indie filmmakers to the aesthetic liberation of handheld cameras in shopping carts, available light and jump cuts as a new coherence: Breathless ( À bout de soufflé ). Godard would then spend the 60’s jumping from theme to theme, somewhat in the fractured manner of his films: war and its crimes, including an instance of waterboarding some 50 years before the Bush administration would make the practice fashionable in Le Petit Soldat ; bourgeois sexual relations as a woman abandons her family and drifts into prostitution in My Life to Live ( Vivre sa vie ); mid-60’s Paris providing the setting for a dystopian future where the hard-boiled detective Lemmy Caution (American expatriate actor Eddie Constantine) combats the all-powerful supercomputer Alpha-60 in Alphaville ; crime, camaraderie and with its French title, providing Quentin Tarantino with the name for his production company, A Band Apart with Band of Outsiders ( Bande à part ); even accepting Hollywood money and directing celebrities like Brigitte Bardot for his fascinating and gorgeous big-budget (for Godard) adaptation of Alberto Moravia’s novel Contempt ( Le Mépris ); and using the bare outline of a minor crime novel for the discursive farewell to Godard’s then-wife and muse, Anna Karina, while introducing political themes like American imperialism, Vietnam and even a reprise of waterboarding in Pierrot le Fou . The political dimensions of Godard’s films began ramping up in the late 60’s, climaxing with 1968’s appropriately insurrectionist Weekend . Thereafter, in collaboration with fellow critic/director Jean-Pierre Gorin, he made doctrinaire films steeped ideologically in Marxism and putatively created in collective fashion by their Dziga Vertov Group (named after the pioneering Russian filmmaker) with largely dreadful results very much of their time. He slowly came out of this hard-leftist phase with increasingly complex feature-length experiments in collaboration with his then-and-current life partner, Anne-Marie Melville, while also starting to embrace primitive video technology in film, beginning with 1975’s Numéro Deux (Godard maintained that this film was a sequel to Breathless , possibly as a joke). For all the esotericism of his work during this period, his reputation as a great director remained strong in the U.S., and when he finally returned to a semblance of narrative filmmaking with 1980’s Every Man for Himself (Sauve qui peut (la vie)), the film met with great praise (and/or arguably relief) from American critics, and even occasioned an hour-long conversation with Dick Cavett that remains one of Godard’s best and most forthcoming interviews in English: Come the MTV 80’s he did so much to anticipate via his trademark shock-cut emancipation of visuals and audio, Godard remained a figure of controversy, igniting criticism from the Vatican over his modern-day consideration of a virgin birth, Hail Mary (Je vous salue, Marie), as well as crafting the unlikeliest Shakespeare adaptation of all time in his Cannon Films-produced King Lear, starring Burgess Meredith, Molly Ringwald, Norman Mailer, Woody Allen and Godard himself. Increasingly, Godard as a character, factors into his films of this period, all leading up to what many consider to be his magnum opus, the magisterial history of cinema, or vice-versa — or, with its parenthetical implication, one of several possible — the decade-in-the-making video project Histoire(s) du cinema . Here, it’s all Godard, in image and voice overs, alongside a profusion of excerpts from other films, newsreels and an endless array of videos, professional and otherwise, sculpted and altered across multiple episodes into a dizzying but also enormously revealing reflection on cinema as the prime historical agent of the 20th century. In its similarly avid sampling, its enigmatic juxtapositions of image and text and its literally phlegmatic voiceover by Godard (sounding like an even more doddering Alpha-60) The Image Book , closely resembles Histoire(s) , seeming at times like its lost final chapter or afterword. __________ The first image we are greeted with in The Image Book is of a pale hand from a Renaissance canvas, pointing skyward. It’s a detail taken from Leonardo Da Vinci’s “St. John the Baptist,” presumed by historians to be the master’s final painting. This is followed by a shot floridly video-processed into vibrant blues, reds and yellows of the once-essential tool of the filmmaker’s craft, the Moviola editing desk, cutting then to a close up of fingers folding frames of celluloid awaiting an edit, while remarking on the capacity “to think with hands.” Already, in three shots, Godard has invoked heaven and earth, the height of Western civilization, along with both his own mortality in what could be his own final work and technology rendered obsolete, the privileging of the analog, while simultaneously embracing digital effects (Godard must also be aware of the sense, in English at least, of “digits” as a synonym for fingers). And he’s just getting started. “It’s a brief story,” he remarks much later in the film, “the mass extinction of a species.” Across five nominal chapters whose titles re-appear seemingly at random, Godard waxes elegiac not only for himself or a culture, but for all of humanity. Similarly, his selections range from not just Western masterpieces of another century, but countless other images from around the world and throughout the ages, right up to the present day — yes, that includes 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi . War and its aftermath are mainstays throughout, with the film drawing upon everything from WWII footage to ISIS training videos. There’s a continuous sense of the cautionary in The Image Book , but it’s one also intermingled with many of Godard’s past obsessions, with him even re-sampling samples from his own past work and others, with specific ones tying this work directly back to Histoire(s) . As in that earlier work, we hear — and occasionally see — the classic “Lie to me,” scene from Ray’s Johnny Guitar, an exchange which also appeared as dialogue in Le Petit Soldat , as well as in other scenes drawn from that Western interspersed throughout Histoire(s) . Yet another re-sampling from the Histoire(s) features a few seconds of an enthusiastic rimjob being administered in an otherwise anonymous gay porn video — except, in The Image Book , the scene is bookended by a giggling microcephalic from Tod Browning’s Freaks . As in much of Godard’s work, his point is obscure while provocative, a dialectic never quite resolved but continuously, radically interrogated. And also, occasionally, even leavened with a certain goofball humor. Along with these examples, I recognized a fraction of other sources utilized throughout The Image Book , some as noted from Godard’s own work, and nearly all regularly undergoing substantial visual/textural transformations: an older Lemmy Caution looking lost in a scene taken from Godard’s ostensible Alphaville sequel, Germany Year 90 Nine Zero ; the rear-projected opening of the funhouse scene (and, interestingly to me, not the arguably more appropriate “hall of mirrors” sequence that it precedes) from Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai ; Ringwald and Meredith in King Lear ; a shark attack from Jaws , among many other examples. I could also swear that it’s a headshot of the late New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael (less and less a fan of Godard as the years wore on) which is followed by Delacroix’s famous depiction of a bare-breasted female Liberty Leading The People. Vocal samples and snippets of music are also intermixed throughout the film’s radical audio design (there’s a whole other article that could be written about Godard’s audio work in the film — suffice it to say that watching The Image Book in surround sound is a must), with Godard’s continuing friendship with ECM Records honcho Manfred Eicher keeping the soundtrack awash in the music of such noted ECM artists as Tomasz Stańko and Arvo Pärt. But an ability to cite sources is as useful to Godard’s aesthetic imperatives in The Image Book , as it would be when listening to a masterful DJ transform sample-based sources into new, richly vibrant musical art. Godard even toys with this archival sensibility when he flashes lists of the dozens of “Textes,” “Tableaux” and “Musique” sources for the film at the end for a comically brief few seconds. The art is not in the crate digging itself but the manner in which Godard transmutes his material via digital video effects, desaturation and psychedelically intense re-saturations of color, and sudden shifts in formats/aspect ratios of the same material as a multifaceted technique to convey his polymorphous book of images. Le politque de sampling, say: the overall effect is one that galvanizes the attention even when it is continuously confounded. Sometimes, however, Godard’s strategies appear to be very straightforward, as when such intertitles as “Hommage a La Catalogue,” “Archives and Morals” and “Archeology and Pirates” appear, or a simple layering of Hebrew text over Arabic. Godard’s long solidarity with the struggle of Middle Eastern populations is strongly reinforced throughout and especially in the film’s longest, final chapter, “La Région Centrale” (itself the title of a separate major work by the Canadian experimental filmmaker and musician Michael Snow), though these moments are also complicated with troubling images of the Holocaust. These sequences are clear evidence of Godard’s mastery of the cinematic form, not to mention his dogged humanism, as documented atrocities from both the history of Jews and Arabs serve as synecdoche to a present-day reality that speaks louder than words, precisely because of the implicit power of images themselves in Godard’s hands as a form of communication. “The words,” he insists at one point, “will never be language.” Again and again, what at times feels obscure in The Image Book comes through with bracing clarity, as in shots of a painter working on a canvas with overlapping perpendicular lines of many different colors. “Mosaic” or “bricolage” convey a sense of Godard’s gameplan here (Aragno, for his part, has suggested the film resembles a “fresco”), but doesn’t convey the penetrability of pigments blending one into another, much as the ideas represented by their images and sounds become a unified voice in the film. Once Godard dangles the intertitle “Counterpoint,” the polyphonic, contrapuntal nature of his approach becomes clearly apparent, all harmony, dissonances, reprises. To see the world in a grain of sand — or, as Godard articulates it in a voiceover: “I need eternity for the story of one day.” Far from a Lego-brick stacking of ideas, The Image Book lives and breathes, bristling with Godard’s restless, even youthful artistic energy. So much of what he has to say is mournful — “Believe me,” he laments, “we are never sad enough for the world to be better,” something followed not long after with a disturbing fit of cigar aficionado Godard’s emphysemic coughing over a black screen — and yet we see shoots of creative possibility in those moments of painting, in shots of women from many eras and cultures happily gathering in marked distinction from the plentiful images of war and associated horrors, and in the wholesale intransigence of an incomparably accomplished filmmaker still storming the barricades in his 89th year with a work of dire warning, heartbreaking recollection and fearless abstraction. In an era of fake news and rewarded know-nothingism, it’s also a bracing salvo of tough-mindedness and a salutary refusal to accept the status quo, not least from the expectations of conventional filmmaking. Few people may end up seeing The Image Book , but it’s hard to imagine anyone emerging from it unmoved or aloof to its boundless provocation. In these respects, as throughout Godard’s endlessly challenging career, all of us will always owe him everything. James Keepnews James is a musician, writer and multimedia artist. His film criticism has appeared in New Haven Advocate, Fairfield Weekly, Metroland and other publications. #Newsletter #Articles #JamesKeepnews #JeanLucGodard #Godard #TheImageBook #ThinkPiece