The window of an apartment in Rotterdam leads us to the outskirts of an industrial industrial port, a strident and devouring machine that pours out its flames. In front of this infernal and metallic spectacle, the horizon appears obstructed. The steel factories transform the material into smoke and and the boats sail against winds and tides. Above the metal and the buildings that pierce the sky: silence and the flight of and the flight of birds are only a hypothesis.

In Le Livre d’Image, Jean-Luc Godard recycles existing images (films, documentaries, paintings, television archives, etc.), quotes excerpts from books, uses fragments of music. The driving force is poetic rhyme, the association or opposition of ideas, the aesthetic spark through editing, the keystone. The author performs the work of a sculptor. The hand, for this, is essential. He praises it at the start. “There are the five fingers. The five senses. The five parts of the world (…). The true condition of man is to think with his hands. Jean-Luc Godard composes a dazzling syncopation of sequences, the surge of which evokes the violence of the flows of our contemporary screens, taken to a level of incandescence rarely achieved. Crowned at Cannes, the last Godard is a shock film, with twilight beauty.