The Image Book (2019)

Thursday, January 31, 2019 @ 7:00 PM
Globe Cinema - 617 8th Ave SW, Calgary, AB
$12 General | $10 Members/Seniors/Students | $40 5-Pack Punch Pass | $99 Season Pass

Jean-Luc Godard, who is as sure a thing as they come as far as ‘living legend’ status is concerned and who turned eighty-eight-years-old in early December, returned to the Cannes Film Festival in 2018 (not that he actually, you know, showed up in person) a festival he was instrumental in temporarily shutting down exactly fifty years previously, receiving for his trouble a Special Palme d’Or invented entirely for him and his completely sui generis new film. The Image Book is perhaps the kind of art for which a whole new award is required, and new classifications along with it. Godard was one of the founding fathers of the French New Wave, and the only Swiss combatant among their ranks. In the 1960s he quickly become a fashionable enfant terrible, making irreverent and maniacally stylized films that practically reinvented narrative cinema. At the beginning of the 1980s, in collaboration with his partner Anne-Marie Miéville, Godard’s cinema began to mark a decisive turn. His work moved away from radical play, toward beauty and profundity. The Image Book arrives at the apex of a peerless career. It is made in the mode of his ephocal series Histoire(s) du cinéma, combining fervidly intercut archival footage and a bracing deluge of oracular commentary. Some describe these works as essay films. Godard's biographer Colin MacCabe has insisted that instead of thinking of this version of Godard as an essayist, we may do better to consider him rather one of the finest poets of the post-war era.

- Written by Jason Wierzba

CONTEMPORARY WORLD CINEMA

As we progress further into the 21st century, the global currents of ideas, influences, and images that inform the art house cinema have both widened and deepened. Digital technologies enable new voices from disparate places to assert themselves into the conversation. Global travel and finance stimulate new, unexpected collaborations, ideations, and co-productions; ever-globalizing telecommunications ensures that word of new discoveries and developing reputations circulates freely between Berlin and Busan, Cannes and Karlovy Vary, and most everywhere in between.

Despite all this, it is still rare to see these films in theatres, with other people, projected on a big screen. In our Contemporary World Cinema series, programmed on an ongoing basis, we present a selection of the most vital, challenging, and artistically cutting-edge films from around the world. Most importantly, these works of critical cinema will be presented in the cinema, as intended. Don’t miss these one-of-a-kind works, which likely will not return to theatres in Calgary. 

About Calgary Cinematheque

We are a non-profit film society dedicated to presenting significant, challenging, and essential works of cinema art in Calgary. During our season, which runs from October to April, we screen films weekly, in curated programs which situate each film in a thematic and historical context. We do this because we believe cinema is an essential form of artistic, social, and political expression. Audiences should be able to engage with a wide range of cinematic expression, not only with what is commercially viable. We believe in the power of sharing these experiences with other people in a theatrical setting and we strive to cultivate a community around that experience.  

Calgary Showtimes:  Image Book (Le Livre d'image), The >

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