The Image Book

The essence of a book is to encompass all other books ("intertextuality"), the nature of reality is to contain within itself an infinity of realities ("representations"), and finally, the essence of an image is (not) to encompass all other images, all stories, and all interpretations, but also something more - a peaceful fascination with itself, free from interpretation, open to the flicker of an always new world, a new sequence. After all, sequences unfold in time, and when an entire life is needed for an hour of film, the ultimate refuge of films becomes a fragment of images, which have the power to compress entire centuries in their flashes. Or at least their own - the twentieth century of cinema. Jean-Luc Godard, even in his old age, does not change his likely definitive word of an abandoned revolutionary, who does not intend to abandon the hopes of his past and his images and becomes the Angel of Walter Benjamin, who redeems the victims of oppression and exploitation with his gaze (after all, Benjamin's textual metaphor has a prototype in... Paul Klee's painting). (12/11/2018)