Godard has long been associated with the French New Wave, an innovative cinematic movement that changed the nature of filmmaking in Europe and elsewhere. While many of his contemporaries have stopped making films or have passed away, Godard continues to make films today and pushing the boundaries of what film can do. His most recent film The Image Book is an experimental meditation on the state of the world, with an interpolation of historical reflection and more contemporary subject matter.
The film has been described as an "avant-garde horror essay," and looks at the modern Arabic world. The content of the film is various footage, painting, and music, all strung together into a film with narration by both Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville. It takes a closer look at the history of film and its failures, particularly its failures to adequately examine the crises in the Middle East, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The film has been met with praise. A review of the film in The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw states, "Godard’s is a cinematic language that has now possibly been largely co-opted by the cultural theorist or the conceptual artist. But Godard always insists on the larger, traditional prerogative of film and the grandeur that only cinema, only the phenomenon of people gathered in the dark before the vast screen, can convey." The film competed for the Palme d'Or at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival and received a "Special Palme d'Or," the first in history.
