Pejman Foundation

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.

Set between Tabriz and Tehran in the weeks between the Twelve-Day War and the subsequent conflict between Iran, Israel, and the United States, this film follows two Iranian artists whose lives have become inseparable from a vast private archive assembled over decades: photographs, documents, discarded objects, and traces of anonymous lives. Working somewhere between collecting, hoarding, preservation, and obsession, they have created an improvised museum of neglected lives, one in which sex workers, young soldiers, child labourers, gay lovers, and ordinary families emerge through abandoned albums, damaged belongings, and fragments of memory left behind by history.