In Jean-Luc Godard’s final feature film, The Image Book (Le livre d’image), he drew on devices that had defined his career: overlapping film excerpts, literary and musical quotations, paintings and statues, press photos, official documents, his own voice and those of others.
At the Biennale Arte 2026, Fabrice Aragno, one of Godard’s collaborators since the early 2000s, offers Sentiments Signes Passions (Feelings Signs Passion): about Jean-Luc Godard’s Livre d’image. The installation generates an entirely different visual and sensory experience than the original film, while remaining true to Godard’s logic.
The Image Book was structured in two parts, the first divided into five chapters – “as if we were seeing the five fingers before seeing the whole hand”, as Godard put it. His hypothesis was that the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultures – the source of the three major monotheistic religions, as well as Plato and Aristotle, Marx and Freud – now dominate the global order by way of force, money and culture, but have failed to produce a language capable of handling the complexity of the world, resulting in endless catastrophes.
Aragno dislocates Godard’s five fingers from the hand, but recaptures the spirit of The Image Book through projections on sheer fabrics among which visitors can move. Where Godard used editing, Aragno uses space and transparency. Godard, who approved Aragno’s initial installation, nicknamed Aragno’s apparatus projections vivantes (“living projections”).
—Jean-Michel Frodon
