The legendary Jean-Luc Godard adds to his influential, iconoclastic legacy with this provocative collage film essay, a vast ontological inquiry into the history of the moving image and a commentary on the contemporary world. Displaying an encyclopedic grasp of cinema and its history, Godard pieces together fragments and clips them from some of the greatest films of the past, then digitally alters, bleaches, and washes them, all in the service of reflecting...

We live in a world awash in images. The recent technological revolutions in video recording, editing. and distribution are more akin to the development of movable type than any other such revolution in the last 500 years. And yet we are not popularly cognizant of or conversant with the grammar of visual communication, the coded messages of its style, and the practical components of its production. We are largely, in a word, illiterate. But this is...