Guided by Pictures: from Jean-Luc Godard to Brain Scans

This article seeks to critically engage with Elkins’ urging that “visual studies as a discipline needs to find ways to be guided by pictures rather than ways of explaining pictures” (2013: 29). It considers two cases of images that resist interpretation by means of written words. The first case is Je vous salue, Sarajevo, a short video from Jean-Luc Godard’s experimental cinema; the second is a brain scan coming from the biomedical field. What kind of theoretical and practical strategies can be put at work to recognize the capacity of these images to act as arguments, rather than taking them as inert objects to be looked at? The article engages with Godard’s “anti-montage” and morphology as two ways that visual studies scholars have at their disposal to challenge the relationship between images and theory.