Taking as his starting point fifteen characteristically penetrating epigrams by Jean-Luc Godard, Richard Dienst invites us to trace a new path through some of the fundamental questions of cinema. Godard has never stopped offering lessons about seeing and thinking, always insisting that we have to learn how to start over. By starting over ‘from scratch’, Godard challenges us to rethink our ideas about embodied perception, material form and the politics of making images. Less a commentary on Godard’s oeuvre than an outline of a Godardian pedagogy, Seeing from Scratch offers a theoretical exercise book for students, teachers and practitioners alike, pursuing unexpectedly far-reaching ways to think through images. Along the way we encounter, in this brief, accessible essay, ideal for classroom use, a wide range of thinkers whose ideas are put to practical use working through the intellectual and aesthetic questions and challenges Godard’s epigrams suggest. Readers are thus introduced to some of the essential currents in canonical and contemporary thinking on the image, from Kant to Klee, Reverdy to Rancière and Brecht to Bresson – not in the abstract, but as part of the book's practical approach to intellectual problem solving. In its conversational tone, return to fundaments and practical pedagogical approach, Seeing from Scratch is an essay for the media age in the mould of John Berger's Ways of Seeing from the 1970s: a new way of discussing the theory and practice of images and the film image. A companion piece, ‘The Postcard Game’, presents a scene from an imaginary classroom, where a stack of postcards—like those found throughout Godard’s work—provokes a spiralling series of questions about images, texts and the manifold pathways of the creative process, providing a template for similar new kinds of pedagogical activity and discussion. Seeing from Scratch: 15 Lessons with Godard arrives on our virtual bookshelves at the perfect time. Never have we needed to rethink how we teach and learn about images more than we do now, a time when we are buried beneath bewildering imagery and when higher education is being transformed in dispiriting ways before our very eyes. Richard Dienst offers us a series of provocations infused with a wit and intelligence equal to that of Jean-Luc Godard, whose work is the inspiration for this ambitious attempt to rebuild a pedagogy of images from the ground up. It should inspire students and teachers of film alike in ways that will surely surprise them. — Christopher Pavsek, Simon Fraser University In Seeing from Scratch: 15 Lessons with Godard, Richard Dienst teaches us how to see and thereby think through the Swiss filmmaker’s cinematic imaginary. Combining his acute critical lens with a more playful example from a postcard game, Dienst illuminates Godard’s strategic deployment of a system of montage in which a careful selection of images is set in motion, generating a series of profound meditations. Dienst persuasively demonstrates how images, even when isolated, are never alone but exist in complex relationships with each other, forming ever-changing constellations. Seeing from Scratch traces the evolution of the nonagenarian’s image theory from the 1960s to more recent iterations in The Image Book (2018) or Goodbye to Language (2014). The lessons we learn from Dienst extend beyond an understanding of Godard and make us rethink the way in which moving images can produce critique in the twenty-first century. — Nora M. Alter, Temple University Richard Dienst is Professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He is the author of The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing Against the Common Good and Still Life in Real Time: Theory After Television. His essays on Jean-Luc Godard, Bertolt Brecht and cultural theory have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals.