Cinematic ends and beginnings abound in a stellar 56th New York Film Festival lineup

Should you find yourself in New York over the next 17 days and in an insufficiently apocalyptic frame of mind, you might want to check out Jean-Luc Godard's "The Image Book," one of the more mind-blowing titles in this year's excellent New York Film Festival, which opens Friday.

There are, as the title suggests, a lot of images here, most of them cherry-picked from other movies - Nicholas Ray's "Johnny Guitar," Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" and Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom" are just a few of many - and then interspersed with documentary footage of various wartime atrocities. For 90 minutes or so, the history of motion pictures and the history of human civilization seem to collide in a frenzied symphony of destruction, exacerbated by the fact that