Addio al linguaggio

The French have always been the greatest thinkers. Philosophy is an art form for them, and an export commodity. Godard is a thinker, first and foremost, and seems to have decided finally that film is a medium for communicating ideas - not for telling stories or for entertainment or even propaganda (despite his lengthy Dziga Vertov phase), but the mere expression of ideas relating to the sociology of human existence. This film is full of ideas, hardly explored, merely expressed. Virtually every line is an epigram, obviously lifted straight from Godard's notebooks, and intoned gravely.

This film might form a trilogy of existential anguish with "Eloge de l'amour" (a goodbye to idealised love) and "Film Socialisme" (a goodbye to an idealised socialist utopia). "Goodbye to Language" is even bleaker: a goodbye to meaning, for without language there is nothing, neither action nor meaningful existence.

It starts out as another cynical diatribe against humanity and its many shortcomings of sense and sensitivity, the breakdown of which unleashes brutality in the first place, and, by natural extension, war. Brooding string orchestras firmly set the elegiac tone.

The allegory is developed by a highly stylised, bleached-out and barren couple - he, brutish, she, sensitive - walking around their home in stylised nudity like Adam and Eve, shamed by their inability to attain the simple happiness of simple communication.

Colour-saturated images of nature adorn the film: nature as the only simple optimism left. Godard's dog gradually steals the show, presented as a creature that has overtaken man in the ability to live a guiltless life.

I have seen no interpretations of what the metaphor is that the captions imply. But here is one: the medium itself is the metaphor. While often picturesque, the 3D effect is more often just odd. In no way does it add to the meaning of what we are seeing, but rather imposes a false theatricality upon things. Moreover, much of the 3D doesn't work, and, with the camera giving completely different perspectives on the nearest objects, surely cannot have been intended to work. It often ceased to be 3D and became two badly superimposed brain-jarring images. Some of these are so unworkable, so physically painful to look at that one must suppose either that Godard is taking a sadistic pleasure in stabbing us in the eyes, or that these images are meant to represent the actual dysfunctionality of the medium - overbearing technology that detracts more than it contributes to the meaning of things.

If that's one of the ideas at play, the film has wrong-footed everybody. If not, it has just wrong-footed me, but the idea is there for the taking and is worth thinking about, for that is entirely what the film is: something to think about, sadly.

In this French-Swiss film, various vignettes are used to follow the lives of two couples and the dog of one of those couples as they occasionally philosophize.

Because this film is written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard, it is obligated to be as incomprehensible as possible to the average viewer. As I have seen many of his films before (some of which I have liked), I was prepared for an odd experience.

A synopsis on Wikipedia was helpful but it made me feel I had missed something. However, conventional plot is not a Godardian purpose.

If the intention is to create a dream-like experience to affect the subconscious mind, then the film does rather well. However, I still expect at least a minimal amount of understanding what I am watching. Luckily, the film was mercifully short at just an hour and ten minutes.

On 1st viewing of Godard's Goodbye to Language,you have no narrative, just a man and a woman,later a dog.There is repetition: the use of a new technique,3D,without rules,to show how a child or animal sees the world,with the use of primary colours in spring or autumn,or colours drenched ,bleeding out of the object.He uses heavy inter-titles like 'Nature' or ' Metaphor'.Godard wants to go beyond language,while paying homage to words at the same time.He quotes lavishly many writers,poets, thinkers,philosophers,painters,and plays the work of different musicians, where the music plays then goes dead. Alternatively, the screen goes black while people are speaking or music is still playing. Godard wants to have no preconceptions,just see through his lens the world nakedly, reflecting the world through these new techniques.We wander in forests,look up at trees,see the beauty of flowers, roam with a dog by a lakeside or as it rolls in snow,or in urban settings focus on a chair in the foreground. Subject: the idea is simple: a married woman and a single man meet.They love,they argue,fists fly.A dog strays between town and country.The seasons pass.The man and woman meet again. The dog finds itself between them.The other is in one,the one is in the other and they are three.The former husband shatters everything.A 2nd film begins:the same as the 1st, and yet not.From the human race we pass to metaphor.This ends in barking and a baby's cries.

Freud and the art of film began at the start of the 20th century,they both in some ways are parallel developments, exploring reality, based on new techniques.Godard shows us perception and consciousness,how an animal's eyes are unclouded by consciousness. Godard shows human beings weighed down by interpretations,needing interpretation.He uses 3D film in this baffling experimental drama,turning the technology on its head(no car chases,nor animated dragons or objects hurling towards the screen) by using his 3rd dimension to send contrasting images to each of the viewer's eyes or-in one particular haunting sequence-to add spatial depth to the sight of a man sitting on a toilet,pooping.This is a kind of equality we all share. The idea that existence is about trying to reconcile the "real" world with the subjective experience of the world, and the names and notions we use to catalogue and define the world--but the digressions are what make it sing. "I will barely say a word," says a voice on the soundtrack--maybe Godard?--adding, "I am looking for poverty in language." While the film is drenched in the rich sensual experience of Godard's visual language.An interesting motif is images of running water,water lapping shores of a lake,sea water,a river in full spate,rain falling,even the water of a shower:the importance of water in the origin myths of heroes, and dreams linked to childbirth.

He quotes Monet as painting what he doesn't see.We as human spectators, look at the observable universe.To scientists,numbers and the laws of science are real,independent entities,but they are constructions of human thought attempting to seize something of the universe.There is no transcendent perspective,we are dreamers.We can only really see ourselves when we are looking into another person's eyes.The camera captures everything it sees-we passively like the camera comply-and yet not seeing anything. As though Godard is making the movie for the camera and for the sake of the film itself.There are no conventions of plot or character.One of the characters says she "hates character". Density,compression,digression,montage are utilised freely.Lettered Texts are printed on top of each other or over images.We get ideas tossed at us like Hitler's rise to power coincided with the invention of TV,or will Russia ever be a part of Europe,without ceasing to be Russia?That a new Godard film is an event,something that may better be seen in an art gallery:as distribution in the UK by Studiocanal has folded and it's been rushed to DVD.This is a shame as the full 3D experience can only be gained in a movie theatre. in Goodbye, Godard's use of 3D is a matter of using the screen (with its illusory extra dimension of depth) as a multimedia space in the true sense: he's creating both a painting and a sculpture.Obscure,maddening,obsessed with history and cinema.In a word: awesome!

You know, it's always so common that people who dislike/hate films like this to call fans "pretentious", among other names, highlighting their reasons for liking films like these as having to do with self-importance. I do tend to like really out-there stuff so I know how it feels. But really, it just comes down to whether one enjoyed something like this or not. It's not about the "meaning", since one can like or dislike a film regardless of how well they understood it. Despite not knowing what the hell this was saying, I was actually enjoying it. I'm sure some hated it from the get-go and it was torture, but for me the first 30 minutes had me mostly intrigued. That fascination with it lessened as the film went on. I don't think something like this really works for more than 30 minutes, at most. I'm sure some would disagree, but while I don't hate it, I'm not a fan of it overall. I enjoyed it until I didn't, simple as that.

To call a post-Nineties Jean-Luc Godard's film "accessible" would be a stretch. But his new one, Goodbye to Language, is discernibly more appealing and less of a slog (70 minuets instead of 104) than his Film Socialisme (NYFF 2010). The latter occasioned Todd McCarthy's angry-sounding assertion that Godard is mean-spirited and exhibits "the most spurious sort of anti-Americanism or genuinely profound anti-humanism, something that puts Godard in the same misguided camp as those errant geniuses of an earlier era, Pound and Céline." This is less visible in Goodbye to Language, which spends a lot of time with a naked middle-class white couple in an apartment, and with Godard's own dog, Roxy, and is playful enough to be shot in 3D, of which it makes some good use. I do not see that use as "revolutionary," as Mike D'Angelo did in a Cannes bulletin for The Dissolve. I think in the face of a rote-acknowledged "master" (and Godard really did seem exciting and revolutionary back in the days of Breathless and La Chinoise) whom one can't make head nor tail of, it's natural to pick out elements one enjoys and blow them up into something important. Thus one notes that the distorted color in Goodbye to Language is sometimes gorgeous. And one wishes that more mainstream films dared to do such things more often, with one excuse or another.

Goodbye to Language, like Film Socialisme, is divided up into parts with portentous titles, which one would remember if they seemed to illustrate their titles in any relatable way. The NYFF festival blurb calls this "a work of the greatest freedom and joy," but it's not. It's didactic, full of general nouns (like "freedom" and "joy") thrown out with the verve of a French university student. It cites fifteen or twenty famous authors whose names were dropped or lines quoted; and ten or twelve classical composers, snippets of whose compositions are folded in to add flavor and importance. But when Mike D'Angelo says "it doesn't constantly seem as if he's primarily interested in demonstrating his own erudition," he's saying this because other Godard films have constantly seemed to be primarily interested in that, and this one just barely avoids it.

Here's what D'Angelo observes in the film's 3D that he thinks revolutionary (and this one moment is indeed remarkable): "Turns out he'd had the camera pan to follow an actor walking away from another actor, then superimposed the pan onto the stationary shot, creating (via 3-D) a surreal loop that, when completed, inspired the audience to burst into spontaneous applause. " It's hard to describe, and strange, and indeed original. I'd very much like to have watched this sequence -- which you do have to take off your 3D glasses to appreciate the transformative nature of -- with an audience keen enough to have noted its cleverness and applauded it. The audience I was with applauded at the end, but that just felt like an obligatory gesture, not the "olé" of connoisseurs noting a visual coup.

As D'Angelo says, since the Nineties Godard has been "a full-bore avant-garde filmmaker." This means his films are the kind of thing you might see showing in a loop in a darkened room of a museum. When any film makes no rational sense I remember my museum experiences of that kind of art film and am calmed. Such films have their place. They are like complex decorative objects. Yes, and Godard's references to Nietzsche (pronounced "NEETCH" by French- speakers) or Solzenitzen are like gilding on a frame. And offhand gibes like the man in the hat who says Solzenitzen didn't need Google (which also sounds funny in French) to make up the subtitle for a book, as D'Angelo puts it, "ranks high among the dumbest things a smart person has ever said." Godard is a smart person who in a long career has said plenty of dumb things. He would have been a lot better as a filmmaker if he'd done more showing and less telling, from a long way back.

But parts of Farewell to Language are bold and visually stimulating, and ought to be studied by conventional filmmakers, editors, or cinematographers to get some more original visual ideas. I also like another D'Angelo's Dissolve note (and he himself says this is his favorite Godard film since Weekend): "According to my Twitter feed, Goodbye To Language has reinvented cinema again—one dude went full Pauline Kael and compared it to Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon." Unfortunately, some after the screening I saw, with bunch of ostensible film writers, out in the lobby some were pronouncing that this was "the future of cinema." Not Marvel Comics?

Watched at NYFF 2014.