I’ve watched Godard’s Goodbye to Language (“Adieu au Langage”, 2014) once so far. It deserves and requires multiple viewings. It is a montage film, shot with multiple cameras (including a Go Pro) and covering multiple overlapping and unrelated story lines. There are also lots of shots of Jean-Luc Godard’s dog.
The movie is purposefully annoying. Take for instance the use of fast cutting. Fast cutting comes from music video editing and is used to convey forceful action. But the fast editing is still tied together with an underlying soundtrack to provide a sense of continuity and to bracket a series of related footage. Godard, on the other hand, undermines this by starting a piece of the score and then chopping it unceremoniously like a record player losing its groove. And then he does this over and over with the same piece of unsatisfyingly broken music in different places throughout the film.
If there’s a clue to what the film is “about” (and does it really need to be about anything) it’s in a line in the last third of the film, about a couple on the verge of breaking up, where both characters say that they understand what their partner is saying but cannot understand what they themselves are saying. It’s like a reverse gaslighting. Which, to be fair, is what marital fights feel like.
Other parts of the film include ponderous philosophical monologues and dialogues about the “tyranny of the image” – the tendency of myth and magical thinking to displace discursive reason. Godard also has lots of scenes of people interacting with their phones in book stalls and standing next to other people, highlighting something that has become so common that we no longer comment on it, but which can still shock when we see it on film. Smartphones and internet culture are in their own way manifestations of the tyranny of the image, since they replace long-form thinking with easily digestible memes. To the point that we now take for granted that long-form is a waste of time and assume that it is normal (or even possible) to absorb complex thoughts in a few minutes.
Naturally there is irony in the title and concept of the film since film itself is a replacement of discursive thought with images and syllogistic reasoning is replaced with a musical score to move us from one narrative moment to the next. Except in Godard’s hands, the film resists us and makes even the simplest things hard. It fucks up the score. It limits the beautiful long shots. It uses gritty camera footage at a time when high quality digital images are cheap and easy. The handling of the sex scene is bleehhhh. Worst of all, the central story is anti-ship in a medium that requires sexually appropriate relationship building to ensure commercial success.
The overall effect of the movie on me is that I struggled to watch it but can’t stop thinking about it even weeks later. And parts of the movie I thought were pretentious and had less there than met the eye – I now think contain infinite depth.
An extra feature of the film is that it was originally shot in 3D and was exhibited at Cannes in 3D. I watched it in 2D but now will try to track down the 3D DVD. Like other amazing films – such as Bi Gan’s masterpiece Long Day’s Journey Into Night — it uses a cinematic medium that has since fallen out of favor. I fortunately still have an old 3D flatscreen and a 3D DVD player to watch it on.
Other movies, like Ang Lee’s Gemini Man, which is ultimately a technical master’s experiment in 3D cinema, isn’t even available in 3D DVD format. Given the current death of the movie theater in America, there’s even a chance that we won’t ever be able to see it in its intended form again.