Adieu au langage (2014)'s comments

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dream_tiger

Please Borvaran, tell me why.

9 years 9 months ago

I'm freaking glad I am not Godard, who seems to be stuck in a limbo of inter-textual postmodern distancing and for long seems to have stopped to relate to people of flesh and blood. The "spontaneous" anti-aesthetic that Godard uses in its deconstruction of 3D movie commute often between headache-inducing and uninteresting but it shines occasionally. If nothing else, it shows up both Godard's 3D film's artificiality and its unique characteristics, but my goodness how tired you become in the end the old man's quips and his inter-textual and editing related ADHD.

7 years 11 months ago

demagogo

I hope I wasn't the only one laughing at a dog quoting Rilke.

8 years 1 month ago

NourNasreldin

Adieu au Langage aka Goodbye to Language is Godard’s latest piece of work and one can safely say that it is a purely experimental film. The film has Godard’s signature style, for example: The black screens with numbers and words that appear every few minutes throughout the film although I don’t think Godard needed to use the black screens in this film, as this time we as an audience didn’t need something to keep us in check or to remind us that this is only but a film because simply, you could never, not even for a second forget that Goodbye to Language is a film. Also, another signature Godard element is the repetition of the dialogue at different times in the film. The film consists of many jumbled shots that quickly carry you from one scene, person, mood and feeling to another in just a matter of seconds.

The film strongly emerges itself in the Anti-plot world, as the viewer is lost in the mad realm of Godard with a script that he’s written himself that has no beginning, middle nor end. However, some of the ideas represented in the film by two particular characters are crafty and thought provoking. I would like to give examples of the dialogue but unfortunately; no quotes have been posted to the web yet. Explaining the film would be so hard as one cannot pinpoint a certain topic of focus. The film explores love, politics, language, existence, and the question of what the world means mainly, but still only focuses on each one of them for a very limited period of time as it is almost impossible to fix your attention on a certain topic since that the shots are always quickly changing, sometimes very irritatingly even. But then again, I believe that was Godard’s aim.

Besides the disorientation of the shots, the film is also shot in 3D! Which was an absolute surprise to me but not so much after I started watching the film and figured out Godard’s the director. I have to admit, Godard uses the particular feature in a very nonconventional way that confuses the viewer even more. Godard also felt free to play around with the colors and mess with the exposure. It would be foolish to try to compare this film to other Godard films as it differs entirely from anything I’ve seen of him before, but then again it’s Godard and people were still weirded out by Breathless when it first came out back in the 50s.

9 years 10 months ago

Siskoid

Jean-Luc Goddard's Goodbye to Language (Adieu au langage) really shouldn't be on Netflix. Not because it's an experimental art film, but because its main innovations have to do with its approach to 3D. Which can't be seen on Netflix. Goddard apparently Jerry-rigged makeshift 3D cameras and the broke all the rules, as far as superimposing images, screwing with depths of field, etc. go, do as to disorient the audience, which the film already does with its non-plot, jarring sound design, and weird filter changes. The language Goddard says goodbye to is that of traditional cinema, and at one point, the superimposition of media, coupled with a character or two on a smartphone, made me think the film was reaching for recreating how we absorb media today, one eye on the TV, the other on a computer screen, perhaps even two - a calculated media overload. But if that's really in there, I couldn't say. What it felt like to me was a bad artsy student film, with naked characters reciting pretentious philosophical dialogue, acting in the way Brecht would have made actors act, with shaky camera work using terrible equipment and juxtaposing disparate images. I'm certainly not unpretentious - that may be gleaned from what traces I've left around here somewhere - but this to me felt like old experiments, already seen and done and since adapted to perfume commercials. It felt like pastiche at this point, and I kept wondering why I was subjecting myself to it. If I were to sample its 3D tricks, I might find something at least technically interesting about it. Absent that feature, I don't see the attraction.

8 years 1 month ago

Borvaran

The cinema lessons in 50 year will talk about this film.

9 years 9 months ago

fonz

How many times do I need to watch this before I can even break through the first layer of this cinematic onion? By my estimation, at least five. Once to just take it all in. The next with one eye closed, after with the other closed, then focusing entirely on the imagery, finally just on the sounds. Maybe one entirely devoted to words. Going in I was under the impression that this was an experimental film entirely devoid of dialogue that was in 3D made by a cinematic master.

I'm still trying to process what I have experienced and there is a strong possibility that will check this out again in theaters before it ends its run, but this is by far the best use of 3D I have ever seen. The imagery is crisp and clear, that every frame can be blown up and hung up on your wall. It's a heady film and the 70 minutes might feel like an eternity to some but if you are well versed in existential thought and are open for a challenge, you will be rewarded with a good palette cleanse from all the other mind-numbing 3D you may have seen in recent years.

9 years 7 months ago