Reseñas de la crítica

Apparently, G cannot lose his exceptional sensibility for discovering Beauty. The experiment to use 3D is clearly a new challenge: how far the camera can go in sensing and sizing it. From this point of view Adieu au langage is sometimes fascinating. The richness of the enchanting colours in nature, the yellow leaves and red flowers, the trees moving in the wind might be banal, yet their close sensual presence, their mere existence becomes suddenly as if it would be something totally new.

It is funny, playful, profound, provocative, and uses the 3D in really interesting ways (unlike anything else I've seen in 3D). What was also surprising to me watching it in that environment was how clear, ultimately, it really is. The structure is broken-up and fragmented, scenes are cut off, the sound is uneven (on purpose), every image is futzed with in some way … but there really is a story there, and it's really a quite simple one.

In his astonishing first feature in 3-D, the now-84-year-old Godard pointedly shows, through an almost impossibly rich tapestry of stereoscopic images and sounds, how language and technology have conspired to create barriers that separate humans not only from each other but also from themselves.

Language is spectacular as well as cerebral, employing 3-D in ways I've never seen before... Throughout the movie Godard grades the colors from one camera slightly differently than those from the other; projected in 3-D, the colors combine like paints on an artist's palette.

Goodbye to Language is [Godard's] lyrical, philosophical, and occasionally scatological vision of cinema's possibilities. Shot with GoPro cameras and smartphones, enfant terrible-style, it is playful and aggressive (he assaults our optic nerves at times), but there is also melancholy in this tale.

To watch it and hear it in ideal conditions – projected in 3D in a theater with surround sound that’s crystal clear enough to preserve all the expressivity of its saturation – is to open oneself to a relation that directly affects both body and cognition, working through attraction as well as opacity.

Also delightful – and confounding and funny and unexpectedly moving – was Jean-Luc Godard's Goodbye to Language, about which I can only say, after a single viewing, that it is filled with nothing but new images. (The recurring shot of fingers wrapped around the rails of a gate is uncanny in exactly the way I've always wanted 3D to be uncanny but never is.) Even relative to Godard's post-Histoire(s) work, Goodbye to Language is uncommonly dense.

I found it to be genuinely, quietly, moving: more in line with the personal cinema of Brakhage or Mekas than the militant ciné-sociologue of years past. To be sure, Godard's staple interests were still there – Marx, Mao, De Staël – but these references now belong to an introverted imagination, not to a loudspeaker.

It is a bouquet of textures, attributable to a variety of postproduction filters and technologies – Godard lists his cameras, many of them less-than-state-of-the-art consumer jobs, in the closing credits, right alongside the composers and writers from whose work he has created the decoupage of the film's sonic element. Yet still reservations remain...

Much of the conventional means of engaging with cinema are all but abandoned. What remains at the core of it are the images, which is ironic because these images feel unstable, volatile, practically on the brink of exploding, tearing out a giant hole that might open a way for us to see out of the cinema we know into one that's yet to come.

At certain moments, it hurt my eyes to continue watching, I had to look away, take off my glasses for a few seconds, rub my eyes. This effect is very much intended, of course, which brings the meta-cinematic/meta-3D aspect more sharply into focus.

In any Godard film, even the ones that don't dazzle us with coolness and eloquence, the truth of cinema is there: Godard knowing that we're watching, us knowing he knows, the record and memory of the filming experience, the bemused distance between the actors and the "roles" we're not supposed to ever believe, the legacy of movie tropes borrowed from and riffed upon. Don't forget any of it, the master says almost Zenishly, it's all part of what cinema is.