Adieu au langage

Jean-Luc Godard is 83 and his film, Adieu au Langage ("Farewell to Language") is generally described in valedictory terms, as an autumnal and graceful movie in which the old sorcerer, like Prospero, bids adieu to his magic, breaks his wand, and buries his book full fathom five.  This account of the film, like any other that can be written or spoken, falsifies the experience of the movie.  More than any other film maker, Godard insists on the autonomy of film -- a movie, no less than a composition by Bach or Beethoven, can not be described in words:  it's method of meaning is non-linguistic and any verbal summary is merely the rawest, and most inept, approximation.  For better or worse, Godard makes films that can't be paraphrased in words.  This makes writing about his movies perilous.  Since his films can't be accurately summarized, and since educated people tend to think in words, an audience confronted by one of Godard's pictures, newly made and without critical baggage of received opinions as to what the images mean, will be baffled, even, perhaps, infuriated.  At the Walker Art Center, the crowd applauded Godard's Adieu au Langage, perhaps impressed by the picture's sheer, if rebarbative, technical virtuosity -- but I don't think anyone had any real idea what exactly they had just seen or what, if anything, the barrage of images and words and music was supposed to mean.  People clapped but I don't think they knew what they were applauding.  Produced in a devilishly perverse and headache-inducing 3D, Adieu au Langage was filmed by two side-by-side cameras.  The film operates according to a series of oppositions, a difference-engine that exploits the dialectic between nature and metaphor, man and woman, human and animal, water and shore.  A critic might equate the two cameras to the opposing terms in these dialectical oppositions and argue that our sense of the third dimension, our concept of a shape on a flat two-dimensional plane, arises from the contrast of these binary terms:  for instance, we imagine a world from the opposition between nature and metaphor -- there are things outside of us and we transform those things into ideas by making metaphors; from this process, we construct a world.  Similarly, arguments could be made about the terms man and woman, human and animal, the fluid of the lake and solid of the shore, as well as other binary terms that I probably didn't notice.  This is an interesting idea and I would not advance it if I didn't think that it was, at least, partially true -- but, of course, Godard does everything in his power to so complicate and invert (or reverse) the oppositions that they generally vanish into one another, ending up as identities, or, even, completely unrelated terms.  A critic could correlate Godard's willful refusal to develop, or, even, consistently accept, the terms of these oppositions that he has himself imposed on the film with his eye-wracking use of the 3D image.  Sometimes, Godard exaggerates the 3D effect to the point of utter absurdity -- in a murder sequence, staged in a rainy public square, Godard sticks the frame of a chair and the edge of a table covered with books so deep into the audience's space, so far into the foreground that these objects seem to be sitting in our laps; in several sequences, he has the muzzle of his dog, Roxy Mieville, protrude so deeply into the spectator's space that the tip of the dog's nose seems poised to touch our own noses -- it's as if the mutt were about to lick our face.  At other times, Godard films leaves floating on water above other submerged leaves, objects in mirrors, reflections in puddles -- these images are already three-dimensional in that they are comprised of a surface and something perceived within the surface; adding the optical 3D effect to these images turns them into visual puzzles that are very hard to sort out, difficult to unscramble.  In some parts of the film, the 3D vanishes and the images are presented as a blur of impressionist colors, a super-saturated humid watercolor.  In three sequences, Godard pans one of the two cameras required to create the illusion of three dimensions, causing the image to slip out of the third dimension and, then, complicate itself in a labyrinth of superimpositions; Godard, then, tracks the camera back to its proper position causing the image to resolve into three-dimensions again, a sort of correlate of moving from a major key into the an extremely discordant minor and, then, resolving the discord by bringing the image back into three-dimensional focus -- all of these effects are difficult for the viewer and continuously require the spectator to not only think about what the picture shows, but how it is shown, and, then, even more daunting, how our eyes actually work to perceive and interpret or decode the image.  Thus, the film is about seeing itself, about the mechanism of optics and perspective that we bring to interpreting images.  These optical difficulties -- the film presents itself as a blinding sequence of pictures in sharp focus, somewhat blurred, very blurred, or without any focus at all -- are part of an experience that involves decoding titles flashed on the screen, often at different apparent depths on the picture plane, highly philosophical discourse rendered in whispers and subtitles, fragments of music that start and stop for no apparent reason, and lurid imagery, much of it obscene or violent, that frequently seems completely unmotivated.  A herky-jerky, fragmentary narrative that seems to involve a woman having an affair with a hairy older man who is married and, usually, shown on the toilet defecating, apparently, culminates in some kind of assassination -- however, a man speaking German is involved in the shootings.  The man and woman are not characters, but, rather, merely mouthpieces for Godard's koans, a series of paradoxes that they utter sententiously:  "In Russian, the word kamera means prison" or "When Chairman Mao was asked about the meaning of the revolution of '89, he said --it's too soon to know," or "Monet said you have to paint what you can't see," this last proverb, appearing in variations as words to the effect that the only thing that is visible is what is invisible."  The film's dialogue, which is really just opposing monologues, don't reveal character, doesn't advance the action (and is not expository) and the ideas expressed are either gibberish or paradoxes so radical that they can't really be understood in any rational way.  The woman seems to relate everything to death and conceives of her relationship with the man in terms of oppression and concentration camps.  The man responds to her words with farts and appears obsessed with shit and shitting.  Needless to say, the relationship between our hero and heroine is an unhappy one.  While they speak, classic films flicker behind them on a wide-screen TV.  At one point, Godard repeats shots that he has earlier interposed in the film, documentary footage of helicopters in Vietnam and bursts of napalm incinerating forests.  From these images, he cuts to a young man and woman that we have earlier met in the public square where the assassination was elliptically enacted -- the man and woman are defined as philosophers in that scene, planning to leave Europe.  In the later sequence, the man and woman reappear after napalm bursts in super-saturated color in the viewer's eyes -- now the woman is Mary Shelley and the man is Percy Shelley; we are on the shores of Lake Geneva where Mary Shelley is writing her novel Frankenstein.  (I think think the helicopters emerging from the sky are supposed to signal inspiration, the impulse to make art, literature -- but who knows?)  The man and woman can't have children; their relationship is too problematic for child-bearing or child-rearing.  Instead, the woman expresses the monstrosity of their relationship by writing Frankenstein and Godard and his own companion, invest their emotion in their dog, Roxie Mieville.  The dog is the surrogate for a child, and an image for a creature made by the dialectic of man and woman, that is without words and beyond language.  Many of the most beautiful images in the film seem to present the world from the perspective of this handsome and intelligent-looking hound, certainly, the most engaging, sympathetic, and well-developed character in the film.  A dog, Godard tells us, is the only creature that loves us more than it loves itself -- and so the dog represents, it seems, the resolution of the oppositions, the solution to the problem of death and love, shit and truth, words and silence, and all the other binary terms that we can't quite resolve into a single focused perspective on the world.  But Godard's imagery always has a kind of awful truth; it is never sentimental -- the dog isn't a metaphor; Roxie is, in fact, always just a dog.  Several times, we see the dog rolling in shit, luxuriating in the stink of the world, playing in a deep, melancholy landscape, a green forest and the agitated waters of a lake in the background, a serene, faintly menacing nature from which human beings have been banished.  The experience of Adieu au Langage is literally unreproducible -- much of the film's meaning is encoded in its remarkable and sadistic use of 3D -- and no one is ever going to show this movie in any kind of reliable repertoire rotation.  The picture is just too difficult.  I'm sure that it is profound and important, perhaps, an achievement on the order of Beethoven's last quartets, and that on several viewings much that is now unclear to me would come into focus.  But there is no way to see the movie again, at least, in three-dimensions, and so this picture, probably Godard's last, may always be inaccessible.