ANOTHER DIMENSION: GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE BY DAVID BORDWELL Goodbye to Lan ating fi ears. Greeted with praise ar by the National Society of Film Critics as the best film of 20 Surprisingly, it achiev claim without surrendering any of the challenges s0 typical of this grand old man of cinematic modern: ism. In fact, he pushes his earier tendencies to the limit. The polit cal statements are more ambivalent, the trips into nature are more hyperstylzed, the story (or stories) are more fragmentary than ever before, Add 3D to the mix, and you get one of the boldest and ‘most engrossing films of our time. Yet the film is designed to seem a bewildering pile-up of images and sounds. My first viewing left me pleased but baffled called it, and that’s not unfair. We get a thering up images—light on water, a bow! of fruit beside a nude, a reflection on sociologist Jacques Ellul—and storing them up for possible use in a tidier film. Stil, the rhymes and repetitions tease us with a sense that there's something pow. erful holding in a turbulent but patterned flow. The meaning may be elusive, as with most late Godard films, but the experience feels rounded and sufficient, rot empty. A sket these fragments together,DISMANTLING THE SCENE Much in Goodbye to Language is familiar from other lat Godard films. There are his nature images—wind in trees, trem jent water, rainy nights seen through tl sh a J his urban shots of milling crowds. All of these indshield—at may pop in at any point, often accompanied by snatches of class sor modern music. Again he returns to ideas about politics and istory, particularly World War Il and recent outbreaks of violenes in developing countre Yet all this familiarity doesn’t mean we're comfortable with what we see and hear, Godard has always been a storyteller Who trjoys incompleteness. Since we'te accustomed to clear and arfative, we can find hs fims awfully opaque. Not ony do characters plausibly, facially, irrationally but its hard to assign them particular wants, needs, and personal jes. They come into conflict, but wo're not always sure why. In addition, we aren't often told how the characters connect with one another. The plots are highly ol ion and merely suggesting them, c an offscreen sound. In Goodbye to Language, for instance, a mani ‘wounding is implied when two women, themselves barely visible in the frame, bend over spatters of blood. But what man? And who) was the attacker? Within scenes, Godard tends to avoid giving us an estab lishing sho, if we mean by that a shot that includes all the relevant dramatic elements. He often has recourse to constructive editing which gives usp 1 space that we are expected 10 assemble. Often we get an image of one character but hear the dialogue ofan offscreen character. And the shot of the lone charge ter may hang on quite a while, so that we wait to see who's speak redundant tical, leaving out big chunks of en by a single close-up oF ces of t 8ing, Worso,a hot may stage itsaction ° v2, acte's hard to identify. Godard may shootin silhouette, or frame people in ways that hide their faces. As a result, we can't spot their expression, or even identify who they are. In one shot in Goodbye to Language, a dog whom we'll loarn to call Roxy approaches @ couple on a rainy night. The an urges her pertner to take him in. All we see, however, is n-ga:sing up the car. In the darkness we hear (dimly) the shimpering and the woman's plea, but we 28 neither one. By fragmenting and thinning out hs scenes, Gi cgains a dot ble benefit. We get just enough inf ion together somewhat, and our ats happening can carry some narrative interest. Yotthe opaque com positions ano. ine bits and pieces wedged in ell atention to themselves in their own Fight. When vec con't fully grasp the fact that the woman is asking her man to take = the dog, we're forced to concentrate on the image, with »s coop shadows sparked by the ruby glow of a stray reflection. By blocking or tro .Bng our story-making process, Godard re-weights each ind". ual image and sound, AGGRESSION AND DIGRESSION Whats there can't be any old images or sounds; they hook together in larger patterns that sometimes float free of the plot, and sometimes work indirectly upon it. The best analog) might be to a poem that hints at a story, so that our engagement wth the poetic for overlaps at moments with our interest in half-hidden action of the characters. ‘What's half-hidden in Goodbye to Language is a tale offio couples, laid out m cision. Ater a double prologue showing us eac! woman meeting, we a dog), > evidently ‘has its tunterpartin the life of Couple 2. real camara setups, and the presence of an identical gun thug fl hdgband?). Both couples affairs end badly, if somewhat enigmats cally. Atthe very close, wo more couples are briefly introduced. ‘There are Percy and Mary Shelley, followed by a couple shown only asa woman's hand writing a text and a man's hand painting! ‘water colors. Artistic creation, it seems, allows @ man and a ‘woman to flourish The film’s symmetrical, double-enty structure is almost impossible to discern on firs viewing, That's not only because, ‘Godard has compressed and frayed the scenes. And its not only Because he has diabolically cast actors for the second story who) resemble those inthe fist story. The audacity comes 2s well with his favorite habits of interruption s Digressions swarm across his scenes. n the early scer + of Goodbye to Language, its possible to lose sight of the mal BD scter— aoe fren » volot va tacos cof the mina - characters crowding the book table, the professors comments on Solzhenitsyn and the rise of Hitler, and the pun on “pet ‘evoking not only the thumb calisthenics of cellphones | Tom Thumb of fairy tales. Godard briefly pushes aside plot action of a husband abusing an estranged wife asta parallel between domestic abuse and a 7Some interruptions and detours come from the editing process, For decades Godard has popped in black frames, titles, or a burst of found footage. Of course he creates marvelous shots while filming, but ever since Breathless (A bout de souffle, 1960), when he yanked out frames from the middle of his shots, he has always made post-shooting work more than simply trimming and polishing. He breaks off beautiful shots and drops in bursts of music that snap off just before they cadence. "For Jean-Luc,” cinematog rapher Fabrice Aragno says, “shooting is just a way to collect mate- fial.” Here the post-production process is a thorough re-writing, even a distressing, of what came from the camera, Nonetheless, the intercut footage and the cellphone chore- ‘ography are arresting in themselves. When we can't easily tie what we see and hear to an ongoing plot, we're coaxed to savor each moment as a micro-event in itself, like a word in a poem or a patch Of color in a painting. And lke the stories, the digressions have an arc. The war imagery in the film's first part subsides in the second, to be replaced by Roxy's wanderings. The pivot would seem to be a helicopter crash at the end of the first part, where among the fiaming ruins we can see the burned head of a dog. Roxy's proxy? The original beast survives, exuberantly, in the film’s second long part and right up to the last shot—a lyrical, peaceful counterweight to the horrors invoked earlier. PLANES AND VOLUMES Goodbye to Language is an extraordinary film in 2D, but it gains its full force in stereoscopy. Just as Hollywood cinema erected rules for plotting, shooting, and editing, it has cultivated rules for “proper” 3D filming. But Godard shows what happens if you ignore the rules. 9 This is his experimental side. He explores what “good crattsmanship” traditionally excludes, just as the Cubists decided tha: perspective, smooth finish, and other features of academic painting blocked off some expressive possibilities. The Hollywood rules of 3D, for example, demand shots that are easy to read. When D isn’t trying to awe us with special effects, it has the workaday purpose of advancing our understanding of the story. Accordingly, 30 should use selective focus to make sure that the most important acter stands out, while everything else blurs gracefully. But Godard uses 3D to present the space of a shot as discomfitingly as he presents his elliptical scenes and his zigzag and peekaboo narrative. As in traditional deep-focus cinematography, we're invited to notice more than the main subject of a shot, buthere those multiple planes have an extra presence, and our eye is invited to explore them. Shivering of leaves on a branch, blowrcout, vers atthe roadside, and the plingsonefeny ple rei to let 7 savor them, jonal_cinema presents itself as a window onto the y world, and 3D practitioners have spoken of the frame as the 0 window." People and objects should recede gently away that surface, into the depth behind the screen. But Goodbye to Language gives us a beautiful slatted chair, neither flyin ourlap ‘or fully integrated into the fictional space. It juts out and domi- nates the composition, partly blocking the main action-a husband fon violence hustling out of his car. That chair, or one of its mates, reappears, usually with greater heft than the human charae- joved nearly out of sight behind it. Most 3 films have trouble indicating volumes; instead, the im sliced, like playing cards stacked in front of us. The ‘objects and people in Goodbye to Language achieve remarkable solidity, which may be due to the fact that Avagno played with various distances between the two cameras. Just a8 important, Godard hasn't used the converging-lens method to create 3D during shooting. Instead of “toeing-in” the cameras—that is, swiv «ling each one slightly inward to match the convergence of our two eyes—Aragno set the lenses to be strictly parallel. Godard relied on software to generate the startling, varied 3D we see onscreen. The input from two parallel lenses allowed him to create any degree of convergence or divergence he wished. Sometimes the images are hard to resolve; you may see ghosts, Sometimes we get images that fuse differently depending on where you sit to watch them, Sometimes we get images of almost Baroque volume, 5 when the camera (on a toy train sliding across a room) passes 2 12 tersSN ec eget Ru Le Ta ie eee Se ee ee A Ree re ce ce ean can stretch out the volumes sumptuously in wide-angle depth, Or he can make the planes precariously thin, as when his superim- een a eC RUE ee Ue ere Sed ee ee Cu ae a ere Renner eats sey Ce eC at ees ees Bea cir te ieee Cael eee ek eee ere Oca oe ee ea a things, can be yanked away from realism and toward something more poetic and unsettling. Say farewell to language (in a very OR eae rete i tue cen eaten Peak eis David Bordwell, Jacques Ledoux Professor Emeritus at the University of /isconsin- Madison, is tile author of several books on film history and a - Te eae ee ae