We saw/heard Jean-Luc Godard's latest film, "Goodbye To Language" at the Vancouver Film Festival. Godard, who first began making feature films 55 years ago(!), is not letting up. His film, made in 3-D, is an irascible and stunning collage of sounds and images in his late, non-narrative style. There is some sort of story about a couple that talk, argue, talk, have sex, talk, and adopt a stray dog. The dog, Godard's, is actually the star of the movie (there was a special award at Cannes!). The film juxtaposes fragments of dialogue or thoughts from writers like Beckett, Badiou, etc. along with images from old movies, fragments from different kinds music, images filmed from all kinds of cameras, including cellphones. And it's all in 3D, which lends an extra dimension to the layering of images. (If only he would do surround sound, too, instead of his normal stereo. Though he claims he can only do stereo because he only has two hands for the mixing board.) Godard, needless to say, uses 3D in totally unconventional ways. In several cases, he uses two completely different images instead of the conventional 3D images that are from slightly different perspectives. The result is that you can't actually focus; you either shut one eye and focus on one image, or you try to look at both and get a headache. (The first of these kind of shots apparently elicited a spontaneous ovation in the middle of the Cannes showing of the film; not so in Vancouver.) I am not conversant with the current French philosophical discourse to which many of the texts seem to refer; I can only let it all kind of wash over me. To say what it is all about is beyond me. (Apparently Tom Stoppard, when asked by critics to say what "Rosencrantz and Guilderstein" is about, said it is about two courtiers in Hamlet's court. End of discussion.) In that sense, is the Godard is about its own discourse? I am content to be bombarded with images and sounds in a way that challenges me. In this case, I felt that Godard was in a slightly more mellow mode, in that there was quite a lot of repetition of certain fragments, which lent a kind of structural continuity which I usually don't get in these late Godards. And he has certainly never focused on a dog! (We were with a professor of French, who didn't like the movie because it was something that would be a perfect subject for teaching.)
This one looks great in 3D:
Godard filming with his cellphone:
The couple, with Miriam Hopkins in the background:
Two days later, we heard the pianist Stefan Litwin in a fantastic performance of Ives' "Concord" Sonata. I was struck by how much the Godard and Ives had in common. The Ives, composed over a hundred years ago, makes a radical break with musical language as it existed at the time. And in fact, it still sounds radical. To me, Ives music is about the non-linear juxtaposition of fragments of music, both simultaneously and sequentially. Ives does not proceed with the conventional discourse of musical expression as in, for example, a dynamic expressive buildup, followed by a calmer more meditative moment. Things simply appear, disappear, break off. There is a constant level of dissonance, but it is not meant to convey any sense of tension in the traditional sense. What can be confusing is that Ives uses conventional musical material which can normally be considered expressive. In the later movements, as in the "Alcotts", some of the conventional material shines through more clearly, and becomes expressive.
