Pas de doute pour moi que le dernier film de Jean-Luc Godard est l’un des films les plus importants de l’année – mais je serais incapable d’en parler! Je me suis fait avoir : Film Socialisme, son précédent, m’avait paru beaucoup moins obscur qu’on le disait, j’avais une assez bonne idée de ce que voulait faire Godard en sortant de la salle, alors je pensais qu’avec un titre comme Adieu au langage, je ne devrais pas être trop perdu. Oh, que je m’étais trompé! J’ai bien apprécié le travail formel, la plasticité incroyable des images et l’utilisation souvent géniale du 3D (ces fameuses images superposées que l’on peut monter soi-même en fermant un oeil ou l’autre), mais je n’avais qu’une très, très vague idée du (des) sujet(s) du film.
Alors comme je ne me sens pas en mesure d’écrire sur le film, et puisqu’il ne faut pas le négliger, voici un recueil d’articles à son sujet, qui peuvent éclairer ceux qui sont autant dans le noir que moi. Bizarrement, ces textes recouvrent bien des idées que j’ai déjà développées dans le passé, notamment sur l’insuffisance du langage pour traduire l’expérience du monde, qui est sans doute, ça m’apparaît évident maintenant, le sujet principal d’Adieu au langage – pourquoi je n’y ai pas pensé même si c’est une idée qui m’est chère? ‘sais pas, n’en demeure pas moins que c’était l’expérience sensorielle la plus enrichissante de l’année, que j’aurais bien aimé revoir, mais les choses étant ce qu’elles sont, ça ne risque pas de se produire bientôt (surtout que le film perd sûrement beaucoup de sa force en 2D).
Godard’s Revolutionary 3-D Film, Richard Brody
« Rather than using 3-D as an effect to create a sensation of flight or to make a viewer feel like the target of propelled objects, Godard uses 3-D to emphasize the materiality, the physical properties, of the world at hand. »
[…]
« In “Goodbye to Language,” Godard uses 3-D to out-Welles Welles, in the deep-focus category, and to out-Bazin Bazin, in the overwhelming complexity of visual experience and material reality that he can fill his seemingly vast frames with. »
Adieu au langage : 2 + 2 X 3D, David Bordwell
« I suggest that with Late Godard, we are mostly not moved by the plot or the characters, though that can happen. What seizes me most forcefully is the virtuoso display of cinematic possibilities. The narrative is both a pretext and a source of words and sounds, forms and textures, like the landscape motifs that painters have used for centuries. From the simplest elements, even the clichés of sunsets and rainy reflections, the film’s composition, color, voices, and music wring out something ravishing.
We are moved, to put it plainly, by beauty–sometimes exhilarating, sometimes melancholy, often fragmentary and fleeting. Instead of feeling with the characters, we feel with the film. For all his exasperating perversities, Godard seeks cinematic rapture. »
Say hello to GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE, David Bordwell
« French thinkers have long pondered the possibility that language separates us from the world. It drops a kind of scrim that keeps us from seeing things in their innocent purity. Given the film’s title, I suggested in an NPR interview that Godard’s use of 3D, along with the insistence on the dog Roxie, is aiming to make us perceive the world stripped of our conceptual constructs (language, plot, normal viewpoints, and so on). Personally, the idea that language alienates us from some primordial connection to things seems to me implausible, but I think it’s a central theme of the film. This very talky movie exploits a paradox: we must use language to say goodbye to it. »
Adieu au langage, critique de Blake Williams pour Cinemascope
« This perverse strategy asks us to do away with interpretation—to bid farewell to cognition, offer a “so long” to translation, and say goodbye to language—while demanding that we simultaneously listen, read, and process information constantly. Evoking a sizable range of cultural and semantics theorists, as well as exhibiting a certain allegiance to the Lacanian Real (an allegiance Godard would likely never admit to), Adieu au langage is a lashing out against the symbolic and semiotic structures that hinder our ability to experience truth in the world, and laments the freedoms lost from so many demarcations and hierarchies, while painfully acknowledging the impossibility of the world without them. Abstraction is the closest we can get to reality, and he locates this utopian order-outside-of-order in three creative fields: geometry as an abstraction of space (viz. Laurent Schwartz, the Dirac delta function, and Riemann landscapes); poetic literature as an abstraction of syntax (viz. Rilke and Dostoevsky); and Impressionism and Fauvism as abstractions of the pictorial (viz. his trademark hyper-saturated colour palette, Monet and de Staël quotations, and countless shots of landscapes through windshield wiper blades fighting off every season’s variety of precipitation). Adieu au langage, finally, is Godard’s harrowing attempt to employ 3D imagemaking as an abstraction of reality; to use metaphor as a passageway into nature. »
Goodbye To Language, David Ehrlich pour the Dissolve
« Everything in this film explicitly exists in relationship to something else. (At times, Ivitch and Marcus make it seem as though the shadows of that first couple have willed themselves into bodies of their own.) Nowhere is that more brilliantly clear than during the occasions in which Godard explodes the 3-D effect by assigning two different images to each eye, thus simultaneously displaying three different images from which each viewer is free to choose at will. The most striking occurrence of this observes Ivitch and Marcus as they argue naked in their house. Close your right eye, and you see a close-up of Ivitch’s pubic hair. Close your left eye, and you see a close-up of Marcus’ flaccid penis. Open both eyes and the genitals overlap, the two images superimposed into something vaguely resembling sex. Godard presents the dialectic without the need for montage, and does so while delivering the synthesis produced by Eisenstein’s editing theory in an intimate, bracingly human way. »
Polarized, Michael Koresky pour Reverse Shot
« What we’re looking at in a Jean-Luc Godard film often raises the more difficult question of what we’re looking for. Often we’re looking inescapably, uncomfortably directly at the thing, which is not the thing. A central contradiction in Godard’s work, especially his post-sixties films, seems to be that we’re receiving information in a very direct manner, but that what we’re seeing is entirely illusory in a basic narrative sense. This division seems more than a cinematic trick, but rather intended as a schizophrenic condition of the modern age
[…]
There’s something almost comical about us critics bending over backward to write something meaningful about a film that so resists, even distrusts, words. Maybe we shouldn’t even try—exhilarating in the moment, Goodbye to Language is far more fun to watch than it is to write about, or maybe even think about after. When applied to language, this filmic tapestry in retrospect just becomes a litany. Nevertheless . . . »
N’ajustez pas votre cinéma, Paul Landriau pour Points de Vue
« La 3D après tout est d’abord cet immense cheval de Troie du cinéma hollywoodien destiné à gonfler le prix des tickets de cinéma. Car dans toute grosse production, ce qui compte est que l’effet 3D soit « parfait », lisse, convaincant, afin de mieux y immerger le spectateur. Comme le répète le slogan IMAX à grand renfort de décibels assourdissants : « Watch a film, Or be a part of it ». La meilleure 3D serait donc celle qui ne porte pas attention sur soi-même. La 3D qu’on oublie! N’avez-vous pas ressenti cela déjà, lorsqu’on écoute une mégaproduction et qu’on finit par oublier ces lunettes de plastique donnant du relief mais peu de substance au film? Godard lui s’intéresse donc expressément à toutes les imperfections possibles du procédé qui provoquera un nouveau vocabulaire cinématographique, qui permettra toujours au spectateur de voir cette 3D. De la capter, de la remarquer, de s’en souvenir. »
Quelques références supplémentaires :
Ted Fendt, pour Mubi, tente de retracer toutes les citations du film, autant littéraires que cinématographiques
Une série à Independecia, en français cette fois, maintenant rendu à trois « entretiens » décousus sur le film.
Et si vous en voulez encore plus, David Hudson, pour Fandor, offre une compilation exhaustive de tout ce qui s’écrit (en anglais surtout) sur ce film, qu’il continue encore de mettre à jour.