Goodbye to Language (2014)

Goodbye to Language (French: Adieu au Langage) is a 2014 French-Swiss 3D experimental narrative essay film written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard. It stars Héloïse Godet, Kamel Abdeli, Richard Chevallier, Zoé Bruneau, Jessica Erickson and Christian Grégori and was shot by cinematographer Fabrice Aragno. It is Godard's 42nd feature film and 121st film or video project. In the French-speaking parts of Switzerland where it was shot, the word "adieu" can mean both goodbye and hello. The film depicts a couple having an affair. The woman's husband discovers the affair and the lover is killed. Two pairs of actors portray the couple and their actions repeat and mirror one another. Godard's own dog Roxy Miéville has a prominent role in the film and won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Like many of Godard's films it includes numerous quotes and references to previous artistic, philosophical and scientific works, most prominently those of Jacques Ellul, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Mary Shelley.

Godard became interested in making a 3D film in 2010 and asked Aragno to make some camera tests. Aragno was dissatisfied with the results of professional 3D cameras and built his own custom rigs using Canon 5Ds and Flip Minos. Aragno broke many of the standard rules for 3D cinematography. Godard and Aragno worked on the film for four years, each shooting footage independently before officially beginning production with the actors. Godard edited a 2D version of the film before he and Aragno perfected the 3D cut with color correction and surround sound.

It premiered in competition at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival and won the Jury Prize. It was distributed in France by Wild Bunch and in the US by Kino Lorber, and won Best Picture at the 2014 National Society of Film Critics Awards. It received many good reviews and was listed as one of the best films of the year by several prominent critics. Some critics praised its visual style while others criticized its plot as "incomprehensible" and called Godard pretentious. David Bordwell said it was the best 3D film that he had ever seen. Bordwell, Richard Brody, Colin MacCabe and many other critics have attempted to analyze the film's themes and its use of 3D.

Some of the film's more elaborate shots have been called innovative techniques of the film vocabulary. These include a "separation" shot in which a single, unbroken shot splits into two separate shots that can be viewed simultaneously through either the left or the right eye, and then returns to one single 3D shot. Aragno and Godard also experimented with double exposure 3D images and shots with parallax that are difficult for the human eye to see.

Synopsis

"The idea is simple / A married woman and a single man meet / They love, they argue, fists fly / A dog strays between town and country / The seasons pass / The man and woman meet again / The dog finds itself between them / The other is in one, / the one is in the other / and they are three / The former husband shatters everything / A second film begins: / the same as the first, / and yet not / From the human race we pass to metaphor / This ends in barking / and a baby's cries / In the meantime, we will have seen people talking of the demise of the dollar, of truth in mathematics and of the death of a robin."

Actors