Jean-Luc Godard has always exhibited a deep love of language. His work teems with puns and literary quotations; one of his most famous devices, which he introduced in A Woman Is a Woman (1961) and continues to employ liberally, is to fill the entire screen with words, or even a single word. The title of his latest cinematic poem, Goodbye to Language (“Adieu au Langage”), is a bit of wordplay; as Godard explained in a recent interview, adieu can mean good-bye or hello in the French-speaking part of Switzerland where he was raised. This dual meaning provides a clue to the movie’s meaning. At 84, Godard is still looking for new ways to express himself, though he thinks it harder than ever to achieve meaningful interpersonal communication in the information age. That’s saying a lot, given that he’s always presented such communication as a struggle (failed romance is a consistent theme of his narrative films).
Fittingly the early passages revolve around social interaction in the Internet age, which Godard regards skeptically at best. In one scene he shows three sets of hands, one paying for a copy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago at an outdoor book stand, the other two looking up information about the author on their smartphones. “The subtitle is An Experiment in Literary Investigation, but Solzhenitsyn didn’t need Google to tell him that,” says the man holding the book (a likely stand-in for Godard). He goes on to say that the Internet, by connecting us with an untold number of strangers and providing easy access to any information we want, makes us less inclined toward “interior experience,” which is where we figure things out on our own and define ourselves as individuals. Against archival footage of the Nazi era, a character observes in voice-over that the Internet might be giving rise to something like the mass consciousness envisioned by totalitarian rulers.
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
