Focusing on Jean-Luc Godard's foray into 3-D cinema, a group of panelists gathered this weekend for a NYFF Live event about the Swiss/French filmmaker's latest work, Goodbye to Language, which explores his own state of being in relation to time, light, color, the problem of living and speaking with others, and, of course, cinema itself. Indiewire critic Eric Kohn moderated a discussion that included Laurence Kardish, formerly of MoMA's Department of Film and Media, New Yorker critic Richard Brody, Max Nelson (alumnus of the NYFF Critics Academy and Film Comment writer), and Goodbye to Language lead actress Héloïse Godet. The weekend event took place in conjunction with the Film Society and the 3rd annual NYFF Critics Academy.
The main topic explored was how Godard's 43rd work is a departure from his previous films and what this means. Brody suggested that the use of 3-D has allowed him to grow closer to the artist and intellectual Godard himself seeks to be by “using 3-D as a painter would use a paintbrush.” Since the '60s, Godard has gone through many personal and political changes and had certain intellectual goals he couldn’t achieve. Brody continued: “An artist never goes back and 3-D has given him the ability to 'create a new grammar of cinema'… the characters melt into the film.”
Other discussions included the nature of the “Goodbye” in the title. Nelson noted that it is a trope. “The elegy or announcing the death of something. The thing that has been at an end for a while is the death of Western civilization itself—stage the film as an elegy announcing an end and instead of stopping there staging a resuscitation of bringing the cinema back to its origins… He's saying goodbye to humanity… language is a kind of barrier. Goodbye to a human perspective on the world.”
At its core, however, it is a narrative, Héloïse Godet explained: “[It is] a story of a couple having trouble.”
