Godard's Goodbye to Language

  

 

 

 

 

  

"each person must think that the other is a dreamer."

I have work to do and yet I can't get this damn film out of my head. Images and words flash before my eyes. I can't stop thinking about them. Water. Blue. Hands. Red. Waves. The scenes where if you close one eye you see one image and another image appears if the opposite eye is closed. The things that cement themselves in our brain. 

"Critics put off by Godard, I think, have too limited a notion of what criticism is. They seem to think that their notion of cinema, fixed for all time, is a standard to which every movie has to measure up. They are notably resistant to a simple idea: We can learn something from films. Not only can we learn things about life but we also learn things about cinema. We learn things that we never realized that film can do.

But then, how many critics actually want to learn something about cinema, which can only happen the way we learn anything: by wrestling with something that strikes us as difficult?" -David Bordwell

For after you see the film:  
"Adieu au langage" - "Goodbye to Language": A Works Cited

"When - the sun already piercing - the river still sleeping in the dreams of fog, we do not see it anymore than it sees itself. Here it is already the river, and the eye is arrested, one no longer sees anything but a void, a fog which prevents one from seeing farther. In that part of the canvas, one must paint neither what one sees, since one sees nothing, nor what one doesn’t see, since one must paint only what one sees; but to paint what one doesn’t see." -Marcel Proust (though Godard attributed it to Monet in the film.)