World Premiere of Jean-Luc Godard's ADIEU AU LANGAGE on May 21st 2014

Requested, my Twitter notes from after the screening. More content still to come. === ADIEU AU LANGAGE by Godard. Now is not the time for hyperbole. It is simply a landmark in the history of cinema, on the order of Picasso's.. ...Les Demoiselles d'Avignon or, for that matter, Breathless. A complete and total reinvention of form and what cinema even is. More shortly. The cute thing to say would be that Roxy should win best actor. True. However, Roxy (the dog) is a character of epic... ...proportions, a new archetype on the order of the heroes of Homer, Virgil, Joyce... More shortly. === [next day] Let's talk more (a little bit) about the Godard film. Where to begin. I still haven't watched the letter, but will in 15 min or so. Again, hyperbole must be avoided: ADIEU AU LANGAGE is something entirely new, in the same sense as BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN or CITIZEN KANE. There are 2 shots that use the 3D in a way that is indeed beyond descriptive language, and which, even if you've seen LES TROIS DÉSASTRES... ...and believe you have some understanding now of what ADIEU and the use of 3D might be like (and only if you've seen it in 3D; ... ... seeing L3D in 2D from a torrent or whatever is not seeing it at all)... ...you cannot be prepared for in any way. My friend @cobblehillis said something yesterday to the effect of he has introduced a new kind... ..of shot into cinema. Yes, it's true. Again, even if "the exception" can be conveyed (Gershwin/Mozart, Antonioni/Vigo, et al) this cannot. ..You will simply know what it is when you see it. At the end of the scene where it first occurs, the 3000-person theater erupted into... ...applause. This is besides about four other points in the film where people began applauding. Again: 3000. One film: applause in the... ...middle of it's playing maybe four separate times. What other film has ever done that in history, never mind recent times? Only Chaplin. And it's true, what some people are saying: this is a (relatively) "breezy" film — in the sense that even if you don't understand parts... ..of it (and who cares if you do or don't in JLG? you can't cripple yourself with "understanding" your emotions), what this film is... ...about is not a crisis "of the Greek sort" or the history of Egypt and Odessa, it's the story of a man and a woman. — And a dog. Anyone... ..can enjoy it. On a purely sensational level alone (even if your optic nerves throb), it can be appreciated by everyone. It's a film for.. ..humanity, what the movies used to be like when they were literally "popular." The audience gasped, clapped; and (contrary... ...to what was expected, by me too, based on other recent Godard screenings) almost no-one walked out. It was/is too amazing. One observation, that must be said (and we all have/get various pieces, here and there, of JLG in a first screening th at we are very... ...pleased and amused, in the decoding – e.g., in FILM SOCIALISME, the owl on the Odessa steps, which is a hello to Chris Marker)... — and this is one of the sort: Yes, the shitting and farts in certain scenes are very funny. And yes, the invocation of Rodin's "Thinker"... ...in those bathroom scenes dos indeed build into its own visual punch line — besides the verbal punchline of true equality only... ..existing during taking a shit (also see the punchline re: the Native American tribe who called the forest "the world"— over a shot of.. ...the woman's pubis). (Which is very beautiful, obviously.) So, yes, to come back: the shitting, Rodin's "Thinker," etc. But voilà: ... The man / the main male actor is the spitting image (truly) of Serge Gainsbourg, whom JLG is an admirer of, and who, on his album... VU DE L'EXTÉRIEUR and songs like "3 millions de Joconde" (where he envisions having toilet paper made that has an image of the woman... ...he's with printed on every sheet, in the expression of her bitchy smirk à la Mona Lisa / la Gioconda, so that he can wipe shit on it... ...over and over, 3 million times) explores the ins and outs of shitting, farting, assholes ("You're beautiful, seen from the outside / ... ... Too bad I know what goes on in the inside"), along with his only novel EVGUÉNIE SOKOLOV, about the serial farter (and more). ... ...Indeed, this is a film with what feels like 3 million shots, and thus the 70-minute runtime feels like 4 hours — in the best possible... ...way. Every second is astonishing, every image is an idea, every idea is wonderful. ... .. It is, like ÉLOGE DE L'AMOUR, a film with a story. Yet, unlike it, is also a poem, in a way that's very hard to describe. Yes, every... ...Godard film is a poem, especially FILM SOCIALISME, but this is different. The story plays out in an abstract-but-logical way... ...like a Brakhage film, say ANTICIPATION OF THE NIGHT or 23RD PSALM BRANCH. The dog, very literally, goes between the couple. And, as I said earlier! and as everyone will be saying for as long as the human species exist, the dog (first credit in the cast... ...at the end: Roxy Miéville) is the greatest, greatest, greatest "character" of any movie I can think of in modern times. The dog... ..Is just being a dog, but what Godard has filmed of it, how it is edited, presented, is the most dignified presentation of a living... ...creature I have ever seen. ("Animals are always naked, but they don't know it. Therefore they're not naked.") Just thinking of... ...some of the scenes, some of the shots, of the dog makes me cry. Although the first ten minutes might (deliberately) throw the viewer... ...throw you off, it's the least pessimistic film Godard has ever made. And the ending — .. — OH, AH, the ending — made the audience scream in pleasure, spontaneously, viscerally. It is ecstatic. It is awesome. It is wonderful. ..It was being at the championship of your favorite athlete or team, and hoping for the very best — and getting the greatest... ...pay-off imaginable, exceeding all expectations, and, what's more, realizing in that very moment that those expectations have... ...been exceeded. Godard didn't just deliver whatwe hoped for. He made something unimaginable. And on a final note, yes, the sound itself is (of course) also in 3D, and there enough random iPhone ringtones (never random: always the... ..music and the rhythm of the images) that you keep thinking someone in the theater has forgotten to silence their phone — and it is... ...hilarious each and every time. Yes, ADIEU AU LANGAGE is maybe not only among the greatest of all films, but the greatest... ..of all comedies. Yes, at the end, everyone was stunned, speechless. Kent Jones afterward just said to me, "a great, great, great film." Multiple other friends just said: "masterpiece" — which is a reminder, like Moullet's recent film, how often that word is overused when.. ...you see something like this. — Alright, that's all for now. Just had to get that off my chest. === Just had the pleasure of meeting Zoé Bruneau at a restaurant and telling her what the film means to me and all of my friends here. BTW, contrary to what many of the (generally very positive) reviews say, I have no idea why these people think it's a pessimistic attack... ...on culture and society, as its primary concern. That too is as crazy as Todd McCarthy's statement. Of course it's "critical" but only... ...in the observational sense, which anyone with eyes and a brain feels living in the world. But it is dominantly celebratory re: existence. Roxy is not some primarily disgusted observer — Roxy is the embodiment of all that is Good. Which reminds me how one of the incredible... ...passages is when Godard cuts at the precise moment from a shot of Roxy at the precise instance where a small dot of light appears... ...reflected in the dog's eye, to the recurring fermata of a white dot in the center of a screen of black leader, as in an ophthalmalogical eye-test. Amazing amazing amazing. ===