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Adieu au langage (2014)
Godard's Goodbye
TLDR: This movie is about Godard saying Goodbye to Language, and therefore to Film, and finally, to life.
The film is absolutely stunning, unfortunately, this beauty is tough to experience fully in 2D. The one "splitting of the screens" scene, when experienced in the theater, truly felt like the screen had exploded and that the movie no longer needed to adhere to normal cinematic physical boundaries. Normally, a 3D image works by having each eye see something slightly different so as to suggest depth. But in one extremely disorienting moment Godard swings one image up and the other down, such that the left eye is seeing one image and the right something completely different. It is almost impossible to describe. It felt in the theater that my eyes were being split apart somehow. It was almost painful. It was certainly physical. Which, if nothing else, was one of the most unique experiences I have ever had in a theater. Incredible. It was the first time that a work of art had expanded by sensory experiences so thoroughly.
The content of the movie is unfortunately difficult to appreciate fully if one does not speak fluent French but there is great wealth their too. Many lines are not subtitled because of the overdubbing, or are simply left out. Furthermore, there are a huge amount of puns in the movie (including the title itself, which not only means Goodbye to Language, but also once massaged by Godard, means "Ah God! Oh Language!") Many of the puns throughout would have been impossible to understand for a non-French speaker, and this removes one of the main methods through which Godard expresses one of his main themes: as one of his characters puts it "soon we will each need translators to understand the words that come out of our own mouths."
He makes this point throughout the movie by employing the totality of his literary knowledge in the film and contrasting it with the Brechtian technique he employs throughout. The film is stock full of quotes and allusions to other works (very post-modern), yet through overdubbing, or with loud obnoxious noises and snippets of classical music played on top of speech, he displays how he feels that what we have to say is fundamentally ugly, or confusing, and not really worth hearing.
He does this visually too with sharp changes in visual style. He over-saturates his shots of nature so that they look like stunningly beautiful impressionistic or pointillist paintings. He quotes Rilke "everything that is outside can only be seen through animal eyes." This philosophy is exemplified in his loving images of his dog, which he seems to think sees the world in a purer way than we do. In contrast, the images inside of the human world are often bland and uninteresting.
Godard can't help but interject political reflection on the world he's leaving behind in Europe. He describes how Hitler may have lost the physical war but that he won the ideological one. He goes down an obscure rabbit hole describing how modern democracy turns politics into a separate sphere of thought. This supposedly predisposes it to totalitarianism because it therefore has to appoint technocrats who will have special access to this sphere of thought and whom the public then has to presumably follow blindly (reminiscent of the European technocratic structure). He then asks an extraordinary question "is society ready to accept murder to solve unemployment?" which is hugely relevant with the refugee crisis currently taking place in Europe, with many advocating letting migrants die at sea or sending them back to Syria to possibly die because they are stealing jobs. In his last film, Godard is still able to deliver poignant political critiques.
There is also an overarching theme of Godard reflecting on his life and growth as a person and as a filmmaker. Many people dislike the scenes in the toilet where the male character compares thought to excrement. Many people think this is Godard being overly pretentious and lacking respect for his audience. However the woman character responds to the male character by telling him that he can think that only because he is young. To me this seems like Godard poking fun at his younger self for being overly simplistic in his cynicism (evident in many of his more political films) and that in his old age he has moved past that. The characters' discussion of the Laurent-Schwartz-Dirac Curve (which is infinite at all points except one where it is zero) is another example of his reflection on his growth. The male character then says that zero and infinity were the greatest inventions of man, to which the female character responds that no, it was sex and death. This clearly shows the two sides of Godard's personality and how he has evolved in his thinking, from the abstract and philosophical to the more materialistic and primal conclusion that in fact the only things that matter in life are sex and death.
I think the film is summed up the first time Godard allows the recurring musical theme of the film to carry on its melody to its climax. This formal choice lends great gravitas to the sentence uttered at that moment. "You all disgust me with your happiness. This life we must love at any cost. I am here for something else. I am here to say no. And to die." I think that ultimately this is Godard's swan song. His last provocation before he dies, and it is absolutely beautiful. It ends, fittingly, with a hyper saturated shot of a forest overlaid with an Italian anarchist/communist song, and revolutionary screaming, a microcosm of the films oscillation between visual beauty and linguistic politicizing; a microcosm that I think suits Godard's entire life and filmography. One of the greatest films ever made.
12 Angry Men (1957)
A cheesy, predictable, classic.
12 Angry Men is an undeniably great film, whose simplistic directing and predictable plot ultimately take it away from a 10/10.
The story focuses on one man's struggle to convince a jury of 12, 11 of whom disagree with him on the verdict, to acquit a young man of his father's murder.
Instead of spending this review describing how important this movie is, how well-thought out the script is, or how impressive the individual acting of most jurors is, I shall attempt to pinpoint the movies very significant weaknesses.
First, and most importantly, the movie has some of the most disgustingly heavy-handed, and cheesy moments I have ever seen in a film of this caliber. 1. The scene where the German corrects the racists' English. 2. The scene where Juror 8 calls Juror 3 out on his exclamation of "I'm going to kill him!" 3. The scene where everybody gradually stands up to show their backs to the speaking Juror 10. Juror 10 then goes down to sit in the corner, like a naughty kid, never to speak again for the remaining duration of the movie. 4. The sweating Juror 4 as Juror 8 proves him wrong, despite him apparently "never sweating." 5. Juror 3 finally giving up after a long tirade at the end of the movie.
Secondly, the movie is extraordinarily caricatural in its portrayal of some of the characters (in order of submission to juror 8): Jurors 7, 10, and 3. They were all under developed and largely portrayed as either bigoted, stubborn beyond reasonable doubt (pun intended), or frivolously disinterested beyond belief.
Finally, the extraordinarily simplistic camera work was useful for setting the tone. However, the fact that no characters outside the shot in any specific scenes were allowed to butt in on conversations made the entire movie seem very preachy with only the characters being convinced to change their votes one by one involved in any one scene at a time, along with Juror 8, and occasionally Juror 9. Furthermore, the focus on certain characters led to unbearably long monologues that were hardly believably in a 12-man jury debate. (Renoir in "Rules of the Game," in 1939, had already innovated far beyond this type of constrictive and simplistic camera work and directing.) The anarchy that would have been undeniable in a similar situation therefore end up having to be portrayed through unbearably loud and plainly stupid caricatures listed above^.
In conclusion, the movie is a great one, but it has undeniable weaknesses that are so strong, they take it away from a 10/10.
Citizenfour (2014)
Good movie, albeit drawn out a little too long.
Poitras' Citizenfour is an exploration of not only the espionage undertaken by the NSA, but more specifically the way in which the whistle-blower deals with his actions. The debate is still ongoing about whether or not Snowden's actions were legitimate, whether the data collection itself was warranted etc. However after watching this film, two things will hopefully be settled in the viewers mind. First, that Edward Snowden is a profoundly courageous man, and, second, that he is an exceptionally intelligent man as well.
Incredibly, Laura captured the first moments that Glen Greenwald and Edward Snowden met in person, in Hong Kong, on camera and she continued to film until Edward was forced to leave for Moscow in a hurry. This unique look at the situation is portrayed by Poitras in an incredibly tense and suspenseful way and she succeeds in giving the documentary a quasi-thriller feel, which is further compounded by the astute choice of Trent Reznor's goose-bump-inducing music as the soundtrack. The gems of the film occur in between the leaks we know (hopefully) very well.
These include the interspersed philosophical musings by Snowden on such things ranging from his inability to think further than a day or two into the future to the empathy he feels towards his partner, or the fear expressed by the editors of the guardian closely followed by their destruction of the source material, which they literally attack with a hacksaw and drills, or the international nature of the leaks as the film travels to Brazil, Germany, Moscow, Hong Kong, or finally, the extreme paranoia understandably experienced by Snowden and the way he deals with it (at times placing a sheet over his head to make sure the camera doesn't capture any details of his typing, or plugging out the hotel phone for fear of it being bugged.) Unfortunately, the film dragged on for 30 minutes too long and reinforced, almost to the point of simply repeating word for word, the same points over and over again. However this allowed a thoughtful audience the chance to re-digest what we had assumed before and to perhaps rethink some of our a priori judgments on the issue and on the person(s).
Ultimately, the film is valuable if only for the fact that we as the audience get to experience the divulging of the NSA leaks again, as if for the first time, and, as a result of the proximity and intimacy the film creates with Snowden himself and the journalists he uses, with almost as much intensity and surprise. We need to continue to talk about these issues, and as is repeated throughout the film, we must not allow ourselves to become blasé in regards to mass surveillance. This film deserves the Oscar simply because it took incredible courage to make on the part of all parties and undeniably plays a role in keeping the Snowden leaks in the collective unconscious for as long as they need to be.