Flattened Out: Lands Explored in ADIEU AU LANGAGE

The challenges of depicting interior experience  can account for a social distance remaining uncrossed.  To discount the inner world, to be unable to access others or your own, is to perpetrate a flat, protected world, one of images doubling as obstacles,  those that are impossible to penetrate.
One could imagine a group of people at a societal gathering; say a book fair, and the people are so accustomed to remaining curled up inside their own denial of the depth of inner experience that they refuse to discuss the books with one another or to interact; their main experience is of flashing and swiping, heads pointed down at the flat digital outputs of smartphones.

One can imagine an uneven love affair, or how all true love affairs
are uneven; one must love more and therefore hurt more than the other. At one point in ADIEU AU LANGUAGE  Godard's narrator states something about how once an animal as a pet has  directly met the gaze of a person, there is no going back, there is no more of being exactly two. Like lovers, like parents and children, they have seen each other because they both have bothered to LOOK:   they are connected through specific  recognition; of inner life and mutual feeling.
They are no longer two, and yet as we hear this we see the dog alone.  One imagines the dog, or any animal kept by a human, as the one who bears the burden of longing.  The person imprisons the animal:  by deciding when they'll see the dog;   how much time and how much love they will allow themselves to give.

This is doubly true in a human romantic couple. It is a societal idea; a political need for reliance (another leveling, "flattening out"). This is an easier way to disseminate and sell images and stories;  chaining us to our technology,  flattening out flesh that could once be held and felt.  The three dimensions of the body were now objects on either size of the gaze.  It is teased with; the gaze bears down on the inner self, the soul.  To be countered with the denial of oneness as the gazer pulls away. The retreat and control is not unlike defining the boundaries of love with a pet.


In another iteration of this idea, Godard shows us a dog in war. And his narrator says something about the dog as a soldier.  He is the soldier of love, the less loved of the two, and he will sacrifice for what is greater than him alone.

ADIEU(goodbye, farewell) . AH DIEUX (oh, Gods).  More puns from Godard, but also they are extensions of one thing into another object. We have one thing that is now two things and if both are added together there is a destruction of the first.  It is no longer a flat label but it is an extension, a protrusion, like adding a dimension to see something flat protrude into something tangible.
Elements of collage used before by Godard, oh yes, but also now specifically reflecting the idea of a single image, or word, illuminated by the generation of multiple meanings; multiple sides; three dimensions.

Echoing the flatness of our relations with one another is the leveled foreground of our ecstasies and sorrows.
The new Godard film is flooded with gestures of lovers, but there is a schism between acting in love and being in love; a point made crystal clear when seeing these particular people together. Their disconnected time together is characterized as screen-gazing; the large flatscreen television in their home plays a classic Hollywood film in a shitty format. The most exciting discussion of literature is of Solzhenitsyn, but the conversation is stilted by the limitations of man's ability to delve inside and to connect to one another. The poetry and humor of Godard's film shows this by a subsequent series of searches for pictures of Solzhenitsyn on cellphones.

The destruction of depth is nothing but a result of one PLUS one.  Is this a depthless land we reach by way of (1) refusing to love limitlessly PLUS (1) chaining our intellectual experiences to the army of the new; to the propagation of images sold on the web; the amazon booklist.
Jacques Ellul is mentioned, and I've only read his book Propaganda (the author but not that particular title  is highlighted  in Godard's film),  This is a book very much about social change affected by political parties owning philosophy; controlling what we buy and what we see; not through laws, rather through IDEAS. The application of one plus another to equal two is an element of collage, the duality of dimensions to add up to their implosion and rebuilding; the 3D format of the film is used as a readjustment; corrective in its design.

There are many more complicated ideas and layered structures of film and philosophy at work.  Others are and will continue to explore them. The land of the loveless and the land of the half loved; with countless dogs and people, is a minefield of fascination for me.