New York Film Festival: 'Goodbye to Language' and 'Hill of Freedom'

For the grownup movie-going set, fall means more than pumpkin spice: it means a hearty sampling of films aimed at their intellect and emotions—a relief after weathering yet another summer season crammed with comic book spectacles and horror film retreads.

"Goodbye to Language"

Here in New York, we’re fortunate enough to get a glimpse of what is to come at the annual New York Film Festival. The lineup for this year’s festival, now in its 52nd year, includes films by underappreciated and overlooked directors from overseas (Hong Sang-Soo and Oliver Assayas) and films by established American auteurs (Paul Thomas Anderson and David Fincher). The festival also does an excellent job introducing newer American voices, and this year seems to be the year of Alex Ross Perry and brothers Ben and Josh Safdie.

The first feature I caught was Jean-Luc Godard’s dazzling 3D film Goodbye to Language. Since Breathless, his firecracker of a film that marked the young director as a dominant figure of the French New Wave, Godard has been bending and changing the “rules” of film grammar for over 50 years. In Breathless he broke with traditional norms of shooting and editing, challenging the values of “craft” and “quality” in the name of immediacy and spontaneity.

Not surprisingly, over the years his techniques—especially the now ubiquitous jumpcut—have been codified and assimilated into the kind of filmmaking he once wanted to break free from. Godard’s tendency to reject accepted filmmaking practices stems from a desire to understand the ontology of the moving image.

So it should come as no surprise that Godard’s latest is an essay (and somewhere in there a narrative, too) of sorts on the “evolution of the language of cinema”—to borrow a phrase from Godard’s mentor, Andre Bazin. Godard’s film not only asks us to consider the way image-making has changed in an era in which we all carry motion-picture cameras in our pockets, but it also asks us to consider the ways we use and manipulate images, not to mention the way we now relate to each through these self-made images.

"Goodbye to Language"

Early in on in the film Mr. Godard makes this intent explicit by foregrounding characters who mediate their everyday experiences by shooting footage on their iPhones. Yet in his montage he juxtaposes these images and others like them with found footage, digitally enhanced footage, and what we might consider more traditional narrative feature-film scenes. It’s a smorgasbord of formats and ideas.

Ah, yes, let us not also forget those 3D images here too. Godard manages to make some of the most beautiful and jaw-dropping images this reviewer has seen on a big screen. Working against the grain of using 3D as a “made you jump” gimmick, Godard considers the format’s possibilities for beauty and emotional insight. This is difficult to articulate, but to see 3D image such as the one he creates of a woman dipping her hands in a pool of water—this is to behold a fleeting moment of the ineffable.

Typical of late Godard, the director wraps these images around his usual obsessions—hence the references to Solzhenitsyn, Frankenstein, Rilke, the Holocaust, Old Hollywood, et al. We also get bathroom humor and a dog in the lead role.

If you think I’ve painted Goodbye to Language as batty and impenetrable, you’re right. It often is. But if your kneejerk reaction is to skip it because its seems too esoteric for your tastes, you’ll have to trust me that it doesn’t have to be. If you give yourself over to rhythm and splendor of the images you just might find yourself in a place of wonder, possibly searching for the language to explain it all.

"Hill of Freedom"

Another early feature that has me buzzing is Hill of Freedom. The film, from South Korea’s Hong Sang-Soo, could be lumped into the puzzle-film genre as its plot turns on a woman, Kwon (Seo Young-hwa), trying to piece together a coherent narrative out of letters that her lover, Morie (Ryo Kase), has written her while they were apart.

The problem of understanding just what happened while they had gone their separate ways arises when Kwon drops the packet of letters shortly after receiving them—the letters scattering to and fro. This forces her to read Mori’s letters out of order and gives the film the conceit on which it is hinged.

Relayed to Kwon and us in this way, Mori’s exploits away from Kwon only come in fragments, rendering them temporally and spatially difficult to understand. We’re never quite sure how to take Mori’s nonchalant attitude towards his one-night affairs and easily forged alliances with strangers.

But putting together the puzzle here is somewhat beside the point. Hong Sang-Soo—both highly acclaimed and wildly prolific—has little concern for simply whipping up a nifty narrative. Instead, he’s bent on exploring the nuances of memory and the way men and women relate to one another through honesty and confession.

"Hill of Freedom"

Formally, Sang-Soo counters the patched-together epistolary story with long sequences shot in long extended takes that provide the individual scenes with an integral wholeness. This is in fact the inverse of the Hollywood approach which pieces scenes together out of fragments of shots in the service of narratives that are linear. Sang-Soo’s method invites us to be present to the individual, autonomous moment and less concerned with trying to fabricate a narrative onto these privileged moments the film presents. It feels like a lesson for the way we watch films in the dark and the way we live our lives in the light of day.

In the end, however, the film’s rigorous formal qualities go down easier than it may appear on paper. The film is both funny and warm, owing in large part to Ryo Kase’s goofy charisma and charm. But it’s also Sang-Soo’s handling of the material that imbues the film with a lightness that frees us to revel in the here and now.

Bearden Coleman is assistant professor of English at The King's College, where he teaches writing and film. You can follow him on Twitter at@OZUsCamera.