Thematically indebted to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Goodbye to Language is Godard’s take on the creation of a monster, with the director himself in the role of the mad scientist. While he lets his creation gather intellectual and emotional traction, he imposes his own will by disrupting the audio or visual fidelity of the picture. No scene is left uninterrupted; he is a meddler par excellence, always shifting perspectives, superimposing images and, of course, deploying every pun he can think of. He is the ghost in his own machine; the fly in the ointment of his own cinema. And this is cinema as we’ve never seen it before, with the 3D proving to be an invaluable addition to his visual arsenal, challenging the very limits of its capabilities, and changing the medium itself in the process. (BFI)
