Jean-Luc Godard, who will soon celebrate his 84th birthday, holds a special place in the pantheon of modern cinema. He is an imp who is venerated as a deity, a Rorschach test, a lightning rod, a fighting word. His name seems to divide the world into skeptics and worshipers, with not much middle ground. Analogous figures can be found in other zones of 20th-century art: Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, Ezra Pound. They have their singularity in common. They also tend to confound easy distinctions between genius and trickery, and to marshal armies of exegetes in what may be the futile enterprise of figuring out what they mean. ... In the 1960s, as Mr. Godard ascended to international culture-hero status, one of his most eloquent English-language champions was Susan Sontag. Nearly 50 years later, he may be returning the favor by making movies that uphold the arguments of her great essay “Against Interpretation,” which protested culture and criticism’s tireless and tiresome hunt for meaning. “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art,” she concluded, and “Goodbye to Language” rewards just such an approach. If you try, especially on a first viewing, to crack its code or plumb its depths, you are likely to pass a frustrated hour and 10 minutes. But if you surrender, you might have a good time. The earth might even move.
Posted on: Fri, 07 Nov 2014 18:14:56 +0000
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