Goodbye to Language is another typically montage-like film where a lot takes place offstage, here in the house of a liaising pair. It's sometimes from the dog's eye view of Roxy, the mutt who spies things at home and wanders round the forest (in 3D though mine was 2D.)
Launching into a review is not really the intention, and this is exceptionally difficult to critique, so I'll start by going back to the aforementioned 'shot/counter-shot'.
A lot of people may have felt, "but this is ubiquitous", and for TV shows I think it probably is. At random I looked at 'The Doomsday Machine' Star Trek episode from 1966. The opening has Kirk walking round the control room. He first asks Lt Palmer a query (the stand-in for Nichols/Uhura), then he proceeds to Spock and asks him.a query. Both had shot/counter-shot, followed by a distance shot of Sulu.
It's logical without being creative, and the documentary format itself - interviews - is 100% logical (uncreative.)
However, films are films. In Goodbye to Language, the living room of the liaising pair has a large screen continually showing classic pictures. The last one shown was a silent film, and of course this is more like a drama with masks as opposed to language.
Godard idealises the silent era of such as Chaplin, and an ideal film does not necessarily have language as it's about seeing the world as it is (through a dog's eye view.)
I took a look at the trailer of Power of the Dog, and there was an action scene followed by the typical duo scene where there is shot/counter-shot. To use that is lazy directing because it follows the language. The language is covering the visual sense, directing it.
Film doesn't have to be like that. Another old film playing in the background had the two characters, man to left foreground, woman to right background. The sense of romance in the lighting and expressions and sound was palpable.
The other thing is that a camera is something you point. It makes things very easy and therefore technically lazy. Technique rules rather than the visual. The technique of comic books is different because it's often better to show the two characters, or to vary the angles. This is the opening to 'All Around the World' Planetary graphic novel.
Shot/counter-shot puts language at the head of things, whereas a film should be filmic - visual. The difference of a film from a TV interview should be very apparent! Godard's films are vehicles for ideas, not language.
There are various ideas and quotes. The Apache word for world is forest.' The labyrinthine land where Gilgamesh roamed (prev.) Untidiness and darkness, soiled beauty, soiled maidens.
A labyrinthine place has a physical cycle of repair and regeneration. Words do not count there. We live in a topsy-turvy world where words have come to define the physical reality but, in fact, the reverse is the case.
The snake-like, labyrinthine ways are the ways of action, and from these come the epics of past ages. Words are born of the wordless. The shots of water in this film (and the others) have an Odyssey-like depth.
Going beyond words is going into myth. Myth is reality without the Dominion of language (of 'fact'). If this is the Western way, Europe and America are both on the wrong side of history. The two characters wander the house in a state of ennui - inspired by words?
He has a scene and theme reminiscent of Weekend (1967), where Byron, Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft (writer of Frankenstein) are wandering the forest of lake Geneva, declaiming. The romantic era is long gone, only Frankenstein remains!
'If Russia becomes European it will never be Russian again'. Another saying that holds water. Putin's principles are confused, as was noted previously, but to have the endless interviews of shot/counter-shot is going nowhere very fast.
Not only forests are labyrinths, but towns and ports back in the day. That is what is being lost. The scented decadence of movement and force that provides romance and dark ambiance. Action, not words.
Where there is communal action, rebellion is always there. Even in Russia, if Putin is a tyrant rebellion is still possible as we've seen.
The neutralizing dragon of news (words) renders things neutral, partly through this trope of shot/counter-shot, partly through ignoring the physical sphere entirely. Sex-differences are no longer de riguer (see Rowling.)
A neutral world is also one that is compulsive- as opposed to fecund or sexual. This makes another link to Weekend, which starts with a description of an anal-oriented orgy. Here it takes the form of the 'equivalence' of toilet humour.
