Kino Lorber Goes Godard In 3D

Goodbye to Language was the co-winner of Cannes’ coveted Jury Prize and is slated for key festival play in the late summer/early fall. It will open commercially in New York City in late October, at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and IFC Center, followed by a national theatrical rollout on 3D screens. A digital VOD, home media and 3D Blu-ray release is planned for 2015. 

Further commenting on the film’s “deeply, excitingly challenging” character, The New York Times’ film critic Manohla Dargis added that it “offers up generous, easy pleasures with jolts of visual beauty, bursts of humor, swells of song and many shots of a dog, Roxy.”

Goodbye to Language also features never-before-seen 3D special effects. “[Godard] experiments throughout with the placement of entirely different images in each eye,” wrote Variety’s chief film critic Scott Foundas, “resulting in a series of strange superimpositions that almost seem to enter a fourth, unclassified dimension.”

The film was produced by Alain Sarde (Film Socialisme and Notre Musique) and Wild Bunch. The deal was negotiated between Kino Lorber CEO Richard Lorber and Carole Baraton, Head of International Sales at Wild Bunch. “To have the honor to release this ecstatically brilliant, career-capping film by the iconic Jean-Luc Godard leaves us appropriately speechless,” said Richard Lorber. “Goodbye to Language is nothing short of a beacon illuminating the future of cinema.”

Carole Baraton commented: “Working with Richard and his team on Goodbye to Language is a natural choice for us. Since the film’s premiere at Cannes, they’ve expressed incomparable enthusiasm and excitement about the film – and their distribution plans for the film are equally daring and exciting.”

Jean-Luc Godard has continually re-defined what cinema can be over his sixty years in the movies. He helped establish the “politique des auteurs” during his time as a firebrand critic at Cahiers du Cinema, and then upended narrative filmmaking with the French New Wave in his self-reflexive debut Breathless (1960).

The rest of the 1960s brought a dizzying series of innovative work, from his pop musical A Woman is a Woman to his evisceration of Hollywood in Contempt. The 1970s brought his politics to the fore, his interest in Marxist thought leading to provocative, knotty treatises on consumer society.  Every Man For Himself brought him back to narrative in the 1980s, or a semblance of it, and his work became more digressive and essayistic into the 2000s, anticipating the “hybrid” documentary/fiction films that dominate on the festival circuit.

Goodbye to Language is another advancement, fracturing the tale of an adulterous relationship into 3D – his first feature in the format (he also used it in the 2013 short The Three Disasters).

This “adrenaline shot to the brain” (Variety) follows a couple whose relationship breaks down along with the images, which in its second half takes a dog’s-eye view of the world. It is thick with literary quotation but somehow light on its feet, musing on history and illusion while Godard’s own dog Roxy prances in the park. “You could call it ‘Contempt meets Lassie'”, as Scott Foundas quipped in Variety.  It has the feeling of a final statement, but knowing Godard’s penchant for re-invention, hopefully it is yet another beginning.

About Kino Lorber:

With a library of 900 titles, Kino Lorber Inc. has been a leader in independent art house distribution for over 30 years, releasing over 25 films per year theatrically under its Kino Lorber, Kino Classics, and Alive Mind Cinema banners, including four Academy Award® nominated films in the last six years. In addition, the company brings over 70 titles each year to the home entertainment market with DVD, Blu-ray and VOD releases under its 5 house brands, distributes a growing number of third party labels, and is a direct digital distributor to all major platforms including iTunes, Netflix, HULU, Amazon, Vimeo, and others.