Le gai savoir

Godard is a new experience for me--over the summer, I watched La Chinoise for about 20 minutes at a time. It was somehow taxing, but very rewarding to think about. I found myself yearning to see Godard's colors and the snappy transitions between blunt dialogues. So it surprised me that this film is predominantly black--there is more negative space than any other film I've seen. To some people it could be unbearably monotonous, but it definitely makes a lasting impression.

There is some good humor, but overall Godard seems very deadpan. In a way, I thought this must have been a major inspiration for Wes Anderson's sense of color and dialogue pacing. Meanwhile the content speaks to some of my favorite literary interests, like William S. Burroughs, Marshal McLuhan, and of course my main man Jacques Ellul. La Technique!

Not a party film, nor a relaxing watch. Sit meditative and delve in the atypical presentation of Godard's ideas. Surreal, and France in the 60s is interesting enough beyond that. Stylish as hell.

It has been almost twenty five years since I've seen this -- I saw it a couple times in the early 80s and I've never seen it available on tape or disk -- but I found it to be one of the most enjoyable lesson films from Godard. I though it was beautiful to look at, and quite funny in parts, and easy to follow. It IS extremely didactic -- but as the title says, there is JOY in learning. It's popping up in a Godard festival running at the Hammer Museum in June, on a double bill with Weekend, and I intend to check it out again. If I don't like it this time, I'll write again -- but I remember just totally digging this movie. The other writer here says that he didn't go to a Godard film for ten years he so disliked this -- but in my memory it was so joyous i wanted to see it again and again. hey -- maybe we're both right (or wrong).

As the 1960s went by, Jean-Luc Godard was increasing adding social concerns and strident political messages to his films, but never without breaking traditional storytelling, however zany it might be with his French New Wave style. In 1967, however, he set off on a new direction. LE GAI SAVOIR was the first production that Godard shot after he bade farewell to his usual crew and dedicated himself entirely to political filmmaking. Originally made for French television, it was rejected and only screened at a few festivals, and it is easy to understand why: LE GAI SAVOIR still feels very avant-garde and intense today, though the rich imagery will appeal to those comfortable with Godard's immediately preceding pictures.

The film's title is best translated "The Joy of Learning". The two people that appear in the film are less distinct characters than representations of Godard himself: Emile (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and Patricia (Juliet Berto) meet on a darkened sound-stage and announce that they will study revolution. A heap of still images begins to appear on the screen: fragments of workers' union speeches, Vietnam footage, pornography, Parisian street scenes, Black Panthers, African guerrilla movements, fashion shoots, advertisements from magazines, and comic books. Emile and Patricia (but really Godard) wish to make sense of everything they are seeing and to put it in the right order, for Godard believed that cinema could reflect the truth were its materials only presented in the right way. Biting the hand that feeds him, Godard attacks French television, as well as other European television networks, and Hollywood. Godard's leftist sympathies were more Maoist (or rather an infatuation with a sort of fantasy Maoism shorn of horrors it inflicted on China) than traditionally Western European Communist, and some of his biting criticism is directed towards the Soviet Union.

As the film opens with this chaos of social and culture themes, the dialogue is initially driven by free association, and there's a lot of humour in the way that Godard manages to link one issue to another. One can expect puns and bitter jokes, and Godard also whispers in voice-over over the proceedings as he famously did in his earlier film "Deux ou trois chose que je sais d'elle". In one section of the film, Emile and Patricia pose questions to three people brought in off the street: two children and an old man (the last seems a bit of a wino, really), basically giving a word and asking their interlocutor to say whatever comes to mind. This is intended as a way of showing how bourgeois society is or isn't willing to confront the issues of the age, but there seems to be some hope for the kids. The film closes on a hopeful note where the characters suggest that anything missing from the film will be shot by other well-known filmmakers like Bertolucci. "It's a bit vague," they say of Godard's end result, "But film makes people think." (Godard's peers didn't quite take up his challenge.) LE GAI SAVOIR is an interesting portrait of late 1960s Paris, or at least its radical side. Shooting began before the upheavals of May 1968, and Godard was certainly prescient of the coming wave of youth anger. Editing was finished after May'68, which allowed Godard to make references to Daniel Cohn-Bendit and his expulsion from France. Another way that the film is of its era is the way that Godard links his vaguely Marxist economic ideas with sexual liberation and psychoanalysis.

Jean-Pierre Léaud seems to have less room for real acting here than in his other films of the 1960s, which is somewhat disappointing. Berto's part is remarkable, however. Godard has the camera constantly study her face. Berto is so consistently sad and pouting in Godard's films of the 1960s that the brief moment here when she laughs is absolutely shocking.

Night after night, not long before dawn, two young adults, Patricia and Emile, meet on a sound stage to discuss learning, discourse, and the path to revolution. Scenes of Paris' student revolt, the Vietnam War, and other events of the late 1960s, along with posters, photographs, and cartoons, are backdrops to their words.

The shooting started before the events of May 68 and was finished shortly afterwards. Co-produced by the O.R.T.F., the film was upon completion rejected by French national television, then released in the cinema where it was subsequently banned by the French government. The title is a reference to Nietzsche's book "The Gay Science".

For me, this film just further cements the weirdness that is Godard. He is something of a cinematic anarchist, throwing just about any picture or sound he wants on the screen, and this seems to be a running theme of his throughout the 1960s. The extended scene where a child is playing a word association game -- what is that? Is that taken from another film, or did Godard actually include it for some sort of strange, revolutionary metaphor?

This film is one of Godard's most didactic and least cinematic. It could easily have been a play. Taking place on a bare sound stage, the characters are meant to seem detached from the distractions of the world. This is supposed to allow them to dwell completely in the world of ideas and come to terms with the essence of revolution. But oddly this device seems to work against Goddard. Istead of creating an atmosphere of purity and lack of compromise, it seems as if they have detached themselves from reality and are completely wrapped up in themselves. One gets the idea that their thoughts are overblown to the point of becoming egotistical. Goddard is trying to show two people willing to go to the limits of their ideas. It is an interesting concept, but long after the point is made, he continues to make it to the point of tedium. Where Goddard tries to be an iconoclast, he only achieves a very painful boredom. It is an experiment that didn't work. The concept of the film sounds good but in practice it doesn't come across.

I think this film is only for the hard core Goddard fan, or someone who so strongly agrees with his social-political view, that any statement of them is reassuring and pleasant. Unless you are one or the other, proceed at your own risk.

I saw this when it came out in the 60's at a film fest in NYC at Lincoln Center. I was a big fan of Goddard at the time, but this film changed that. I didn't see another Goddard film for 10 years. I have gotten back to enjoying his films, but I would never revisit this one.