Word: gai
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...might object that such obscene language was rightly censored, and that in any case it was gratuitous in a political film. But for many European intellectuals "obscenity" is an essential part of an "intellectual guerrilla warfare" against the bourgeoisie. One of Le Gai Savoir's last images is a book cover reading Bertolt Brecht- from Rimbaud to Lenin, that is, from scatological to revolutionary. Attacks on bourgeois thought cannot limit themselves to "politics" narrowly defined; epater la bourgeoisie is a political slogan. The censorship of "obscenity" is thus a bourgeois device to restrict free thought. Everything could be discussed under...
GODARD'S heroes have always been the instruments of his makeshift analysis. The two of Le Gai Savoir are more useful tools than his earlier protagonists could have been- because he has abandoned the naturalistic conventions that restricted their functions. In an ordinary film characters have to play fixed roles; to speak into the camera, or step into new roles, is to break the illusion or convention of reality so many people depend upon. But in a crucial passage of Le Gai Savoir Godard attacks this "ideology of real life." To tell the meaning of a film you must look...
...Gai Savoir is often, even if not always, progressive. The design of each successful sequence reveals itself- Godard's way of presenting material creates its own self-criticism. Juliette Berto, for example, turns at one point to the camera to tell us, "I'm eighty-four . . . thirty-three feet six inches tall . . . my sweater [which we see as blue] is yellow." Either the sound or the image is lying; will we ever again trust the statements of men speaking on TV? She recommences: "I'm twenty . . ." "That's obvious," interrupts Leaud, offscreen, for us. "Yes," she replies, "but imagine...
...Gai Savoir works best in cases like this, where a certain mode of presentation suggests the way to analyze that mode. A more suggestive example occurs when Leaud and Berto decide to interview a Frenchman of the year 2000 by satellite; Godard cuts to a small red-haired boy dressed in red against a blue background. They feed him single words and he responds: "Aristotle"/"Red," "Circle"/"Lion." As in One Plus One's interview with Eve Democracy, we immediately begin weighing his responses for their political significance ("Revolution"/"October," "Stalin"/"Airplane.") Then, however, the problems implicit in this mode...
...film's limitations spring from its virtues. While Godard's method brilliantly analyzes the language of film, it cannot analyze anything else. We can apply the lessons learned in Le Gai Savoir's sounds and images to our experiences in other films and- occasionally- to our parallel experiences in reality...