Word: godard
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...sequences like these Godard raises complex questions with the simplest of material. The method by which their images and sounds are internally constructed and externally combined provides a discourse that clarifies the meaning of each separate sequence. Form, by directly realizing material, shows the right way to analyze...
...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...
...some sequences form is not clear enough, and the implications of Godard's method of presentation do not reveal themselves. During the long "experimental film," for example, one tape recording of a student's speech during the strike of May '68 is played, then speeded up, then slowed to catch a section of his speech so far ahead that its subject has changed. When this tape is running at high speed a whispering voice supplies theoretical dicta for revolutionary action, possibly as a critique of the first. What this mode of presentation implies is unclear. Lacking accompanying images...
...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...
Some of the film's most moving moments present material far from Godard's experience. At the conclusion of a few sequences we hear large choruses singing Socialist songs; other sections end with shots of Chinese woodcuts in which red children sweep some sort of reactionaries from their homes. Their inspirational tone is made quite poignant by their lack of application to the situation at hand; they have no social or critical context in the film, and are equally distant from Godard's pre-Revolutionary situation...