Word: godards
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...film's young children have an almost identical effect. In all recent Godard they have been a source of optimism, for they can grow up with a correct political education. Thus an adult male voice in See You at Mao (1969) occasionally reads sentences of a Communist history text to a young girl, who repeats them. Easy though this is to interpret as brainwashing, the absence of any criticism within the film reveals it as one of the purest hopes Godard still has. The thought that someone can learn the truth of history, and evolve a good way of thinking...
...Godard's intellectual commitment, like that of his heroes, keeps him from a direct (and therefore false, because unexamined) participation in "reality." He does what he can- he refines images and sounds as means of analyzing and coming to know reality, the way a philosopher might refine his terms or a physicist his instruments. Le Gai Savoir, as of 1968 Godard's furthest attempt, is consequently cut off from reality. There's no more going into people's homes with questions, no direct action or activism, no direct contact with reality for the characters. The images Leaud and Berto...
...pull of the "real," though, remains very strong, and Godard succumbs a few times. Shots of Parisian shoppers taken from a moving car, which looks more like documentary than anything in his previous films, alternate with very short shots and speeches of the two protagonists. Almost at the end of the film Juliette Berto complains, "The people- we talk about them, but we never see them." Godard, in the film's most romantic moment, cuts to a shot of a bus which, leaving the frame, reveals the People on the sidewalk. For an instant direct apprehension of the "real" seems...