Word: godards
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...Whether the language and images of Communist societies are more scientific is not a question one can ask of this film. Le Gai Savoir devotes itself to the only language Godard knows- that of his experience under capitalism. Indeed, he is so preoccupied with the existing conditions of capitalist societies that it is impossible to imagine him working in a post-revolutionary situation: what would his films be about...
...Thus Godard, far from playing self-indulgent word-games, is working at a necessary revolutionary task: to show people living under capitalism how their speech imprisons them. If that idea seems far-fetched, note that O. R. T. F. (French National TV, a creature of the bourgeois state if ever there was one) censored language it thought shouldn't be used...
...heroic subtitle saved this speech for English audiences. O. R. T. F., for which Godard made Le Gai Savor, bleeped out every word except "under orders from the ghost of Artaud...
...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...
...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 de Gaulle...