Le Gai Savoir

LE GAI SAVOIR   **1/2

Jean-Luc Godard

1969

IDEA:  Two radical Leftist students convene on an empty television set to discuss politics, language, images, and the state of the world.

BLURB:  How do you foster revolutionary thought and action within the institutional apparatuses designed to suppress them? What does a radical, anti-establishment politics look, sound, and feel like, especially as it expresses itself through the assaultive din of mass culture? These are the questions being self-reflexively wrestled with in Le Gai Savoir, Godard’s characteristically droll, smug, formally adventurous mix of abrasive Marxist dialectic and intellectual wankery. Patricia and Émile meet up in the inky nowhere of a TV studio to ruminate, lament, and allegedly formulate an ideological plan of action in the midst of countercultural crisis, but rather than posit anything really coherent, the film is mostly an excuse for Godard to noodle around with audiovisual syntax. When he’s not dwelling on the baroquely side-lit silhouettes of Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Berto, he’s serving up barrages of disjunctive signifiers, with scribbled-on advertisements, documentary footage, propaganda, war photographs, and gnomic pronouncements creating such a florid semiotic density that the real-world issues they index tend to get obscured. It’s a relatively enjoyable, giddy explosion of language, all things considered – the Etch-A-Sketch interlude is a delight – but to what end? Are Godard’s protests efficacious or elitist pontification from an artist’s ivory tower? At least he can admit that it all might be for naught: that maybe, in 1969 or today, Le Gai Savoir is most powerful as a sadly self-aware epitaph for a movement stuck gazing longingly at its embattled ideals.