Night after night, not long before dawn, two young adults, Patricia and Emile, meet on a sound stage to discuss learning, discourse, and the path to revolution. Scenes of Paris's student revolt, the Vietnam War, and other events of the late 1960s, along with posters, photographs, and cartoons, are backdrops to their words. Words themselves are often Patricia and Emile's subject, as are images, sounds, and juxtapositions.
As the 1960s went by, Jean-Luc Godard was increasing adding social concerns and strident political messages to his films, but never without breaking traditional storytelling, however zany it might be with his French New Wave style. In 1967, however, he set off on a new direction. LE GAI SAVOIR was the first production that Godard shot after he bade farewell to his usual crew and dedicated himself entirely to political filmmaking. Originally made for French television, it was rejected and only screened at a few festivals, and it is easy to understand why: LE GAI SAVOIR still feels very avant-garde and intense today.
The film's title is best translated "The Joy of Learning". The two people that appear in the film are less distinct characters than representations of Godard himself: Emile (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and Patricia (Juliet Berto) meet on a darkened soundstage and announce that they will study revolution. A heap of still images begins to appear on the screen: fragments of workers' union speeches, Vietnam footage, pornography, Parisian street scenes, Black Panthers, African guerilla movements, fashion shoots, advertisements from magazines, and comic books. Emile and Patricia (but really Godard) wish to make sense of everything they are seeing and to put it in the right order, for Godard believed that cinema could reflect the truth were its materials only presented in the right way. Biting the hand that feeds him, Godard attacks French television, as well as other European television networks, and Hollywood. Godard's leftist sympathies were more Maoist (or rather an infatuation with a sort of fantasy Maoism shorn of horrors it inflicted on China) than traditionally Western European Communist, and some of his biting criticism is directed towards the Soviet Union.
As the film opens with this chaos of social and culture themes, the dialogue is initially driven by free association, and there's a lot of humour in the way that Godard manages to link one issue to another. One can expect puns and bitter jokes, and Godard also whispers in voiceover over the proceedings as he famously did in his earlier film "Deux ou trois chose que je sais d'elle". In one section of the film, Emile and Patricia pose questions to three people brought in off the street: two children and an old man (the last seems a bit of a wino, really), basically giving a word and asking their interlocutor to say whatever comes to mind. This is intended as a way of showing how bourgeois society is or isn't willing to confront the issues of the age, but there seems to be some hope for the kids. The film ends on a hopeful note where the characters suggest that shots missing from the film will be shot by other well-known filmakers like Bertolucci. "It's a bit vague," they say, "But film makes people think." (Godard's peers didn't quite take up his challenge.)
LE GAI SAVOIR is an interesting portrait of late 1960s Paris, or at least its radical side. Shooting began before the upheavals of May 1968, and Godard was certainly prescient of the coming wave of youth anger. Editing was finished after May'68, which allowed Godard to make references to Daniel Cohn-Bendit and his expulsion from France. Another way that the film is of its era is the way that Godard links his vaguely Marxist economic ideas with sexual liberation and psychoanalysis.
Jean-Pierre Léaud seems to have less room for real acting here than in his other films of the 1960s, which is somewhat disappointing. Berto's part is remarkable, however. Godard hs the camera constantly study her face. Berto is so consistenly sad and pouty in Godard's films of the 1960s that the brief moment here when she laughs is absolutely shocking.