Le Gai savoir (1969) - film review

Two young militants meet in a deserted television studio and start to discuss radical ideas about film-making.   They are Émile, the great-great-grandson Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Patricia, a child of the Cultural Revolution.  They agree that if cinema is to survive it must reinvent itself, it must go back to its very beginning and start all over again, using image and sound in a radically different way.

The film that marked Jean-Luc Godard’s definitive break with mainstream cinema in the 1960s and defined his future direction for the next decade and beyond was this daring experimental work.  Le Gai savoir was originally commissioned by the French television company ORTF as an adaptation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s novel Emile.  Once they saw the initial footage which Godard had shot, the ORTF pulled out of the project, but allowed the director to finish the work with his own resources.

Just as Rousseau’s novel led to a wholesale reform of the education system in France, Godard was probably hoping that his film would have a radical impact on the future of cinema.  Whilst few have followed Godard’s cause, the film is significant because it rationalises the director’s philosophy of filmmaking in a way that few, if any, of his other films manages to.  The interaction of sound and image, and how these play upon our imagination and establish links between the world of fantasy and the world of everyday experience, are some of the themes which the film explores.  In this pot-pourri of artistic overload abound the familiar Godard-esque references to imperialist consumerism and extreme left-wing politics, no doubt influenced by the events of May 1968.

© James Travers 2002

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