…or “The Joyful Knowledge” – presumably some kind of knowing distortion of Nietzsche’s La Gaya Scienza. And yes, it’s all about knowledge – of current events, of theory, of languages, of one another – and it’s also all about joy – the basic pleasures of cinema: sound, image, text, clear plastic umbrellas, like that. This film, originally made for French television but (understandably) not shown, is at once Godard at his most didactic and least directed: he wants you to go away thinking, but I don’t think he wants you go away thinking anything in particular. (Anyone who would consider this propaganda doesn’t know what it would mean to be convinced of something.)
It mostly consists of dialogues between Jean-Pierre L√É©aud and Juliet Bertot on a black soundstage: two young people negotiating their relationship against the background of revolutionary aspiration. It can thus be seen as a kind of update and abstraction of La Chinoise, bearing the same sort of relationship to that film as Bergman’s After the Rehearsal does to Fanny and Alexander. Interspersed with this are still images, often defaced pages from magazines or philosophy texts, and layered over with many different sound sources. It’s funny how so many of the authors Godard leapfrogs across in this film – Derrida, Debord, Barthes, etc. – remain staples of American progressive higher education (though, naturally, virtually invisible and unavailable elsewhere). That particular, exhilarating post-‘68 mix of dissolution, disappointment and discovery is, in many ways, still the lingua franca of the American scholar, suggesting that the moment the film records – a moment of starting again from zero, as Bertot and Léaud endlessly put it – has not yet past. We still want that joyful knowledge, and we still know, more or less, how to get it; we’re still not sure just what, if anything, to do with it.
by Evan Kindley | Source: 35mm print
21 May 2008 12:08 PM | Submit Comment
