Subscribe to RSSThe Godard Duo
December 3rd, 2008 | by Alive Mind Education | published in Film Info, Godard Duo
Jean-Luc Godard was a founding member of the French New Wave and one of the most influential directors of the 20th century. Two of his most overtly political films from the 60s, La Chinoise and Le Gai Savoir, examine the relationship between art and revolution, language and power. La Chinoise focuses on a group of students and engages with the ideas coming out of the student activist groups in pre 1968 France. Le Gai Savoir was rejected by French national television and subsequently banned by the French government for its subversive content.
La Chinoise
Paris, 1967. Disillusioned by their suburban lifestyles, a group of middle-class students, led by Guillaume (Jean-Pierre Leaud) and Veronique (Anne Wiazemsky), forma small Maoist cell and plan to change the world by any means necessary. After studying the growth of communism in China, the students decide they must use terrorism and violence to ignite their own revolution.
Le Gai Savoir
While alone in an abandoned television studio, two militants, Emile Rousseau (Jean-Pierre Leaud) and Patricia Lumumba (Juliet Berto), have a discourse on language. Regerring to spoken word as “the enemy” - the weapon used by the establishment to confuse liberation movements - the two deconstruct the meanings of sounds and images in an attempt to ‘return to zero’ and truly experience the joy of learning.
le Gai Savoir
Grade Level: Grades 10-12, College and University
Copyright: © 1969 Gaumont - Bavaria Atelier Gesellschaft. All rights reserved.
Subjects: Arts, Cinema, Film Studies, World Cinema
Set: DVD Only
Total Running Time:5 minutes
ISBN-10: 1-4172-0174-6
Educational Prices:
with Public Performance Rights: $249.00
without Public Performance Rights: $149.00
la Chinoise
Grade Level: Grades 10-12, College and University
Copyright: © 1967 HUGO FILMS. All rights reserved.
Subjects: Arts, Cinema, Film Studies, World Cinema
Set: DVD Only
Total Running Time:93 minutes
ISBN-10: 1-4172-0174-6
Educational Prices:
with Public Performance Rights: $249.00
without Public Performance Rights: $149.00
“Godard reinvented cinema”
-The Village Voice
“The cinematic techniques Godard used to evoke radical youth culture seem years ahead of their time.”
-The New York Times
“Four Stars…A molotov mixture of comedy and commentary”
–Time Out New York on La Chinoise
“Still amazing 40 years later…remains more inventive than any new movie”
–The Washington Post on La Chinoise
“…eerily prophetic and spectacularly stylized”
–The New York Observer on La Chinoise
“In this time of increasingly personal cinema, the films of Jean-Luc Godard make those
of most of his contemporaries look about as original and individual as monogrammed Volkswagens….one of Godard’s most beautiful, most visually lucid movies.”
–The New York Times on Le Gai Savoir