Because when we approach certain problems our language hinders our thinking. The way American social scientists write makes it practically impossible for a layman to understand what they mean, or to understand the society they nominally discuss. An even grosser example is advertising, with which public media saturate the whole populations of capitalist countries. The language and images of advertising condition us with consumption-directed ways of seeing reality. Recent Hollywood films also present life as a process of acquisition that far exceeds need. When we take such depictions of reality for granted, they enslave us. Unexamined assumptions about reality are the most dangerous- especially to a man trying to change society scientifically, and Marxism is nothing when it is not scientific.

WE WILL NOT ACCEPT ANY KIND OF SELF-EVIDENT TRUTHS.

WE DO NOT BELIEVE THAT THERE EXIST ANY KIND OF SELF-EVIDENT TRUTHS.

SELF-EVIDENT TRUTHS BELONG TO BOURGEOIS PHILOSOPHY.

GODARD'S heroes have always been the instruments of his makeshift analysis. The two of Le Gai Savoir are more useful tools than his earlier protagonists could have been- because he has abandoned the naturalistic conventions that restricted their functions. In an ordinary film characters have to play fixed roles; to speak into the camera, or step into new roles, is to break the illusion or convention of reality so many people depend upon. But in a crucial passage of Le Gai Savoir Godard attacks this "ideology of real life." To tell the meaning of a film you must look at what it concretely is, a sequence of sounds and images. "Film is not the reflection of what is real, but rather what is real in this reflection."

To think that a film represents reality is to obscure the significance of its design. If you want to discuss the meaning of a film all you can talk about is its form- the way this and that occur, and the way that is juxtaposed to this, on the screen and nowhere else. A film's form does not lay out a spectacle without interpreting the material of that spectacle. It sets thing struggling against thing and thereby generates specific emotions and ideas. If you do not become aware of that struggle and participate in it, you accept the emotions and ideas the makers of the film want you to have. You must look at what is actually on the screen and criticize the way it combines with other images and sounds. Then film will stop being a diversion, and will become a true education.

Films that further the "ideology of real life" are reactionary; they obscure the political line the film presents by pretending to be true representations of what exists. Films that make you want to watch them critically are progressive.

Le Gai Savoir is often, even if not always, progressive. The design of each successful sequence reveals itself- Godard's way of presenting material creates its own self-criticism. Juliette Berto, for example, turns at one point to the camera to tell us, "I'm eighty-four . . . thirty-three feet six inches tall . . . my sweater [which we see as blue] is yellow." Either the sound or the image is lying; will we ever again trust the statements of men speaking on TV? She recommences: "I'm twenty . . ." "That's obvious," interrupts Leaud, offscreen, for us. "Yes," she replies, "but imagine de Gaulle talking to students, or Franco. . ."

Le Gai Savoir works best in cases like this, where a certain mode of presentation suggests the way to analyze that mode. A more suggestive example occurs when Leaud and Berto decide to interview a Frenchman of the year 2000 by satellite; Godard cuts to a small red-haired boy dressed in red against a blue background. They feed him single words and he responds: "Aristotle"/"Red," "Circle"/"Lion." As in One Plus One's interview with Eve Democracy, we immediately begin weighing his responses for their political significance ("Revolution"/"October," "Stalin"/"Airplane.") Then, however, the problems implicit in this mode of presentation suggest themselves- problems that become more explicit in a similar interview with an old, possibly senile man. When the subject does not respond is it because the device feeding him words is faulty, or because his hearing is bad, or because words like "tenderness" simply don't evoke a response from him? When he responds without repeating the stimulus-word, can be sure he heard the same work we did? These questions do not center, as they might under the "ideology of real life," on the problem of whether we should believe that what we are seeing actually occurred. Instead the central question is how to interpret the material we are watching, without forgetting that it exists only as film.

In sequences like these Godard raises complex questions with the simplest of material. The method by which their images and sounds are internally constructed and externally combined provides a discourse that clarifies the meaning of each separate sequence. Form, by directly realizing material, shows the right way to analyze it.

In some sequences form is not clear enough, and the implications of Godard's method of presentation do not reveal themselves. During the long "experimental film," for example, one tape recording of a student's speech during the strike of May '68 is played, then speeded up, then slowed to catch a section of his speech so far ahead that its subject has changed. When this tape is running at high speed a whispering voice supplies theoretical dicta for revolutionary action, possibly as a critique of the first. What this mode of presentation implies is unclear. Lacking accompanying images, the two broken-up monologues have no reference and scarcely more meaning. An extended enquiry might reveal the point of this sequence- it may be just that non-referential speech has no meaning. But as it stands, Godard's method of presentation does not lead us to that conclusion. If anything the sequence is so confusing and long that it discourages critical involvement. The spectacle of boredom that results is almost as reactionary as the spectacle of "real life" to which Hollywood has accustomed us.

Those sequences which employ metaphor also have limited success, for their meaning comes less from their formal mode than from a semi-representational correspondence to real events. One sequence finds Berto singing scales on "oh." Leaud, standing directly behind her, begins to strangle her and say "ah"; she falters, begins brokenly saying "ah," and with Leaud's approval ends singing scales on "ah." Because the sequence represents something far more awful than the action it presents, it cannot avoid a note of falseness. It is not at all suggestive formally because the meaning to which it refers bears no relation to its form of presentation. That is, it shows us nothing of the way bourgeois education does strangle free expression.

So the film's limitations spring from its virtues. While Godard's method brilliantly analyzes the language of film, it cannot analyze anything else. We can apply the lessons learned in Le Gai Savoir's sounds and images to our experiences in other films and- occasionally- to our parallel experiences in reality.

MISTODIMAN . . . a mixture of "method" and "sentiment" . . . It's a word I made up to describe images and sounds. -Leaud, at the end.

WHEN the formal method of a sequence makes itself clear it also generates a great optimism that explains the film's title, joyful knowing. Sequences that reveal their own analysis can be genuinely moving to those progressive people who rejoice in discovering how sounds and images mean. Who want films that will provoke criticism, films in which le sens joue, instead of spectacles to dull their critical faculties.