But to put all one's hope for political freedom in theoretical work is a desperate act. It's the act of a man committed to scientific, conscious, progress- and a man alienated from "reality" by this commitment to intellect, as well as by objective conditions. If his images and sounds have any sentimental content, it comes from their divorce from the real- their inability to embody the real directly.

Some of the film's most moving moments present material far from Godard's experience. At the conclusion of a few sequences we hear large choruses singing Socialist songs; other sections end with shots of Chinese woodcuts in which red children sweep some sort of reactionaries from their homes. Their inspirational tone is made quite poignant by their lack of application to the situation at hand; they have no social or critical context in the film, and are equally distant from Godard's pre-Revolutionary situation.

The film's young children have an almost identical effect. In all recent Godard they have been a source of optimism, for they can grow up with a correct political education. Thus an adult male voice in See You at Mao (1969) occasionally reads sentences of a Communist history text to a young girl, who repeats them. Easy though this is to interpret as brainwashing, the absence of any criticism within the film reveals it as one of the purest hopes Godard still has. The thought that someone can learn the truth of history, and evolve a good way of thinking, without having to struggle through bourgeois thought as Godard has the last ten years- that thought is very positive. Godard's uncritical acceptance of it shows the depth of his need for real knowledge, not just theories, of reality.

But Godard's intellectual commitment, like that of his heroes, keeps him from a direct (and therefore false, because unexamined) participation in "reality." He does what he can- he refines images and sounds as means of analyzing and coming to know reality, the way a philosopher might refine his terms or a physicist his instruments. Le Gai Savoir, as of 1968 Godard's furthest attempt, is consequently cut off from reality. There's no more going into people's homes with questions, no direct action or activism, no direct contact with reality for the characters. The images Leaud and Berto see are all second-hand; still photographs with handwriting predominate.

The pull of the "real," though, remains very strong, and Godard succumbs a few times. Shots of Parisian shoppers taken from a moving car, which looks more like documentary than anything in his previous films, alternate with very short shots and speeches of the two protagonists. Almost at the end of the film Juliette Berto complains, "The people- we talk about them, but we never see them." Godard, in the film's most romantic moment, cuts to a shot of a bus which, leaving the frame, reveals the People on the sidewalk. For an instant direct apprehension of the "real" seems possible.

But a formal analysis of cinema tells him that such direct embodiment is impossible, and he acknowledges this twice. First, and more gently, come the three successive times when Leaud tells Berto: "If you want to see the world, close your eyes, Rosemunde." Godard cuts to shots of Parisians on the sidewalk: within a film, seeing the real can only be an act of imagination, that is of closing your eyes. Second, at the end of the film Berto declares: "This [the film] was not and never will be, because this IS." It never has actually existed and never will- it can only exist in the moment when it is projected, and then only as a film, not as any other reality.

It's this reality that we must criticize carefully. Only then will film become the scientific tool of analysis Godard needs so he can reach sure knowledge of the real. His desperation for experiences of the real will not let him accept delays; but on the other hand his rationalism will not let him follow a shoddy line of analysis. Le Gai Savoir, far from being a crude propaganda film, absolutely refuses to move beyond the separate and minimal truths about film that it reveals. This refusal kept him from adopting a "correct" line before 1969; since then it has made him constantly redefine his Maoism.

Why should he have become a revolutionary? His humanitarianism will allow nothing less. Godard's films of 1969 combine all these necessities of his character. Made for analysis by fellow cadres more than for propaganda, they are rigorously theatrical attempts to recreate sounds and images so that film can someday become really revolutionary. In them the problem of "reality" has become quite distinct. Maybe after the revolution, when language and image have been freed, Godard will begin to know things as they really are.