Over three years, partially lit by the interior flame of their radicalism, two young militants, Émile Rousseau, a descendant of Jean-Jacques, and Patricia Lumumba, Patrice’s “daughter,” meet after-hours on a bare stage in an otherwise pitch-dark television studio and discuss politics and filmmaking. As witnesses, we receive from this discussion, and from accompanying recent and contemporary images and sounds, an enlightened education. The young pair teach themselves and one another, and we are collateral beneficiaries—along with writer-director Jean-Luc Godard, whose ambivalence over violent revolution is given a projective debate. The film’s title translates as Joyful Wisdom.
     Godard set this film aside in 1967 but picked it up in 1968, after the May student uprising and strikes. Initially caught up in the Leftist waves of La Chinoise (Godard, 1967), Le gai savoir emotionally expanded to include a sense of Leftist turmoil, disarray. We hear a rewinding tape recorder and recorded moments from 1968 street rallies. A substantial part of this film shows a kaleidoscopic collision of images and sounds outside the studio, testing their relationship, how they are politically manipulated, when they are “false” or “true.” Brechtian distancing devices compound Brechtian distancing devices, threatening to lose all sense of argument or coherence in a barrage of sights and sounds. But this never happens, primarily because of the actors, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Julie Berto. Léaud in particular gives an astonishing performance, which includes a simulated tightrope walk, under a clear plastic umbrella, while singing (beautifully!).
     Richard Brody is plain wrong that the “images” of them “matter little.” One of Godard’s themes is the relationship between sex and politics, and the intimacy between Patricia and Émile, with their various close arrangements vis-à-vis the camera and the lustrous brown of their heads of hair, speak to this.