This week the Gene Siskel Film Center is presenting new digital restorations of La Chinoise (1967) and Le Gai Savoir (1969), two films from a critical period in the trailblazing career of Jean-Luc Godard. Both are informed by the revolutionary fervor that had energized the French left in the late 1960s—this spirit is so central to the films, in fact, that today they feel like time capsules of a particular moment in political history.
Le Gai Savoir is a personal work insofar as it communicates Godard’s frustration with narrative filmmaking. Just months after releasing La Chinoise, the director would premiere Week-end, which famously concludes with a title card that reads “End of Cinema.” This message was Godard’s way of saying that he’d given up storytelling (which was never his strong suit anyway) and wanted to pursue new approaches to making movies that mirrored how he was evolving as a thinker and a political being. He wanted to express his ideas more directly, and if this meant turning to agitprop, then so be it. Starting in 1968 and continuing intermittently for the next five years, Godard would create political tracts with a collective called the Dziga Vertov Group. Made during this period (but without the collective), Le Gai Savoir finds Godard failing spectacularly to outline his political agenda in straightforward terms, without such distractions as character or plot to get in the way.
