Sunday, August 28, 2011

Jean-Luc Godard: Le gai savoir, Part 1















Jean-Luc Godard's Le gai savoir (1969) mixes in many late 1960s cultural and political icons and touchstones, ranging from texts and images of the 1968 unheavals, the US-Vietnam War, the Black Panthers, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William S. Burroughs, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and Cuba, the Pentagon, the Beatles, Mao, William Faulkner, Noam Chomsky, Superman, Spiderman, the Hulk, competing maps of the world and its conflicts, Bertolt Brecht, pop advertisements, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Mozart. Even if it had no other value (it does), Le gai savoir remains a vibrant document still hot off the press from more than forty years ago.

Patricia Lumumba (Juliet Berto): "No, listen, we study links, relations, differences. . ."

If everything seemed to connect in 1968-1969, it still does in 2011. A of people in the know about the workings of the world just got tired, I guess, or are almost forgotten. All one has to do, now as then, is look and listen, with curiosity, and pay attention. Where there's a will, there's a way; where there's no will, there's no way -- in or out of a big ball of confusion.















Today's Rune: Strength.

2 comments:

the walking man said...

It is not that things do not connect anymore, it is that they connect differently and for more selfish outlets. No matter that it is 4o years later it is mostly 40 years of backwards movement when it comes to culture.

Charles Gramlich said...

That's sort of a who's who and what's what of the late 20th century.