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What do you do when you’re not yet 40, the world’s most celebrated cinematic renegade, you’ve made your masterpiece (1967’s “Week End”), and it ends with the words “end of cinema?” If you’re Jean-Luc Godard, the Johnny Rotten of the French New Wave, you try to prove it by making movies that dispense with traditional meaning entirely. Still an oddity nearly 40 years after its release, “Le Gai Savior” (which means something like “The Joy of Knowledge”) is an interminable, exquisitely filmed, cinematic conversation between two archly doctrinaire Marxist students (Julie Berto and New Wave stand-by Jean-Pierre Leaud). The subject at hand is language as the enemy of the extreme social change that they advocate. The dialogue takes place entirely on an empty, darkened stage and examines the very notion of language, while being interspersed with a collage of random material and bizarre and often irritating sound effects and narrations by Godard himself. Nearly unwatchable for most of its length, it is also all but impenetrable. (Godard scholar Colin MacCabe has written that Godard’s films from this period “address an ideal audience.” I guess I’m not a member of that audience.) It is also, like Godard himself during this period, horribly politically obtuse. If only he had known that the puritanical, repressive, murderous Maoist Chinese government he so admired — despite his fierce opposition to these same tendencies in the West — would, within a couple of decades, be enabling many of the world’s most rapacious capitalists.
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