Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas, 1996)

[This is my May post for Blind Spots.]

Irma Vep is the third Olivier Assayas film I've seen, the other two being Summer Hours and Carlos. This 1996 feature contains the roots of both, the former's elegant respect for French art history and the latter's deconstructive, post-New Wave wit. A film about a film production starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, Irma Vep instantly recalls Day for Night, but as Assayas voices and visualizes a sense of dissatisfaction with French cinema, the film becomes something else. Eric Gautier's gritty, 16mm cinematography and sophisticated camera movements combine New Wave spontaneity (the film was shot in three weeks) with formal know-how to be both behind-the-scenes docudrama and rich cinematic fantasy.

That the  production in question is an adaptation of Louis Feuillade's 1915 serial Les Vampires only complicates Assayas' thematic intent. The characters working on this French film set all talk of American films, some disapprovingly, others with an eagerness to see their own national cinema reflect Hollywood's crowd-pleasing scale. Assayas "remakes" Feuillade's film to remind everyone that France invented the action epic, and that they didn't need insane budgets and special effects to do so. Yet the fact that someone would remake it speaks to a lack of original ideas for contemporary French directors, and that's leaving out how little of France seems to make its way into this production.

This is most evident in the casting of the titular lead role. Rather than use a native French actress, director René Vidal (Léaud) selects Maggie Cheung (Maggie, well, Cheung) after seeing her in some Hong Kong films. To demonstrate why he cast her, Vidal plays a clip of Cheung in Johnnie To's The Heroic Trio, seen on a cheap video with forced subtitles that include Chinese characters with bad, scarcely legible translations. (This looks achingly familiar to anyone who has watched a To film made in the late '80s and early '90s.) Vidal, who will later be derided as a director who represents stuffy, insular French film, is already looking to the styles of other countries to aid his own movie, and his casting suggests a lack of faith in native talent.

It only gets more complicated and un-French from there. In designing an update on Musidora's catsuit in the original serial, the fashion designers head to a sex shop and grab a latex suit. To get the right look and feel for the catsuit, however, the designer, Zoé (Nathalie Richard) does not look at stills from Feuillade but rather a magazine photo of Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman from Batman Returns. Zoé later confides in Cheung that she hated Tim Burton's movie and its ludicrously outsized style, but she's still looking to the American film for inspiration. This is even more ironic as Assayas subtly hints that Burton, whether he realized it or not, copped Catwoman's get-up from Musidora, so the French are now chasing after people who technically already copied them.

When it comes time to shoot, the production is a disaster. Vidal and the crew go over dailies that lack any and all tension, atmosphere or eroticism. The dailies, like the silents they copy, play in black-and-white and without any soundtrack other than the idle cough of one of the watching crew. When the lights come up, Vidal is a nervous wreck, having only now realized, with money and people secured, that he is wasting his time. French film really is in a rut, it seems. But then, Cheung, who moves so stiffly and uncomfortably in the latex suit during shooting, returns back to her hotel room after hanging out with Zoé, puts on a Sonic Youth record, dons the catsuit and goes out for a prowl. Suddenly, Cheung moves with ease, and she even lifts the necklace of an American woman who waits nude for a lover who won't come over.

This is the only outright fantastical moment of the film (well, other than the ending), but it marks a shift away from a movie about the making of a movie into one about the possibilities of cinema. With the Les Vampires production itself more or less halted with Vidal's nervous breakdown, Assayas can probe deeper into the characters and how they relate to each other through blurs in diegetic realities. Both Vidal and Zoé have crushes on Cheung, but they project onto her in such a way that they seem to love Maggie Cheung, the lead character, and not Maggie Cheung, the actress. Zoé dresses Cheung up in latex for the movie, but that catsuit also becomes an erotic fantasy for her, and the designer even imagines Cheung having expressed a deep love of the uncomfortable thing, creating the invented possibility of the woman wearing it around her in private.

Cheung herself, working with people with whom she can only communicate via her and their second language (English), plays in her own fish-out-of-water tale that complicates her involvement in the film. Indeed, one person even voices a vicious complaint about the casting of a foreigner to play a character who symbolizes the Paris underground, though Assayas clarifies the limits of his own argument for the vitality and independence of French cinema by casting this man's rants as racist and myopic. Assayas may want to stake a renewed place for French film, but he also knows that an outside presence can offer new perspectives, and he uses Cheung to find alternate routes through both the fake remake and the actual movie being watched that lead to new ideas for national cinema.

But for all this ambition, there are many playful, even hilarious, moments found in the film. When Zoé tries on the latex mask she's designed for Cheung's Irma, she, being French, takes one last puff on a cigarette before this three-second break in being able to inhale. She gets the thing on and sighs, sending smoke pouring out of the mask's eye and mouth holes. When Cheung morphs into a cat burglar and takes the American's necklace, she also eavesdrops on the woman's angry phone call with the lover, complaining that she's done everything to kill time, even seeing every movie playing in town. This includes the new Steven Seagal picture, which the woman singles out for perhaps the greatest offense of the entire jilting.

The funniest, and most incisive, scene, though, involves an on-set interview Cheung gives to a French reporter. The scene, opening on the lens taking the place of the camera being used to film this for TV, starts with Cheung answering a question about working with Jackie Chan, hinting at a bias on the interviewer's part soon made explicit. This young man continues to ask about her involvement in Hong Kong action films, his obvious enthusiasm for them undeterred by Cheung admitting she finds them "too masculine." No sooner does she say these words than the man cuts her off, raves more about John Woo movies and even makes finger pistols to act out his favorite shots. He goes on to disparage Vidal's work, calling it self-indulgent crap made only for the intelligentsia, stereotypical French cinema personified. Cheung tries to argue for the need for different forms of filmic expression, but the reporter won't listen. The scene is a hilarious, and passionate, form of film criticism, with Cheung finally arguing in favor of a blend of commercial and art filmmaking. But it also makes me wonder if this Yank wannabe is the French version of a snob. In America, the snob rails against the most visible forms of national entertainment and champions the work of lesser-knowns and those outside the country. If French film is typified by navel-gazing auteurism, is the discerning aesthete the one who pines for Jean-Claude Van Damme movies?

"Cinema is not magic," reads a scrawl in a political film shown at Zoé's pad. "It is a technique and a science." Irma Vep agrees with that assessment, but it also shows how technique and science engender magic in an audience. Cheung's kind, gentle rejection of Zoé is followed by camerawork so gorgeous yet tragic that Assayas visualizes the shattering of that cinematic spell and the devastation of reality. And the final scene, in which the old dailies are replayed but rent apart by experimental etches and white noise, breaks the entire movie's magic, illustrating technique's power to create through its equal ability to destroy. This sequence heavily references Isidore Isou's experimental film Venom and Eternity, yet like the rest of the film, this look to the past makes the case for the future of French cinema. Assayas demolishes the entire frame, but in his expression of dissatisfaction with his country's filmic output there is also a clear belief that it can still be the greatest cinema in the world, as it so often has been. Had other French directors followed Assayas' lead, he might have set off a New New Wave.

Film Club: Day For Night

Before Halloween, one of my very best Internet friends, Allison, proposed we watch a horror film we'd never seen and chat about it on our sites. We settled on Les diaboliques, but some snafus led to those plans falling through. But we refined things a bit and regrouped to talk about Day for Night, a film I've been meaning to watch for years (I think I even rented it at one point but ended up sending the disc back unwatched). I'm glad to say Truffaut's film more than lived up to its reputation, and I had a great time chatting with Allison about it, and I think we covered most of the film's terrific charm.

To read our back-and-forth, head over to Allison's site, Nerd Vampire, and check out her post.

What Time is It There?

When someone describes a film as minimalistic, he usually refers to the aesthetic quality, a sparsity of construction and mise-en-scène that leaves a chill in the air. What so many, including myself, fail to adequately convey is that minimalist film, when done well, tends to be richer, more painterly and more evocative than more complicated work. Perhaps it's because the removal of classical elements of mise-en-scène take away the intellectualism of the cinema. Rather than give us symbols to toil over, directors pull back and leave emotions to fill the gap. Thus, it's harder to talk about these movies, because even when shots are deliberately arranged and edited and you see what the director is saying, you cannot fully discuss the picture without investing in it emotionally. For those who believe criticism should strive for objective verisimilitude, meaningful criticism of such works is impossible. It's easy to talk about someone's creative and emotional vision when it comes caged in unlockable elements. It's much harder when you have to expose yourself to talk about someone else's bared chest.

From a conceptual standpoint, Tsai Ming-liang's films suggest minimalism taken to an extreme. Not only is he a master of the long, static take, he reuses the same actors in essentially the same roles. Lee Kang-sheng plays the protagonist in all of Tsai's films, and he even carries the same character name, Hsiao-kang, across more than one feature. Lu Yi-ching tends to play the mother figure, Miao Tien the father. Chen Shiang-chyi plays the young woman, be she a love interest or something else. Tsai even reuses the fish from The River. Plenty of directors work with actors multiple times, but by assigning the same cast to roughly the same parts each time, Tsai expands upon his ideas of dissociation and conformity before a film even starts: though he leaves open the possibility that the feelings of disconnect and ennui in his characters are rooted in the same people, the recycling of casts allows him to make the case that we're all becoming the same. Modern thinking coined the term "nuclear family," and it also made that unit into its own prison. No longer about community, now all we have is our immediate relatives, and we cannot even communicate with them.

The first shot of What Time is It There? hangs outside the kitchen of a humble Taiwanese home as an old man finishes preparing dinner. He walks into the room where the camera rests and sets down his plate on a table, but he doesn't eat, restlessly reaching for a cigarette and fidgeting. Though he sets a plate for no one else, he gets out of his chair and calls for Hsiao-kang, then he steps outside on the back porch and rearranges a plant. His disquiet, though calm, introduces an anxious mood, and the look of emptiness in Miao's face when he sits closer to the camera is haunting but understated. The only dialogue of the entire scene is the father shouting "Hsiao-kang!" The rest unfolds in near silence, only the rustling of the rearranged plant and the creak of the wooden chair putting something in the audio track.

In the next shot, Tsai relocates to a car with the young Hsiao-kang, now cradling a container with his father's ashes. He and his mother head to an interment, located in what almost looks like a reference library, filled with shelves of fine oak cabinets in which to store remains. Instead of the unique and differentiated headstones in Western cemeteries (one of which Tsai later shows), this place literalizes the idea that we are all equal in death, and it also suggests that we are equal and unoriginal in life. As I watched this scene, I thought of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, that horrific obsidian wall that reduces the meaningless sacrifice of so many thousands to simply their names, at once an admission of our shame and a final attempt by the powers that be to minimize the disgust by removing all humanity from the equation. We know as little about Hsiao-kang's father in death as we did in the brief amount of life we saw.

Tsai complicates the shot further by introducing the first of many tragicomic elements in the film. As the camera sits in the narrow corridor of this modernized, efficient form of interment, a Buddhist priest performs a funeral ritual, clanging chimes and chanting centuries-old prayers in the middle of this clinical room. The sight of the priest, in his bright orange robe, standing among the polished, nondescript, dark wood paneling is inherently funny, but the sorrow it communicates, of committed Buddhists trying to ensure their beloved will return, is rending. At the same time, the way that the rows of ashes resemble a kind of reference section, a place of storage, also implies that these wee cupboards might actually aid the Buddhist idea of reincarnation: they might merely be places where one's former body is stored while the spirit seeks a new host.

It's impossible to feel optimistic about that line of thought, though, when you follow the reactions of the son and wife left behind. The mother continues to hold Buddhist rituals in the hopes of bringing her husband back, constantly setting his plate for dinner and interpreting anything remotely suspicious as her husband's ghost floating around. Hsiao-kang, who does not seem as if he was ever that sociable, retreats into his room, not even leaving to urinate. Instead, he pees in plastic containers -- bags, bottles -- like Howard Hughes. During the day, he leaves the room only to go sell watches on the street, where a woman (Chen Shiang-chyi) approaches him looking for a watch that can keep two times as she is leaving for Paris soon. Unimpressed by any of the watches he's flogging, Shiang-ciyi asks if she can buy the one Hsiao-kang is wearing. Having received the watch from his father, Hsiao-kang feels not only an emotional connection to the timepiece but a superstitious one, fearing that he would give away a piece of his dad. But he relents, and the woman goes on her way.

After this brief encounter, Hsiao-kang's behavior begins to shift. On a whim, he begins to set the watches in his case to Parisian time, then any clock he can find. He visits a bootleg stand and asks for French films, taking home François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (Tsai's favorite movie). At night, he sits awake, watching this scratchy, panned and scanned version of the movie that lops off 2/3 of the original frame. Later in the film, Tsai shows the woman in Paris sitting on a bench when the star of Truffaut's masterpiece, Jean-Pierre Léaud, sits beside her and attempts to make small talk.

These tendrils snake and wave, directionless as the tentacles of a sea anemone, but they never converge or brush against each other. The vague connection that tugs at Hsiao-kang is perhaps not romantically motivated so much as the outgrowth of his increasing hollowness. No one else who stops to buy the boy's watches makes any impression, as they do the usual: they scan over Hsiao-kang's wares, maybe haggle a bit and move on. Shiang-ciyi stood out, and whether he feels any attraction to her is secondary to the mere fact that she broke the routine.

When Tsai takes his camera to Paris to follow the woman, though, he does not resort to portraying her as some free spirit to extend her unorthodox actions with Hsiao-kang. Rather, she seems as lost and without purpose as the man whose watch she purchased, if not more so. In Paris, she is naturally alienated from the domestic population, and she does not make clear why she even came. She nurses a piece of paper with a phone number but never calls the mysterious person, leaving her isolated in France. Listlessly, she wanders Paris, not even taking in the sights as she uncomfortably sits coffee in cafés as if she heard that's what Parisians do and just repeats the action over and over in an attempt to fit in. A sense of displacement pervades the film, but Shiang-chyi literalizes it, having traveled to another part of the world to find somewhere she might belong, only to be even more lost.

Compared to the ragged howl of pain in Wong Kar-wai's films, loneliness and loss in Tsai Ming-liang's movies are more contained, held behind a dam that holds back the flood until cracks appear. He denies us the catharsis of full release, achieving a pain even greater than that of Wong. Where his previous film, The River, was more explicitly about modernity and the threat of interpersonal loss in a world that now functioned on a global scale, What Time is It There? approaches the same general subject in a way that complicates and deepens it.

The problem Tsai finds in the modern world here is not that we lose all sense of connection but that there are so many possibilities opened up to us that we experience sensory overload and shut down. The mise-en-scène in Tsai's shots is always static and angled, not in mathematical precision but to ensure that no one faces horizontally, where they might make eye contact with someone to their side, nor directly at the camera, where they might at least feel us watching and caring about them. They have options, but in their confusion they wind up stuck in the middle, facing diagonally to nothing.

Numerous moments of the film speak to this disconnect. At a subway station in Paris, Shiang-chyi sees an Asian man, perhaps Taiwanese, across the gap, but when he board the train that fills the space between them, she does not move to make conversation despite the longing for communication that's plain on her face. Hsiao-kang and his mother cannot relate to each other, but if they could just sit down and talk about their emotions over the patriarch's death, they might move forward. Instead, the mother is reduced to sobbing and begging for answers from the family fish as she grips the tank desperately. Later, Hsiao-kang listens to a frothy, lightweight radio show that recounts silly news stories as a chirpy but disengaged female voice bounces through titillating nuggets. One of the stories concerns a dog running around a highway, and the woman on the radio goes through a series of awful jokes about it trying to get a suntan, only for someone to call in and say the poor thing got run over. After the slightest pause and downturn in the host's voice, she returns to business as usual, masking a sense of pain with the same hollow façade Hsiao-kang and the others use, even if they're not as bubbly.

In the film's most tragicomic moment, Hsiao-kang sits in a theater after leaving a store where he rearranged the time on the clocks. The other customer who watched him do it comes in, sits next to Hsiao-kang in a nearly empty theater, takes the kid's giant clock and walks off. Hsiao-kang follows him, ending up in a bathroom where the man opens a stall to reveal dropped pants with the clock covering his penis. It's quietly absurd, but it suggests that the man was snapped out of his own ennui and disconnect by watching Hsiao-kang. Just as the boy felt an imperceptible tug toward the woman, so too does this man to Hsiao-kang, and while it's funny when he casually knocks the stall door closed on the man and walks out with a sigh, it's also sad because Hsiao-kang cannot see his own pain in others.

There are casualties in Tsai's view of the modern world, however. The director sees the irony of his fears of cultural loss in a homogenized world when his own cinephilia sprang from European cinema, and he rather reluctantly places the New Wave on the chopping block. The hissing, snowy bootleg of The 400 Blows casts the young Jean-Pierre Léaud as a ghost, and when Shiang-chyi meets the aged Léaud, they sit in a cemetery (itself contrasting classical Western interment, ornate and influenced by Christian social values, with the crematory policy of Taiwan). Shiang-chyi has no clue who he is, both a result of generational gap and cultural separation, and Tsai clear mourns the New Wave even as he makes clear that if the final nail had not been put in the movement's coffin, he is going to be the one to do it.

The title of the film is What Time is It There?, but 'where' is a relative term dependent on 'here.' Nothing makes time more disjunctive than the cinema, which can cross space and time in a single cut. For a film that uses clocks as a central symbol, the movie wryly has a non-linear progression even though it does not seem to ever double back. The structure of the film becomes as displaced as its characters, always moving forward but never really going anywhere, never recognizing what's happening.

The climax of the film is among the most haunting I've ever seen, similar in its culminating expression of directionless ennui and existentialist doubt to the ending of Tokyo Sonata. Each of the three primary characters engages in a sexual activity that only separates them further from others. In Paris, Shiang-chyi meets a woman in a restaurant and comes back to her hotel room. They sleep together, in a literal sense, but Shiang-chyi leans over and kisses the woman as if repaying the favor of talking to someone. The woman is unresponsive. Back in Taiwan, Hsiao-kang has sex with a prostitute, while the mother vents her sorrow and her fantasies of her husband returning by masturbating with the container of her husband's ashes. The awkwardness of this and Shiang-chyi's moments might be funny, but they are intensely affecting. The mother in particular seems to think that this perverse act with bring her closer once more with her husband, that his ghost might return and pleasure her. In the end, she seals herself off, reduced to isolated self-love she envisions as reconnection instead of finding someone else. (And what Western actress would sob noiselessly, avoiding histrionics and awards-baiting monologues, while still letting snot run down her face?)

The film's final scene does not bring these people together, because that's not the point. Where so many of the "network narrative" try to link people, the only thing the characters in What Time is It There? have in common with each other, even the relatives, is how alone they are. Tsai moves at last to Paris, unable to bring mother and son together, to close on Shiang-chyi. She sits by a pool, lounging uncomfortably and meditatively in a chair built always to lean back. Behind her is an empty chair. Some children play with her suitcase, throwing it into the pool, only for Hsiao-kang's father to walk by and fish it out. What does this mean? I cannot say on a first watch, but it spoke to me about those tendrils that connect even the loneliest of people, and that perhaps all that we saw was Hsiao-kang's projection of the woman he obsessed over, looking to her to get over the pain of his father's loss. In his mind, maybe she actually did take a piece of his father with her to Paris, where he now lives. It's a magical moment, reminiscent of the end of Being There, but it also has its bleaker side. The woman who made an impression on Hsiao-kang is stuck in Paris, and his father is there too. But he remains in Taiwan, possibly imagining all this but never going there himself. Some part of him knows Paris won't really be like that, and that he will just become as alienated as Shiang-chyi there. It's the final joke in a dryly comic film, the prospect that a third of the story, as depressing as it was, was actually someone's most hopeful fantasy. But like all the other gags, it's rooted in a deep sadness that turns laughter into tears.

Le Gai Savoir

Portions of Godard's Le gai savoir were filmed before he jetted off to London to muck about with the Rolling Stones, but the final product definitely has a post-May '68 feel to it. In context, Godard's minimalist movie serves to flesh out some of the vague ideas behind Sympathy for the Devil, and it takes the unfinished conception behind the splintered rockumentary to an extreme: with this film, the director wanted nothing less than to shatter the make-up of cinema, proof that Week End's final title card was not a declaration of fact but a statement of intent.

Made just before Godard entered into the often-contested (and even-more-often ignored entirely) Dziga Vertov Group, Le gai savoir represents the artist's attempt to "return to zero," to compensate for the lack of home video by making a film that essentially rewinds his other films. Using his two favorite revolutionary actors, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Berto, Godard roots the film's (in)action in a dark studio, pitch-black but for the gentle stage light that illuminates the two actors. They introduce each other as the descendants of Rousseau (Léaud) and Lumumba (Berto) and immediately launch into polemical discussions that reconstitute politics around art in Godard's usual fashion. Then they splinter off, agreeing to monitor the relationship between sight and sound in three phases for three years, first simply observing, then critiquing and finally acting upon their theories. Only now do the intellectual touches of the director's previous works seem tame: at least they came in the form of aesthetically beautiful and narratively spry movies.

By far his most confounding and layered work to that point, Le gai savoir exists in a fractured state, jumping between the two actors in the studio to jarringly bright still photographs and bustling, candid shots of people on the streets. Sounds overlap. Images are drawn on, recolored, juxtaposed and then folded into the audio. The only prop in the studio with the actors is a clear, plastic umbrella that they intermittently wave about while they speak in a manner that breaks up every sentence between the two of them.

All of this reflects Godard's deconstructionist attitude, even the umbrella, reduced to a basic, transparent outline. A critic, of course, breaks down a film into its various elements and discusses each and how they relate to the film as a whole. As such, there may be no better example in Godard's canon to illustrate his contention that the best way to criticize a film was to make another. Le gai savoir takes this idea past the point of film and into society: early on, he displays still photographs with letters written on them as if teaching the alphabet, albeit one whose examples are relevant and political (i.e. Vietnam for V); he echoes this later when Léaud's Emile rants about the illustrated words in a child's dictionary might display terms like "soap" for 'S' but neither "sex" nor "syndicate." The O's in words scribbled onto the screen are emphasized through underlining or capitalization, stressing how much they look like zeroes. Even the back-and-forth between the actors played over these photos and illustrations takes on a quality similar to those instructional cassettes used in languages classes for reading comprehension.

So, is Le gai savoir a lecture? Well, yes, but compared to the didacticism of Sympathy for the Devil, Godard returns to his playful self. The mood of the film is, despite the headiness of its objective, appropriately childish. Godard even brings in a kid to play a free association word game as Berto and Léaud lob words from off-screen for the boy to respond to. It's unclear whether the actors are actually speaking to the boy, unlikely, even, considering he somehow knows to say the word "October" in connection with "Revolution" despite being no older than 10 (he also links "Chinese" with "Earth," playing into Godard's Maoist fascination by implying that the nation's people are attuned with the planet). Then the director and actors do the same with an old, half-deaf man, and the nature of the game equalizes the old man's experience with the young boy's innocence by limiting the players to simply saying what first comes to mind.

The dominant force behind the film is, naturally, Godard's gift for montage, here reverted to its foundations in Russian political cinema. I cannot hope to have picked up anything but a fraction of the various juxtapositions of images, sounds and writing, but the overall effect of the constant cutting is a surprising cheekiness that showcases the director's wit in the midst of his polemics. A picture of a nude woman in a magazine pops on the screen, with the word "Freud" written by her head and "Marx" written, well, a little further south, inverting the popular perceptions of the aims of the two thinkers and hilariously positioning Marx as the man of "action," as it were. Lyndon Johnson and Charles De Gaulle are routinely paired with Hitler and Stalin through images and dialogue, making them all into false prophets who abused the public trust, the only difference separating them is that the people can actually rise up against Johnson and De Gaulle where the others brutally crushed dissent. The most brilliant moment involves Berto, clad in a period dress, reading nonsense in front of a backdrop of comic book characters as Léaud, wearing contemporary clothes, reads aloud coherently. Seemingly random, this one scene contains numerous dialectics, between classical and pop art, lingual meaning and gibberish, and the old (the dress) versus the new (Léaud's modern garb).

"Theoretically, these two sounds have nothing to do with one another," Berto says of some noises Godard assembles, and Léaud completes the thought by adding "But they could eventually have a connection." That idea propels Le gai savoir, which uses its minimalistic foundation not to completely destroy the cinema (though it ultimately ends in blackness with only a whispered narration to suggest that the film is still playing) but to stage a film of infinite possibilities. Berto and Léaud are often obscured in shadow because they are merely symbolic, Berto of theory, Léaud of revolutionary action. But the people on the street, the comic books, the war photographs? Those are all crisp and beautiful, even when horrific, and the director's editing of them makes the movie come alive even when you're tearing out your hair to pinpoint it.

"This film is not the film that needs to be made," Godard confides in us in his closing whisper, already chastising himself for his shortcomings in trying to capture the world, his political zeal and a buried optimism in a spare 92 minutes. What he wants of Le gai savoir instead is for the film to show him the path back to the beginning, to the vantage point where he can see all the trails cinema forged for itself. Only then, only by following the paths back and studying them along the way, can he make a new one. There it is in a nutshell: Le gai savoir is a half-meta, half-literal visualization of Jean-Luc Godard as the ultimate cinematic trailblazer.