Joy of Learning

Joy of Learning (1969)

Le Gai Savoir

While alone in an abandoned television studio, two militants, Emile Rousseau and Patricia Lumumba, have a discourse on language. Referring to spoken word as "the enemy"--the weapon used by the establishment to confuse liberation movements--the two deconstruct the meanings of sounds and images in an attempt to "return to zero" and truly experience the joy of learning.

Date of release
1969-07-12
TMDB
6.1 / 10 (28)
Runtime
1h 35m
Genres
Drama
Director
Jean-Luc Godard

Casting

Interesting facts

Joy of Learning is a 1969 experimental film by Jean-Luc Godard. The shooting started before the events of May 68 and was finished shortly afterwards. Coproduced by the O.R.T.F., the film was upon completion rejected by French national television, then released in the cinema where it was subsequently banned by the French government. The film is an adaptation of Emile, or On Education, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's treatise on education, and its title is a reference to Nietzsche's The Gay Science. The film was entered into the 19th Berlin International Film Festival.

Production

The film underwent a lengthy period of shooting and editing throughout 1967/68 and was only released in 1969. Most of the material was probably shot before the events of May 68. Initially, Godard pitched the film to O.R.T.F. as more closely based on Rousseau's text. After completion, the film was rejected by French television and after a lengthy period of disputes over rights completed in West Germany.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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