JEAN LUC GODARD ON OPINION POLLS

Lately, Mccain has closed his gap with Obama in opinion polls and pundits can't stop ranting about Sarah Palin's poll-based popularity. I never trusted or liked polls, because myself I am never honest when asked these sorts of questions. Here is a little bit of theory from the French New wave director Godard on opinion polls.


FROM MASULIN-FEMININ, CHAPTER 14


Do vacuum cleaners sell? Do you like cheese in tubes? Do you read a lot? What's a cadre? Do you like poetry? Winter sports? Short skirts? How do you react to an accident? If your love left you for a black person? would you mind? Do you know about famine in India? Do you know what a Communist is? Do you use birth control pills? or a thing in your vagina? Where do you live? What's your salary? Why are society women more frigid than factory girls? Did you know there is an Iraq-Kurd war on?

Gradually over these three months, I came to realize that these questions did not reflect but deformed the collective mentality. My lack of objectivity, even when unconscious, tended to provoke a predictable lack of sincerity in those I was polling. Unawares, I was deceiving them and being deceived by them. Why? Probably because polls and surveys quickly veer from their true goal, The observation of behavior, and instead insidiously go for vale judgments. I discovered that the questions I would ask any French person expressed an ideology that reflects not present mores but those of the past.

So I had to be on my guard. I used some random notions as guidelines:

"A philosopher posits his conscience against opinion."

"To have a conscience is to be open to the world." "To be faithful is to act as if time didn't exist."

"Wisdom would be to see life, truly see it. That would be wisdom"