Programme

After the May 68 upheaval, Godard abandoned mainstream filmmaking because he believed that the medium was dominated by capitalists who poisoned people’s minds to serve the establ ishment. He rejected the bourgeois representation in cinema and began to employ revolutionary rhetoric to ‘make films politically’. 

Like many of the fashionable French intellectuals of the time, Godard was obsessed with Maoist ideologies in the late 1960s. Thus he tried to work anonymously and formed the ‘Dziga Vertov Group’ (named after the Soviet filmmaker of Man with a Movie Camera (1929), reflecting his belief in the leftist ideologies while championing Marxism as well as Brechtian filmmaking), and founded ‘Sonimage’ company with Anne-Marie Miéville (who would later become his life partner and long-time collaborator) to make independently produced experimental films. Godard also had high hopes for television and documentaries at that time, so he began exploring the formats intensively.

Many of his films from this period were generally considered difficult and disconcerting, yet he made such wonderful films as Tout va bien, which would be the envy of many other directors. It seems to prove Godard’s famous statement: ‘cinema is truth 24 frames a second’.