Jean-Luc Godards Political Filmmaking

This book offers an examination of the political dimensions of a number of Jean-Luc Godards films from the 1960s to the present. The author seeks to dispel the myth that Godards work abandoned political questions after the 1970s and was limited to merely formal ones. The book includes a discussion of militant filmmaking and Godards little-known films from the Dziga Vertov Group period, which were made in collaboration with Jean-Pierre Gorin. The chapters present a thorough account of Godards investigations on the issue of aesthetic-political representation, including his controversial juxtaposition of the Shoah and the Nakba. Emmelhainz argues that the French directors oeuvre highlights contradictions between aesthetics and politics in a quest for a dialectical image. By positing all of Godards work as experiments in dialectical materialist filmmaking, from Le Petit soldat (1963) to Adieu au langage (2014), the author brings attention to Godards ongoing inquiry on the role filmmakers can have in progressive political engagement.