Who Speaks Here? Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Militant Filmmaking’ (1967–74)

The chapter begins with an overdue exploration of Godard’s “militant filmmaking” in the context of intellectual history of May 1968 and the debates around political filmmaking in France. The lens through which I analyze Godard’s films of this period is the crisis of aesthetic and political representation translated into experiments with image and sound juxtapositions, within the frame of the Dziga Vertov Group experimentations with the ideologemes of the Left. I also examine the DVG’s use of Maoist techniques such as the logic of contradiction, self-critique or positing the sound/image struggle as analogous to the class struggle. Two questions that persist in the DVG’s films and that are asked in an array of experimental forms relate first to the representability of the political struggle and indignation, and second, to the authority of the voice of the filmmaker as the harbinger of political change.