Weekend is the last film of Godard's contemplative phase, a film which prepares the break of 1968. With Deux ou trois choses of the previous year, it is a site on which Godard discovers the economic structures which motivate human behavior….

In Weekend, Godard reveals civil society in its most corrupt form from the viewpoint of an entomologist; in Deux ou trois choses he shows the subjective problems of an individual caught in the economic meshes of this "society of needs." Civil society … is characterized by an unreal split between political and economic society. The civil man (Corinne, Roland, Juliette) finds political matters external to his life….

With Godard's 1968 break, this individual isolation disappears from his films. The personal interests of the disparate radicals in Vladimir and Rosa (1970) become united by the Chicago Trial into a community of emotion and purpose. In speaking of his break, Godard finds the same passage from the pursuit of personal needs to the realization that he need not film alone, that his cause is the cause of others, that he can break out of his selfish isolation by a communal act of filming…. (p. 170)

Godard makes the leap to the Marxism which was tempting him, yet outside him. No longer is there the question, "What am I; what am I to do?" for Godard or his characters. He now films the Marxist answer, "I am what we do."…

As Godard matures, his characters lose their individuality. One might say they lose their "character" and become "characteristic" of a group or class. Juliette in Deux ou trois choses is presented as representative of all bourgeois housewives who live in the suburban housing projects just as the apartment buildings shown become representative of all suburban housing developments. The characters who flaunt their individuality in small outrageous acts disappear from the films of Godard….

In Vladimir and Rosa, as in Pravda, Godard plays an abstract character named Vladimir (Lenin) in order to explain Marxist theory and pose the problems of Marxist cinema. He is not playing the individual Lenin in any kind of historical re-creation but rather invoking the idea of Lenin as one who combined theoretical Marxism with revolutionary practice—a Lenin who realized Marxist ideas in physical reality—thus cueing us as to Godard's intention of actualizing Marx on film. (p. 171)

For Marx the class has a character, while the individual has no character independent of class. The individual is prevented from being an individual by the material relations which enslave him and alienate him from himself. His needs of subsistence and the menace of others have fused him to a class which subsumes him under itself and enslaves his mind through class-bound ideological formations. Under capitalism, the individual is "unreal" except as a class being.

So Godard's characters become "typical" representatives of a communal being they share with others. The individual no longer exists as individual beyond the time of La chinoise. There are no longer unique protagonists, no longer any "heroes"; according to "Father" Brecht, it is the masses who make history, not heroes.

It is not only Godard's characters but also the content of his images which lose particularity. The material reality within the frame becomes the most general, everyday reality…. Godard is not speaking of a man but of man, not of a city but city, etc. While [John] Ford loves to dwell on small activities like shaving, walking, eating, etc., he presents them both for their own sake and because they reveal individual character. Whereas Godard is no longer interested in the character of individuals and films the everyday not out of any special love or affection for it but because he speaks of all men who shave, walk, eat, etc., and must invoke the activities and the sites of these activities. (pp. 171-72)

Godard can say that film, as an ideological formation, is "not the reflections of reality, but the reality of the reflection"—a reflection, a re-presentation which appears real to consciousness, but is not reality itself…. For Godard, film is ideology, cannot be anything but ideology. His work in film is an ideological struggle in which he films against the current ideology of the bourgeoisie in order to reveal it as ideology, thus breaking its hold by showing men that their consciousness is a false consciousness. Since film is itself ideology and as such is a bourgeois representation of the world which shows an imaginary world, Godard films against the language of film. His struggle is an ideological one because ideology is the field of his action, i.e., he films against yet within an ideological problematic. (p. 173)

Godard must film within ideology to speak to an audience whose consciousness is ideologically determined. If he did not assume such an ideological base, no bourgeois would understand his speech. Yet the intention is to break the audience out of an ideological conception of life. Godard must film both within their language and against it. How does he achieve this contradictory task?

The film must be designed to break through ideology and produce and develop a new consciousness in the spectator so that he will criticize his ideological notions. In order to induce the spectator to self-criticism, one must make him see himself in the film, but not to the extent of total identification where he is swept along by the film and abandons himself to it. He must maintain a self outside the film to which he can apply the film, seeing its problematic as his problematic. In short, he must be able to think while watching the film, to criticize himself by considering the problem. This means that there must not be such a total emotional empathy with the people in the film that he cannot step outside it.

If the film starts with ideology in order to break out of it into "reality," the film must contradict itself, by the radical discovery of what is other than itself. That is, Godard, like Brecht before him, criticizes or exposes ideological themes through the discovery of non-ideological themes. The film goes outside itself, breaks with its own problematic, with the "givens" of existence in order to show that these familiar realities are unreal. (p. 174)

Godard and Brecht expose the lived, known reality by a shift of gears or rather a shift of viewpoint which distances the spectator from that reality he thinks he knows so well, a reality which he does not know because he is entangled in it, has never examined it from the outside. Godard thus shifts from a consciousness within ideology to the "astronomical" viewpoint of an anthropologist, sociologist, economist…. Unlike the films of Ford and Hawks, Godard's Marxist films reveal character in order to change it by exposing the falsehood of the original consciousness to another. It is the opinion of Marx, Brecht and Godard that a man must move out of the prevailing ideology in order to reach the consciousness that moves him to economic and political action which might change the world. Changing the world first implies a change from a static consciousness to an active one—from a consciousness immersed in the discovery of things as they are (pre-1968 Godard) to a consciousness which sees the world as crying out to be changed.

The bourgeois ideology sees the world as essentially there, static, resistant to change. Godard, in his "bourgeois" phase, demonstrates again and again that the world prevents the completion of meaningful acts, rendering them pathetic or ridiculous (Pierrot)….

But Marxist theory sees reality as process—as dialectic. The world changes through the working out of the contradictions of existence….

The contradictions within the film lead to the spectator being in disharmony with the film, or, to be more specific, the spectator adopts the attitude toward the film that the film has toward itself—if the film is self-critical, the spectator is critical of the actions, words and characters in it….

The dissociations, the contradictions within the film must be pointed out, heightened by the structure of the film itself. In particular, the "joints" must be illuminated in order that the spectator can clearly see the contradictions involved. (p. 175)

For a Marxist, the world is not only contradictory but also discontinuous. Times and spaces do not flow evenly, but develop unevenly. Godard's films have always assumed a special discontinuity. His locations remain unlinked on film; he shows no coherent geography. One could not translate the movements of Michel in A bout de souffle to a map of Paris. Occasionally one could trace a line, but huge gaps would appear in his itinerary. Godard's shots are not at all the consistent exploration of a continuous world outside the camera. One never quite knows where one is in relation to the previous shots. (pp. 176-77)

The Marxist film in the hands of Godard, on the contrary, presents itself as incomplete. Godard hopes to convert the spectator from his traditional role as spectator into an actor who finishes the film after experiencing it. As the ideological "reality" is revealed as ideological by the spectator, he criticizes his ideological world, seeing it as false. But ideally, the change in the spectator's consciousness leads him to act upon the newfound "false" world in which he lives, to transform it into a community. In Vladimir and Rosa Godard not only points out the inhuman social reality which underlies the political (ideological) trial of the Chicago Seven, but combines his analysis with exhortations of the revolutionary action, some of them quite specific actions. The film ends with Juliet Berto looking into the camera at the spectators, crying out that we are all prisoners, that we must seize our freedom. One cannot then say that Vladimir and Rosa ends when the theater lights go on—it is a film conceived and executed as open-ended, an unfinished act to be completed by the spectators become actors outside the theater. Such a film is an endless act. Through this uncompleted cinema, Godard hopes to achieve on film what [Louis] Althusser demands of theater: an art whose object is to destroy the consciousness the spectator brings to the theater, to dissolve his pre-given, static and ideological consciousness of himself and his world….

When Godard speaks [the] last words of the film Deux ou trois choses, he voices the necessity to set aside all previous cinema (including his own), to put all past "knowledge" behind him. To film on a tabula rasa—an empty blackboard where nothing is determined. At zero there are no laws, no previous habits of language. Film is pure possibility, yet to be constituted. The only reality is the knowledge that nothing is (yet) real. (p. 177)

To return to zero is to realize that civilization is only an arrangement of products for sale. That the economics of capitalism is the "real" city. That the buildings are only facades determined by and subordinate to economic relations. That the streets are the means to get from one product to another to another—avenues of purchase. That Hollywood (and the cinema it represents) is only a product among products.

To return to zero is to discover the unreality of all that which Godard has previously filmed. That he was deceived. That all he so rigorously analyzed was only appearance. (pp. 177-78)

To return to zero is for Godard to discover that the "reality" he films is only an ideological construct, that reality is not seen but thought by film, that reality is still to be constituted in the world. To return to zero as filmmaker and thinker is to realize that he, Godard, can only point toward a truth not yet realized, that the function of cinema is to incite men to realize reality by exposing the lie of that which poses as reality. To return to zero is to refute a bourgeois cinema which believed that the appearance was reality, unconscious of the fact that this "reality" was being constructed by the ideological nature of cinema itself. For Godard at zero, the truth of the image is no longer self-evident. In the bourgeois world, nothing is with any certainty. At zero, Godard films in the knowledge that no thing which exists in this unreal world is knowable as such, that apparent being is false, bourgeois, that knowledge is still to be constructed as the world is constructed, that he must build a world he knows to be real in order to guarantee the truth of his thoughts. (p. 178)

Dennis Giles, "Godard and Ideology," in Film Reader (copyright © 1977 The Silver Screen), No. 2, 1977 pp. 169-79.