Godard's voice carries. He has finished two new films, "See You at Mao" and "Pravda," each about an hour long, in a style going toward the most didactic and thorny destinations, yet he can't for the life of him suppress the force and grace of that singular delivery of his. Even these raw first works of a new stage that is now tough going seem likely in the end to reach the ears of people out of sympathy with his radical politics, not because of the yelling powers of polemics but because of the carrying powers of a poet's voice. Godard can make a silly film or an endearing one, but he can't make an ineloquent one. His path now goes away from narrative completely, and it isn't exactly a paved highway. (pp. 83-4)

The voice of the two films is political and speculative, raised to a pitch of slightly mysterious tension because of Godard's own urgencies. There is a faint trill in the air, the unmistakable upper harmonic of somebody at work on something original and hard to do. Godard is intent now on making "revolutionary films" in which everything will be concrete and nothing suave…. Godard now wants to make films that are as dogmatic as possible. He wants to strip them of the emotionalism that he obviously finds wheedling and mechanical in traditional movies, including his own early ones. He wants to pound people with language. Godard is the most literary of filmmakers, in a sense that is different from the usual one, with his way of plastering words even across images—on posters, in graffiti, on children's blackboards—as well as pouring them into the sound track by the bucketful. In these new movies, it is almost as if he wanted to attack people with so much repetition and so much claptrap that they will be whipped into hauling themselves, bleeding and half-concussed, across some threshold of boredom into another way of seeing things. And yet, in spite of his irate theories and his intentness on creating the texture of a gaudy, comfortless, grainless present where what is to come is somehow more palpable than what is current, he keeps arriving at moments of film that are agelessly composing.

Godard has always been obsessed with the energy that can be released by pitting opposites against each other: kindergarten colors, world-worn reflexes; pious mottoes, godless mishaps; computer voices, real blood; windbag commentaries, suffering people; clever creator, simple-minded creation. This, say his films as they perpetually tug apart in the middle, is what it's like to be living merrily when something is terribly wrong, to be in a jet filled with air-hostess smiles and the sound of the "Wedding March" on the Muzak system when no one in the plane can recover the feeling of what it was ever really like to grin and when no one there believes in marriage. Our jet—capitalism, industrialism, revisionism, the whole shooting match—is going nowhere, say the films, and some expert pilot had better hijack it.

In "Mao" and "Pravda," Godard is pushing documentary to a place it has never been. The sound nearly always plays against the image…. Often the "Pravda" commentary goes into an extended pastiche of a conversation between Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, deliberately unconvincing and batteringly trite: "That's what we've got to do, Rosa," says fake Lenin earnestly. "We've got to organize these causes and sounds along antirevisionist lines." Which practically makes you want to thump the screen with fury that such a bright filmmaker can talk such garbage to contrary-minded purpose—except that he then goes even further and becomes peculiarly soothing with his morganatic marriage of overbred sound and simple image by linking the high-flying talk to an inexplicable and beautiful shot of a red rose lying in a puddle…. The commentary will gabble through theories about production and wealth while there is a Gainsborough shot of people loading hay onto a cart. And always there is this Brechtian dislocation somewhere, reminding us that a movie is not real but only an aping of the real, and that while traditional filmmakers are concerned with the reflection of reality, Godard is concerned with the reality of the reflection. In both these films, it is clear that something slightly cracks Godard's heart—mad stranger though he will be in most people's experience of what is saddening—about the ebbing of a man's vital energy when he sells it to an unknown employer and when his capacity for work is a piece of merchandise up for bidding…. The commentary mutters, barely audible in the din, that what a car-factory worker produces for himself is not the thing he assembles but money. One grows fond of Godard's way of talking to himself about his political worries. It sounds very like him. A cracked whisper, urgent. Sometimes one that can hardly be made out…. "Mao" is quite a picture, tense and shapely, with Cruikshank's or Hogarth's attention to the bony English face, and torn apart aesthetically in order to reflect a struggle that Godard deeply minds about. The fight he sets up between words and images is a metaphor for political struggle and for our own sense of concrete reality, where there is always a disjuncture between what we say or think and what we experience. You are not a unity, say these films. You are trying to be a unity, but the fact is you are not. (pp. 84-7)