While his work still graces repertory houses and college classrooms, it is no longer the predominant oeuvre, the major topic of conversation it once was. The man who, in a typical mixture of ego, self-mockery, and dead accuracy, once signed himself JEAN-LUC CINEMA GODARD has disappeared. (p. 1)

Godard is not a case of a man who, like Hitchcock, was simply a generation ahead of his critics. Godard never imagined our dreams so much as we imagined his. There is a remarkable consistency to the man: He began life as a film critic, and, while at times we imagined him to be simply self-conscious, it is, in the most profound sense, a critic he has remained.

Godard has consistently turned his work against itself. His films examine themselves, thus necessarily shrinking in scope and appeal as every word, every movement is challenged and reconsidered. He has felt compelled to make the camera define things, to limit the scope of view. While he began praising a tradition of filmmaking in which depth of field was everything—in which the more you could see in a single shot, the more happy ambiguities could be found—Godard's radical departure turned out to be the one-shot-for-one-idea cinema. Balance Married Woman (1964) against Comment Ca Va and one notes not a similarity of style but of intent. They are both movies concerned with showing the viewer how society's means of communication influence personal behavior. In a world where there is too much to see, where "information overload" makes definitions seem impossible, Godard makes large pictures of small things.

But, after 1968, two things happened to Godard's work that make a major difference. Like the typewriters and industrial tools that, in Comment Ca Va, are pushed to the foreground to indicate the proletarian presence, the blackboard became the framework of the film. Instead of fragmentary narration, which retained character and, hence, emotion, Godard became obsessed with words themselves….

As America moved right, Godard's continued leftism seemed a social indiscretion. People weren't supposed to be into that anymore; the last thing one wanted was a harangue, even if the harangue were also a means whereby thinking might be changed. European leftism, which stressed theory and perceived Communism as a conservative force, became increasingly foreign to American eyes. And then there was the Palestinian question….

Ici et Ailleurs [the film he shot in a PLO camp] is a curious work, at once a defense of Palestinian terror and a renunciation by Godard of his romantic attachment to it. (Where did emotion go in Godard? Into these loving shots of training soldiers, that's where.) The film as it finally emerged is a realization that the difference between living in France and living in the Middle East makes it impossible for Godard to make an honest film. He wants, he says, to give back his images. But the people to whom those images belong are dead—killed, not by Israelis, but by other Arabs….

Feeling for Palestinians is not limited to Godard. The problem with Ici et Ailleurs is not simply that, no matter what qualifiers are attached to the film, and no matter how incisive the cinematic arguments may be, the movie does contain those heroic images of soldiers, militaristic moments of "moral cretinism" (the term is Godard's, from Les Carabiniers) that cannot be denied. The attitude toward the Palestinians is simply not well thought out. As a cinematic thinker, as a linguistic investigator, Godard is without peer. Politically, he is not nearly as cogent….

Numero Deux (1975) and Comment Ca Va (1976) are not the abandonment of politics and the return to narrative that some of Godard's erstwhile American followers keep praying for. Unlike [Bob] Dylan, Godard did not find God and reconsideration after his near-fatal 1971 traffic accident…. Numero Deux is the annunciation of yet another Godardian period, one in which the individual is once again emerging as an important factor within society's political structure. At the same time, Numero Deux is not the remake of Breathless, as it was originally described….

Whenever these and other video Godard moments are described, the proviso "they are not really films" is almost always attached. Both Numero Deux and Comment Ca Va are "really" films. In fact, Comment Ca Va, which describes itself as a film "between active and passive," is a movie between video and film. Godard essentially uses video for images of analysis. Technically restricted to simpler images than film stock, Godard uses videotape when he wishes to illustrate a point. Film images, even when shot in the simplest manner, continue to contain complexities that reveal an emotional content. Numero Deux and Comment Ca Va represent an attempt to create works of both analysis and emotion….

Neither will make Godard popular again. But then that is not what either movie wishes to do. The disappearing Jean-Luc Godard has managed to create that form of cinema that is neither documentary nor fiction. In the past 10 years, Godard has gone from Dickens to Hegel. On top of CINEMA we must now superimpose DISCOURS. (p. 41)