REMBRANDT

Rembrandt van Rijn lived from 1606 to 1669 and was one of the greatest artist of the Dutch Golden Age and one of the most innovative painters in art history. He fused classical iconography with his own experience and used real people as his models for his paintings, drawings, and etchings that were portraits, self-portraits, and depictions of scenes from the bible. Rembrandt seamlessly melded the earthly and spiritual as no other painter in Western art.

The most prominent aspect of his paintings was the light and his use of chiaroscuro, the theatrical employment of light and shadow that came from Caravaggio. There is a loose paint quality to his work, especially in his late paintings where foreground and background elements merge as opposed to being separated and rigidly formal. In his biblical works, such as The Raising of the Cross and The Stoning of Saint Stephen, he often painted himself into the crowd infusing the personal human element into a scene of spirituality. His compositions leave a lot of negative space that adds to the spare emotional beauty of his works. There is a deep compassion for mankind in the faces of his subjects. 

One of his greatest paintings was The Night Watch (1642) which was a massive group portrait, where Rembrandt had to find solutions for narrative and compositional problems. Instead of showing the militia as stately and formal, he created an action scene with the men readying themselves for a mission.

In the 1650s when he was nearly bankrupt, a court ordered the contents of his house in Amsterdam to be inventoried for sale. Among the possessions were three small paintings of Jesus, one listed as "Head of Christ, done from life."  Rembrandt used a young Sephardic Jewish man from his neighborhood as the model of Christ, and again this image fuses the human and the spiritual into a portrait of great beauty.

Rembrandt produced around 40 self-portraits that trace his progression from an uncertain young man, to the successful portrait painter of the 1630s, to the troubled but incredibly powerful portraits of his old age. Late in life, Rembrandt lost his money and had to sell his house and printing press. The late self-portraits are beautifully painted and contain a powerful and tragic quality.

LEONARD COHEN

Leonard Cohen has been making music and songs for over four decades and outside of Bob Dylan is one of the most accomplished and influential singer/songwriters to emerge in the late 20th Century.

Cohen was born and raised in a middle-class Jewish family in Montreal, and published poetry and novels in the early and middle 60s before moving into songwriting and creating music. He achieved high critical acclaim with his novel Beautiful Losers which was published in 1966.

This literary quality transferred into Cohen's songwriting and his first album Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967) was an artfully constructed masterpiece of poetic beauty. The songs depict a world dominated by love and lust, rage and need, and compassion and betrayal. The relationship of men and women are often the framework of Cohen's songs, with love as the catalyst to go deeper into humanity's frequent use of mental and physical abuse, and its occasional use of kindness. Songs of Leonard Cohen creates a stark portrait of men and women trying to come to terms with these relationships. It is mostly acoustic guitar and Cohen's voice, but there are some subtle musical effects that add a touch of polish by producer John Simon. There are many dark, beautiful, and emotionally moving songs on the album including Suzanne, Master Song, The Stranger Song, Sisters of Mercy, and So Long, Marianne. Robert Altman used many of the songs to great effect on the soundtrack of his film McCabe and Mrs. Miller that came out in 1971. Few musicians have ever created a more remarkable or enduring debut.

Cohen's second album Songs From A Room came out in 1969, and is similar in approach but even more simple than the first album. It's a fine album that has many strong and memorable songs, such as Bird On A Wire and You Know Who I Am, but is not quite as consistent as Songs Of Leonard Cohen.

My favorite record by Leonard Cohen is Songs of Love and Hate (1971) which established him as the master of erotic despair. The album is made up of eight emotionally intense songs and encompassed the physical, emotional, and spiritual side of love as expressed in Last Year's man (the physical), Famous Blue Raincoat (the emotional), and Joan of Arc (the spiritual).

The hate, anger, and contempt manifest themselves in Avalanche and Dress Rehearsal Rag where the despair reaches suicidal proportions. The venom that comes out in these songs can only come from someone who once cared deeply.

The production on the album is also different from the first two records in that Cohen's voice is deeper and closer, and the added musical elements of orchestra and a children's choir add an emotionally resonant punctuation to the songs. Still the album's framework allows Cohen's lyrics and voice to be the main focus.

More than anything this album is an emotional powerhouse, one of those records (like Lou Reed's Berlin) that has an effect on me every time I listen to it. Listening to Songs of Love and Hate over and over, saved me, after a the end of a relationship I had many years ago.

New Skin for the Old Ceremony came out in 1974. The songs on this album have a more orchestrated sound using many instruments, but still overall there is a spare effect. One of Cohen's best known and moving songs, Chelsea Hotel #2 is on this record. Cohen lived at the famous New York Hotel when he wasn't in Montreal. It tells the story of meeting a famous singer in an elevator which leads to a sexual encounter described in the song. Other major songs on the record include Is This What You Wanted and Who By Fire. The original cover art had an image from the alchemical text Rosarium philosophorum depicting the sexual embrace of two winged and crowned beings.

Death of a Ladies Man (1977) was a new direction for Cohen as the album was produced by Phil Spector and displayed his famous wall of sound. Some critics liked the record but others felt Cohen was submerged in the mix. It included jazz, rock, and even funk-influenced arrangements and was recorded in LA. Cohen was not happy with the album, but noted that it was the favorite among punksters. 

Recent Songs (1979) was a return to acoustic folk music but still had jazz influences. The album included the Gypsy violin player Raffi Hakopian and the Armenian oud player John Bilezikijian. There was a Mexican Mariachi band on the record and Jennifer Warnes prominently appeared in the vocal tracks. Members of the band Passenger played on four of the songs. They had been introduced to  Cohen by Joni Mitchell. Garth Hudson of The Band also appeared on the album.

Various Positions (1984) turned to a more modern sound including some electronics and also included a major contribution by Jennifer Warnes. It includes the song Hallelujah which is one of Cohen's most beautiful, loved, and covered compositions. Other notable songs on the album include Dance Me to the End of Love and If It Be Your Will.

I'm Your Man came out in 1988, and gained Cohen many new and younger followers. His high baritone voice had now dipped into the lower registers (bass baritone and bass), and the mix included a wide variety of instruments and female backup singers. There are many excellent songs on this record including First We Take Manhattan, Everybody Knows, I'm Your Man, and Tower of Song. Sharon Robinson started writing with Cohen on this record and started a collaboration that would last for many years.

The Future (1992) had a similar sound to I'm Your Man with Cohen's deep voice high in the mix. The music includes gospel-choir choruses (The Future), synthesizer ballads (Waiting for the Miracle), pop country (Closing Time), and staccato-like rhythms (Democracy).

Many of the songs from I'm Your Man and The Future were included in film soundtracks, opening Cohen's music up to a larger audience. Everybody Knows  along with If It Be Your Will were used in the film Pump Up The Volume. Natural Born Killers (1994) used Waiting For A Miracle, Anthem, and The Future to great effect.

In 1994, Cohen retreated the the Mount Baldy Zen Center near LA and embarked on five years of seclusion. He was ordained as a Rinzai Zen Buddhist Monk and took the Dharma name Jikan which means silence.

Leonard Cohen has produced two other studio records in the 21st Century - Ten New Songs (2001), and Dear Heather (2004). Sharon Robinson played a hugh collaborative role on Ten New Songs, and jazz chanteuse Anjani Thomas made a major contribution to Dear Heather.

Over the years, Cohen has produced several live albums. Live Songs came out in 1973 and in recent years Live In London and Songs From The Road were released. Live At The Isle of Wight from1970 also came out recently. All are excellent editions to Cohen's body of work.

Leonard Cohen is a songwriter and vocalist whose literary and poetic work is thought provoking, emotionally moving, and hauntingly beautiful.

THE STRANGER

Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know.

These are the first words of THE STRANGER, the novel by Albert Camus that was published in 1942. The book tells the story of Meursault, a French Algerian who senselessly kills an Arab man and his subsequent arrest and trial for the crime.

THE STRANGER is an example of existentialist literature and exhibited Camus' belief in the absurdity of man's existence.

Part One begins with Meursault being informed of his mother's death and going to her funeral. He doesn't show any of the expected emotions of grief and doesn't express his feelings in the narrative. Meursault is an ordinary, middle-class man. He has a job, a group of friends, and even a girlfriend, but what sets him apart from humanity is his indifference and lack of empathy for just about anything whether it be the abuse of a woman, the abuse of a dog, or even the death of his own mother. In this first section Meursault objectively details his existence and describes the world around him. This includes an affair with Marie, a woman who works with him. He likes her and enjoys being with her, but can't express love for her. He describes the old man and his dog who live near him and who have a love/hate relationship with one another. He helps his friend Raymond take revenge on a girlfriend, yet Meursault seems without passion and judgement. After an encounter with a group of Arab men, one of which is related to the girl that Raymond abuses, Meursault goes back to the beach where he encounters one of them and in the blinding heat, kills him with Raymond's gun. 

In Part Two, Camus describes Meursault's incarceration and trial for the murder, but Meursault expresses neither guilt or regret. As the trial evolves, all of the above details are brought out as evidence for Meursault's guilt. Is he on trial for the murder?...or for his indifference and actions surrounding his mother's death?

Meursault is found guilty and sentenced to death by guillotine. Near the end of the book he meets with the chaplain, but rejects his opportunity to turn to God. The chaplain persists and finally Meursault becomes angry, with a climactic outburst about the meaninglessness of existence and the universe's indifference towards humankind. In the end Meursault accepts his fate and acknowledges his mortality and responsibility for his own actions.

Camus' philosophy of the absurd was set forth in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus which was also published in 1942. He analyzes man's search for meaning, unity, and clarity in the face of a world devoid of God and eternal truths and values. The world is absurd because it is meaningless and indifferent. Camus comes to the conclusion that the best way to deal with this realization of the absurd is not to commit suicide, but to revolt and for one to create their own meaning in life. The essay deals with many issues and analyzes the work of other philosophers such as Heidegger, Jaspers, and  Kierkegaard. Camus also talks about Don Juan and his place in the absurd world, as well as the life of the actor and the conqueror. In Part Three he explores the absurd creator or artist and looks at the work of Dostoyevsky. 

In the final chapter, Camus talks of The Myth of Sisyphus, where for all of eternity Sisyphus is forced by the gods to push a rock up a mountain to the top where it rolls down again and he has to repeat the act over and over. Camus sees Sisyphus as the absurd hero who lives life to the fullest, hates death and is condemned to a meaningless task. Camus presents Sisyphus's endless and pointless toil as a metaphor for modern lives spent working futile jobs in factories and offices. In the end though Sisyphus reaches contentment when he becomes conscious of the absurdity of his situation. In an appendix Camus also examines the work of Franz Kafka and its relation to the absurd.

The Plague (1947) was Camus' second novel and tells the story of medical workers finding solidarity in their work as a plague sweeps through the Algerian city of Oran. The characters ranging from doctors, to vacationers, to fugitives, all exhibit the effect the plague has on the populace, and each deals with it in a different way. The novel has been read as a metaphorical treatment of the French resistance to the Nazi occupation of France.

The book deals with the themes of exile, separation, solidarity, community, resistance, and religion.The Plague emphasizes that ultimately we have no control, life is irrational, and the world and existence are absurd, but still we should not give up, but find meaning in our lives when dealing with events that are out of our hands.

The Rebel (1951) was a book-length essay which covers both the historical and metaphysical development of rebellion and revolution in societies, especially Western Europe. Camus writes about a variety of artists including Epicurus, Marquis de Sade, Hegel, Nietzsche, Breton, and Dostoyevsky and how they all historically portray man in revolt. The book deals with the contradictions of rebellion as those who do rebel often become totalitarian themselves once they take power.

The Fall (1956) was the final novel published in Camus' lifetime and is told as a first-person confession by the character Jean-Baptiste Clamence as he reflects upon his life to a stranger. Once a highly respected lawyer, he details his crisis and ultimate fall from grace. It takes place in Amsterdam often in a bar named Mexico City. There are references to Dante's Inferno, Nazism, and the Ghent Alterpiece by Van Eyck. The Fall explores themes of innocence, imprisonment, and the illusive quality of truth. 

Exile and the Kingdom is a collection of six short stories published in 1957. They were written between 1949 and 1955 and they further explore the themes of Camus' other work. He is concerned with the dilemma of the outsider or stranger, the conflict between solitude and community, exile and belonging, and speech and silence.

These themes were directly linked to Camus' own life as he was French but born and raised in a working class family in Algeria. During WWII, he was one of the leading writers of the French Resistance and editor of the underground newspaper Combat. He also alienated himself from other leftist, including Jean-Paul Sartre, with his criticism of Stalinism. He was distressed by the Algerian War of Independence in the 1950s, and anguished by the terrorism on both sides and eventually chose not to take a stand on the issue. These life experiences directly informed his writings.

Camus also wrote plays, as well as essays and literature. 

Other important writings include Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (1961) which was a collection of essays that did cover conflicts including the Algerian War and included an important essay critical of capital punishment called Reflections on the Guillotine. The Artist and His Time is an essay that concludes that the justification for the artist is to speak up for those who cannot do so for themselves.

A Happy Death (1971) was actually the first novel by Camus and draws on memories of suffering from tuberculosis, working for the maritime commission in Algiers, and his travels in Europe. It is considered a precursor to The Stranger, but Camus decided not to publish it when he wrote it in the late 1930s. It came out after his death.

The First Man was an autobiographical novel Camus was working on at the time he was killed in an automobile wreck in the town of Villeblevin in 1960. It was found in the mud near the accident site and published by his daughter in 1995. In an absurd twist, an unused train ticket was found in his coat pocket. At the last minute, he had decided not to take the train, and instead travelled by car with his publisher and close friend Michel Gallimard who was also killed in the accident.

JEAN-LUC GODARD

Recently, I saw Socialism (Film Socialisme), the latest film by the 80-year old Jean-Luc Godard. Like most of Godard's work, as opposed to telling a linear narrative, the film is a collage of images, sounds, quotations, meditations on history and politics, and references to film history. The film is full of beautiful cinematography and includes digital HD, low tech camera-phone video, shifting seascapes, historic footage, and title cards.

The film is structured as a symphony in three movements. In the opening section a group of characters wander a cruise ship and we catch clipped, cryptic conversations in multiple languages about imperialism and genocide, that are subtitled in fragments. Patti Smith and a man appear and break into song. A French philosopher delivers a lecture on geometry to an empty ballroom, poking fun at cruise-line educational offerings. A teenage girl watches YouTube clips of meowing kitties, which is linked to the ancient status of cats in Egypt, one of the journey's six stops that occur in the third movement. There is a scene in the ship's disco that depicts people swaying to the harsh, jittery, dance music called "glitch." 

The middle section takes place at a French gas station , where politics, TV journalism, and children's skepticism about their parents are investigated. There are elegant compositions and humorous absurdist touches as the family has a pet llama and a donkey on the premises.

The final section is composed of quick-cut, free associating montages that are reminiscent of Godard's video work. He incorporates images from Eisenstein's Potemkin, and reflections on war, imperialism, and liberation as the ship visits six legendary sites: Egypt, Palestine, Odessa, Hellas, Naples, and Barcelona.

The film makes extraordinary use of music and sound. Beethoven, Part, Schnittke, Chet Baker, and silence work with and against the images of glistening watery decks and Rembrandt-lighted interiors. When watching a Godard film you have to discard all accepted expectations of what a film is or should be and give in to the flow of images, sounds, and ideas that will keep you thinking long after you have left the theater.

Godard is French-Swiss and was a film critic with the film magazine Cahiers du Cinema that laid the groundwork for a set of concepts that formed the auteur theory, where the director is seen as the central artist, or author, in the construction of the work, and produces a personal signature from film to film. Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette were all critics at Cahiers, and along with Godard all went on to make films and became known as the French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague). They praised the films of Jean Renoir, Jean Vigo, and Robert Bresson and the Hollywood directors Orson Welles, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawkes, Samuel Fuller, and Nicholas Ray, among others. 

The 400 Blows (1959) by Truffaut, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) by Alain Resnais, and Breathless (1960) by Godard shot the New Wave into international prominence and were unexpected financial and critical successes and allowed the movement to flourish.

Godard is the most extreme and radical of the New Wave filmmakers. His films challenged the conventions of traditional Hollywood cinema as well as traditional French films that were based on literary classics. His films combine political ideologies, knowledge of film history, and existentialist philosophy. 

Godard was also influenced by the German playwright Bertolt Brecht and believed in his theory of alienating or distancing the viewer from the work by using a radical separation of the elements of the medium. Godard wanted his work to deny the viewer a fluid narrative typical of mainstream cinema and force the viewer to take a more critical role and connect the pieces themselves, coming away with more investment in the film's content.

Breathless (A Bout de Souffle) was Godard's first feature length film and starred Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg. Breathless used a bold visual style by mixing longer takes with quick cutting, and used jump cuts that broke the traditional film continuity. Godard wanted the viewer to be aware that they were watching a film, or an artistic constuction, but Breathless along with other of his earlier films still had a loose story structure and provided many pleasurable moments. Even though there is a crime element in it, the film has a light, jazzy quality.

Michel (Belmondo) is a petty criminal who models himself after Humphrey Bogart. He steals a car in Marseille and shoots a policeman who follows him on a country road. He goes to Paris and turns to his American girlfriend Patricia (Seberg), a student and aspiring journalist, who sells the New York Herald Tribune on the streets. She hides him in her apartment while he tries to seduce her, but the police move in, leading to the film's conclusion.

Breathless is one of cinema's major works because it took the language of film and exploded it with a variety of radical new techniques, that included hand-held camera work, off-beat editing, and allusions to popular culture and references to art and film history.

Breathless was the first of several films of international art house works by Godard that brought him acclaim and would continue through 1967. Le Petit Soldat (The Little Soldier) dealt with the Algerian War of Independence and was the first collaboration between Godard and the actress Anna Karina (who he married in 1961 and divorced in 1967). The film was made in 1961, but because of its political nature it was banned by the French government until 1963. A Woman Is A Woman (1961) also starred Karina, this time with Belmondo, and was an homage to the American musical.

Vivre sa Vie (My Life To Live) came out in 1962 and starred Karina as Nana, an errant mother and aspiring actress, who to make ends meet, becomes a prostitute. She is constantly trying to prove she is free even though her life is controlled by a pimp. The film like Breathless used a camera-liberated experimentation that marked the style of the French New Wave.

Les Carabiniers (1963) was about the horror of war and its inherent  injustice and was inspired by the work of Roberto Rossellini.

Le Mepris (Contempt) also came out in 1963 and was Godard's most commercially successful film. It was based on the novel by Alberto Moravia. It starred Brigitte Bardot, along with Michel Piccoli and the American actor Jack Palance. It was a French-Italian co-production and was the pinnacle of cinematic modernism. It is shot in color in wide-screen cinemascope and is full of beautiful compositions. It deals with both the problems of relationships and in the making of films. The film follows Paul (Piccoli), a screenwriter who is hired by the arrogant American producer Prokosch (Palance) to rewrite the script for an adaptation of Homer's Odyssey, which is being directed by the great Austrian-American filmmaker Fritz Lang. Prokosch doesn't understand Lang's high art interpretation and only wants a commercial success. " When I hear the word culture, I get out my checkbook." Palance portrays Prokosch as a shallow bully, almost gangster-like, who is only concerned with the bottom line, and this makes Contempt an indictment of the motion picture hierarchy. Bardot plays Camille, Paul's wife and the film details the disintegration of their marriage because she sees him as weak, compromising, and a sell-out. She loses respect for him and her love is transformed into contempt.

Contempt has several stunning sequences and many radical cinematic techniques. In the opening shot we see the cinematographer Raoul Coutard operating the camera as it tracks from a distance in closer until it points at us, the audience, as the credits are being told through overvoice on the soundtrack. There is a long scene with Bardot in the nude lying in bed with Piccoli. The light changes from red, to naturalistic, to blue with the use of filters. There is an extensive sequence in an apartment where Paul and Camille argue and move around constantly, getting dressed, undressed, sitting on toilets, taking baths, and the door frames and walls are physical barriers between the couple as their relationship falls apart. The film also makes use of flash-memory jump cuts showing the characters at different points within the film. A modern house along the sea on the island of Capri with multiple steps to the rooftop is the setting for the final act as the relationship between Paul and Camille and the making of the film all reach a startling climax. Contempt is a beautiful, thought-provoking film and ends with a shot where the frame is divided into water and sky. At one point in the film Lang remarks, "To live is to suffer."

Band of Outsiders (Band a Part) came out in 1964, and starred Karina. Godard described it as Alice In Wonderland meets Franz Kafka. It follows two young men who both fall in love with Karina as they look to score a heist. There are many references to American gangster films. A Married Woman (Une Femme Mariee) also came out in 1964 and was a slow, deliberate narrative in black and white about a married woman who chooses between her husband and her lover.

In 1965, Godard directed Alphaville, a futuristic blend of science fiction, film noir, and satire. A detective named Lemmy Caution played by Eddie Constantine is sent into a city controlled by a giant computer name Alpha 60, with the intention of overthrowing the dictatorial computer. Even though it is set in a dystopian future, there are no special effects as the city of Paris is filmed as the futuristic city. Alpha 60 outlaws free thought and individualist concepts like love, poetry, and emotion. People who show emotion are considered illogical and are gathered up, interrogated, and executed. Alphaville is an inhuman, alienated society of mindless drones.

Belmondo and Karina starred in Pierrot Le Fou in 1965. The plot is less minimal than earlier Godard films and involves a man who leaves his family and flees with a girlfriend who is being pursued by gangsters. Like many of Godard's films the characters break the fourth wall by looking into the camera. There are a lot of references to the Pop Art movement with the use of bright primary colors and visuals drawn from cartoons. It mixes high and low art and uses the collage-like narrative structure that dissects popular cinematic conventions.

Masculin, Feminin (1966) was a study of contemporary French youth and their involvement in cultural politics. An intertitle refers to them as The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola. The film is based on two Guy de Maupassant stories and stars Jean-Pierre Leaud as Paul, a young romantic writer who chases a budding pop star named Madeleine (Chantal Goya). Despite their different tastes in music and politics they become romantically involved and begin a "menage a quatre" with Madeleine's two roommates. The film depicts a series of verite-style interviews about love, love-making, and politics. There are many references to pop culture icons and political figures of the time including Charles de Gaulle, James Bond, and Bob Dylan.

Made In USA (1966) was inspired by the Howard Hawkes film The Big Sleep and is loosely based on the novel The Jugger by Richard Stark. Because of legal reasons it wasn't seen in the US until 2009. Anna Karina plays a female version of Bogart's hard boiled detective and goes to Atlantic City to meet her lover. When she finds out he is dead, she decides to investigate and has various encounters with gangsters.

Marina Vlady plays a housewife leading a double life as a prostitute in Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967). It is a disturbing character study of married women with children whose husbands agree and/or encourage their wives to sell their bodies to maintain a high standard of living. They live in a modern high rise in box-like, alienating rooms that Godard felt promoted a value system of consumerism.  The film cuts to still shots of brightly colored products and urban construction. Godard does the voice-over as a self-questioning narrator and discusses his fears about the contemporary world and makes reference to the Vietnam War.

Le Chinoise (1967) saw Godard at his most political as he focuses on a group of activist students in contemporary France. It was released just prior to the student rebellions of May 1968. The film is loosely based on Dostoyevsky's novel The Possessed that is about five disaffected citizens who each represent a different ideological persuasion and personality type and conspire to overthrow the Russian imperial regime. Godard's film is set in Paris in a small apartment and dramatizes the interactions of five French students through a series of personal and ideological dialogues who belong to a radical Maoist group.

Weekend (1967) is a black comedy that follows a French couple who both have lovers and are both planning each other's  murder. They set out for the country home of the wife's father to secure their inheritance even if it means killing him. The journey is full of bizarre characters and punctuated by violent car accidents. After their own car is destroyed, they wander through a series of vignettes involving class struggle and figures from literature and history. It creates a beautiful, but also senseless and disturbing world. Intertitles pop up commenting on the narrative. Weekend has a single tracking shot that lasts for over 8 minutes and follows a car moving slowly through a massive traffic jam. The bodies of a family lie across the road in stark contrast to the beeping horns of the frustrated drivers who are trying to pass. The couple arrives at the parents home only to find that the father has died and the mother refuses them a share of the spoils. They kill her and set off on the road again and encounter a group of hippy revolutionaries who support themselves through theft and cannabalism.

Weekend was Godard's 15th feature and marked the end of his first major cinematic period. Politics are never far from the surface of Godard's films, but after Weekend  and the events of May 1968, he made a conscious decision to make films that were even more radical and political, both in content and form. France was now seen by the left as an authoritarian de Gaulle republic, and Godard decided to work with like-minded individuals on his films. The most notable was Jean-Pierre Gorin who was a young Maoist student and they formed a film collective under the name The Dziga Vertov Group. Vertov's name is derived from the verb to spin or rotate and worked at the same time as the Soviet montage theorist Eisenstein and constructivist and avant-garde artists such as Rodchenko and Tatlin. Godard was now making a political shift towards a proactive participation in the class struggle.

The group made several films between 1968 and 1972 including One Plus One, British Sounds, and Wind From The East. The films are hard to see because they were so radical. They were collages of document and staged scenes and had limited theatrical releases. One Plus One was later released as Sympathy For The Devil and includes several long takes of the Rolling Stones in a sound studio recording their famous song. The recording sessions are intercut with staged footage of Black activists reading revolutionary texts and dispensing weapons at a waterfront auto junkyard, as well as voice-over of a man reading a porno novel, other scenes of a young woman writing graffiti with word play, and still other scenes dealing with Marxism and the need for revolution.

Also made at this time was Le Gai Savoir (1969) which is set on a darkened soundstage as two actors Jean-Pierre Leaud and Juliet Berto discuss the philosophy of making films and play word-association games. There are scenes of the Paris student revolt, the Vietnam War, along with posters, photos, and cartoons in the background. The soundtrack includes narration, music, news clips, and noise resulting in a montage and meditation on how word and images mix and questions the filmmaking process.

In their final works the Dziga Vertov Group went back to using well-known actors and produced the film Tout Va Bien (Everything's Fine) starring Jane Fonda and Yves Montand. The film centers on a strike at a sausage factory witnessed by an American reporter and her French husband who is a film director. It presents a Marxist political message explaining the logic of class struggle. At the same time they made Letter To Jane, an essay film which deconstructs a photograph of Fonda visiting Hanoi during the Vietnam War. It questions what is the role of a celebrity and intellectual when getting involved in the class struggle. 

At this point Godard started to experiment with video and created several works, most notably the film Numero Deux which came out in 1975. It was a collaboration with the Swiss filmmaker Anne-Marie Mieville who Godard would work with on many projects in this period. The film is about a young family in social housing complex in France. The film uses a distinct style, presenting two images on screen simultaneously, leading to multiple interpretations of the story and comments on the filmmaking process.

In 1980, Godard returned to more traditional filmmaking by releasing Sauve qui peut (la vie), also released in English as Slow Motion and Every Man For Himself. It starred Isabelle Huppert, Nathalie Baye, and Jacques Dutronc and continues many of the themes dominant in Godard's work including prostitution and the director's constant self-questioning. Dutronc plays a burned-out video filmmaker named "Godard."

Other films from this period included Passion (1982), Phenom Carmen (1984), Detective (1985), and King Lear (1987).

The most controversial film to come out of this period was Hail Mary (1985), which is a modern retelling of the story of a virgin birth. Marie, a student works at her father's Swiss gas station and plays basketball, and maintains a chaste relationship with Joseph her taxi driver boyfriend. A passing stranger arrives by jet plane and informs her she will become pregnant and give birth to the son of God. At first she is shocked and confused, but eventually comes to terms with God's plan through meditations that are interwoven with images of the sun, the moon, clouds, flowers, and water. The use of full frontal nudity and the religious themes upset many Christians and sparked some protests at screenings.

After this Godard continued to work in both video and film and produced work for French television. In the 90s he produced several works including Nouvelle Vague (1990), the autobiographical JLG/JLG (1995), Forever Mozart (1996), and his massive work Histoire(s) du cinema, which combined all of the innovations of his video work with a passionate engagement with the issues of 20th century history and the history of film itself. It was started in the late 1980s and the final part completed in 1998.

Since the turn of the century, Godard has continued to make films including Eloge de l'Amour (In Praise of Love) in 2001, and combines both film and video. In Praise of Love deals with the themes of aging, love, separation, and rediscovery as we follow a young artist contemplating a new work on the four stages of love.

Notre Musique (2004) is about war, specifically the war in Sarajevo, but with attention to all wars, including the American Civil War, the war between the US and Native Americans, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The film is structured into three kingdoms: Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. The film opens with a long montage of war images set to the music of Kurtag. Paradise is shown as a lush wooded beach patrolled by US Marines.

Is Film Socialisme Godard's final film? His influence is vast and can be seen in the works of Tarantino, Scorsese, Bertolucci, Penn, Linklatter, Altman, Jarmusch, Fassbinder, and Wenders. He has made an amazing body of work and created a legacy of radical experimentation. He has investigated the process of filmmaking more than any other director, while making statements about the history and culture of our society.