This book offers an examination of the political dimensions of a number of Jean-Luc Godard s films from the 1960s to the present. The author seeks to dispel the myth that Godard s work abandoned political questions after the 1970s and was limited to merely formal ones. The book includes a discussion of militant filmmaking and Godard s little-known films from the Dziga Vertov Group period, which were made in collaboration with Jean-Pierre Gorin. The chapters present a thorough account of Godard s investigations on the issue of aesthetic-political representation, including his controversial juxtaposition of the Shoah and the Nakba. Emmelhainz argues that the French director s oeuvre highlights contradictions between aesthetics and politics in a quest for a dialectical image. By positing all of Godard s work as experiments in dialectical materialist filmmaking, from Le Petit soldat (1963) to Adieu au langage (2014), the author brings attention to Godard s ongoing inquiry on the role filmmakers can have in progressive political engagement.
