ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the relationship between Cahiers du Cinéma in the post-1968 period and the nouvelle vague filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. The links between the two ran deep: Godard had been a critic for the journal in the 1950s, while in the 1960s and 1970s he stood alongside Straub/Huillet as the quintessential representative of political cinema for Cahiers, with the increasingly radical content of his films mirrored by a restless experimentation with film form. Indeed, it was Godard’s initial turn to Maoism in 1969 (and his formation of the “Groupe Dziga Vertov” with Jean-Pierre Gorin) that was a major influence on Cahiers’ own political trajectory, and one of the landmarks of the journal’s long-standing interest in the director was the series of texts on the films of the Groupe Dziga Vertov published in 1972, which are analyzed here.
