‘Mention Godard first’. This is how the philosopher Alain Badiou opened his 1983 article ‘Reference Points for Cinema’s Second Modernity’. For sixty years Godard’s work has been emblematic of radical chic—beautiful twentysomething Parisians in turtlenecks reciting slogans to each other, and all the rest. More often passed over—because many would like to forget it—is Godard’s most overtly radical period, when he removed his name from his work and committed himself to developing a cinema equal to the tasks of dialectical materialism: film, as he put it, that would be ‘theory and praxis at the same time’.

Changed by the events of May 68, Godard found himself at an impasse. ‘We cannot speak of being an artist or making a piece of art,’ he announced that August: ‘This has to be completely destroyed’. He began associating with young radicals, including Jean-Henri Roger, a twenty-year-old on the staff of the militant newspaper Action. In early 1969, the British production company Kestrel Films commissioned Godard to make a film for London Weekend Television (the ITV franchise holder). Taking Roger across the Channel with him, he took the opportunity to attempt a new kind of film.

British Sounds is a melange of long shots, montage, intertitles and multiple channels of overlapping audio. It spans industrial production, worker discussions, student occupations, fake news broadcasts and feminist analysis, and is better watched than described (it’s available online). Here I’ll only single out the film’s opening sequence, a ten-minute pan across the MG factory in Abingdon, accompanied by diegetic sound, artificially augmented industrial racket, and a voiceover shared between stridently intoned Marxist theory and a child dutifully repeating facts from the history of class struggle in Britain.

Richard Brody, author of the best biography of Godard, typifies Anglophone reception of Godard’s work of this period when he refers to apparently ‘unbearable’ and ‘hectoring pronouncements’ in this segment of British Sounds. For him, the whole film is merely ‘doctrinal badgering’, ‘stiff and self-punishing’. But distaste for explicit Marxist agitprop has distracted liberal film criticism from what is most interesting in this work.

For a start, the long, slow pan across the factory is mesmerizing. The MG convertibles in assembly obscurely recall the cars in Breathless and Le Mépris, and still carry something of their allure, even as they are returned to the cold context of commodity production. Along with their labour, we see the grins and glints in the eyes of the workmen and hear their cheers and chatter, all the while being informed of their reduction to ‘slaves of the bourgeois class’. Godard has left in the points at which his narrator stumbles over his words and has to start sentences over—moments of individual fallibility amid the apodictic steeliness of the text.

Let’s be clear: these are not, as liberal criticism might have it, fragments of a sentimental humanity that pierce the dour onslaught of class analysis. Rather, these moments contribute to Godard’s nascent experiment in cinematic dialectical materialism. On one level, the truth the voiceover narrates—of the impersonal domination of capital over human life—cannot be represented by images and voices in which we are bound to register a humanity that hardly squares with such dire macro-analysis. On another level, this is the point: the sequence begins to indicate the excess of the particular qualities of labour, people and objects over the abstraction and equivalences to which they are reduced by capitalism. If film fails to represent relations of production, this is because relations of production have no place for what film shows us, for what we learn from going to the movies.

British Sounds was, predictably, rejected by London Weekend Television. Godard instead showed it on American campuses, under the title See You at Mao. He later claimed it for the Groupe Dziga Vertov, the Maoist production unit that would make a further four films outside the mainstream industry. The nature of this experiment perhaps necessarily limited it to France’s ‘Red Years’. But, contrary to the received narrative of Godard’s career, this period was not an embarrassing blip, a bout of artistically-compromised gauchiste excess, but the harbinger of the rest of Godard’s career.

Godard was trying to examine fundamental contradictions and ambiguities about representation: images and sounds never communicate meaning univocally; a film never simply presents action or narrative. But who could have prepared for this exploration better than the man behind Pierrot le fou and Week-end? In the later work of the Groupe Dziga Vertov and in the remarkable films he went on to make with Anne-Marie Miéville, Godard and his collaborators progressively reintegrated and extended the intuitions of Godard’s wildly ludic ’60s output as a means of critiquing the ideological manoeuvres subtending all filmic representation, from which their own work could not be exempted. Not only the types of people and actions shown in films, but its most basic apparatuses, had to be reconsidered from ground up, ruthlessly, and politically.

Godard had to pass through a phase of intense and strenuous politicisation in order to appreciate the power of the project he had started unfolding as a young haute-bourgeois obsessed with movies to the point of turning them inside out. When he and Truffaut shut down the Cannes Film Festival in the middle of May 68, Godard announced: ‘There isn’t one film showing today that represents the problems going on today among workers and students, not one, whether by Milos, me, Polanski or François. There are none. We’re behind the times.’ The value of Godard’s life’s work lies in his refusal to take for granted his own grasp of the age, the seizure of zeitgeist so readily attached to his name. His filmography, from 1968 on, bears witness to a constantly renewed interrogation of the relationship of the medium he loved to a world that could not be loved. At a time when dejection threatens to turn us towards national nihilism, it’s worth revisiting the chapter of this story that began in the Britain of what the film describes as ‘the traitor Wilson and the dunce Elizabeth’.