share - a phenomenon seldom to be observed in the obscurantism of the usual BFI publications. Around 1967 Godard discovered the work of "someone named Mao who seemed to me to be part of the New Wave"; and from this discovery emerged La Chinoise, his first significant break from his earlier work. In this film two very major points of departure were seen. The first was that the film about a group of young Maoist students forming a collective in a vacant flat was his first expressly political film and the second was the intrusion of tlie camera itself into the frame. Neither was radically new in Godard's work. The Vietnam stylization in La Chinoise is reminiscent of the little play that Ferdinand and Marianne put up for American tourists in Pierrot; and the intervention by thefilm-maker in emphasising the technological divide between him and his audience has been already seen in Bande a part, at the point where he switches off the soundtrack. What was new, and what gave these devices new significance, was that Godard was trying here to extend the definition of his struggle within the consumerist society by aligning it with struggle taking place outside, in the Third World. In doing so, he was trying to emerge from the individualist limitations of his earlier avant-gardism, and yet avoid the alternate, more bourgeois romanticism that alignment with different cultures has always implied in advanced countries. And it was in this sense that his discovery of Mao becomes significant. As MacCabe constantly points out, Godard's later work is not a break with the past, but an extension of the dialectic in the earlier films. In the earlier work, from A bout de souffle to Pierrot, Godard has used conventions from popular art for his signification - Hollywood cinema, advertising (Une Femme Mariee^, the comic strip (Alphaville), the war movie (Les Carabiniers). Apart from using these elements-to contrast with the more highbrow psychologicaF approach, Godard was able through their use, to signify the dual level of all bourgeois communication. The code within such communication of what should surface - day-life, conservatism, legalism, honestly earned money - and what should, as it were, be denied as ocurring -visceral communication in advertising, women as sex-objects - was not only emphasized but its link with the material base established. That is to say, the manner in which representation in advertising or cinema offers liberation to the consumer in its illegality was presented but by subverting the image to its actual function - that of selling a product - be also demonstrated how it results in fact in extending enslavement. 70 January - March 1983