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Political period (1968–1979)

Godard was known for his "highly political voice", and regularly featured political content in his films. One of his earliest features, Le petit soldat, which dealt with the Algerian War of Independence, was notable for its attempt to present the complexity of the dispute; the film was perceived as equivocating and as drawing a "moral equivalence" between the French forces and the National Liberation Front. Along these lines, Les Carabiniers presents a fictional war that is initially romanticized in the way its characters approach their service, but becomes a stiff anti-war metonym. In addition to the international conflicts to which Godard sought an artistic response, he was also very concerned with the social problems in France. The earliest and best example of this is Karina's potent portrayal of a prostitute in Vivre sa vie. In 1960s Paris, the political milieu was not overwhelmed by one specific movement. There was, however, a distinct post-war climate shaped by various international conflicts such as colonialism in North Africa and Southeast Asia. Godard's Marxist disposition did not become abundantly explicit until La Chinoise and Week End, but is evident in several films—namely Pierrot and Une femme mariée.

Godard was accused by some of harbouring anti-Semitic views: in 2010, in the lead-up to the presentation of Godard's honorary Oscar, a prominent article in The New York Times by Michael Cieply drew attention to the idea, which had been circulating through the press in previous weeks, that Godard might be an anti-Semite, and thus undeserving of the accolade. Cieply makes reference to Richard Brody 's book Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, and alluded to a previous, longer article published by the Jewish Journal as lying near the origin of the debate. The article also draws upon Brody's book, for example in the following quotation, which Godard made on television in 1981: " Moses is my principal enemy...Moses, when he received the commandments, he saw images and translated them. Then he brought the texts, he didn't show what he had seen. That's why the Jewish people are accursed."

Immediately after Cieply's article was published, Brody made a clear point of criticising the "extremely selective and narrow use" of passages in his book, and noted that Godard's work approached the Holocaust with "the greatest moral seriousness". Indeed, his documentaries feature images from the Holocaust in a context suggesting he considers Nazism and the Holocaust as the nadir of human history. Godard's views become more complex regarding the State of Israel. In 1970, Godard travelled to the Middle East to make a pro-Palestinian film he did not complete and whose footage eventually became part of the 1976 film Ici et ailleurs. In this film, Godard seems to view the Palestinians ' cause as one of many worldwide Leftist revolutionary movements. Elsewhere, Godard explicitly identified himself as an anti-Zionist but denied the accusations of anti-Semitism.