Upon the completion of Weekend in 1967, Jean-Luc Godard shifted gears to embark on engaging more directly with the radical political movements of the era -- and thus creating a new kind of film, or, as he eventually put it: “new ideas distributed in a new way.” This method involved collaborating with the precocious young critic and journalist, Jean-Pierre Gorin. Both as a two-person unit, and as part of the loose collective known as the Groupe Dziga Vertov (named after the early 20th-century Russian filmmaker / theoretician), Godard and Gorin would realize “some political possibilities for the practice of cinema” and craft new frameworks for investigating the relationships between image and sound, spectator and subject, cinema and society. Vladimir and Rosa is a perfect example of this new strategy for filmmaking. At its core the film is about the trial of the Chicago Eight, yet Godard and Gorin play fast and loose with American counterculture making this one of their more entertaining works. (Jean-Luc Godard/Jean-Pierre Gorin, France/West Germany, 1971, 103 min.)