During April 1970, Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, a comrade from the Dziga-Vertov Group, toured major American universities screening See You at Mao in order to raise money to finish a film on the Palestinian Al Fatah movement (a project that was never completed). This penetrating document of that tour reveals the enormous appeal of these French filmmakers to a new generation of politically engaged young Americans.

Jean-Luc Godard’s startling, uncompromising attempt at a revolutionary cinema marked a new stage in the aesthetic evolution of modern cinema’s most radical experimenter. Believing that the narrative film—even when modified as in his own Breathless or Masculine-Feminine—was outdated and bourgeois, Godard loosened a propagandistic audio-visual barrage on the senses that combines Maoism, the Beatles, multiple sound tracks, minimal cinema à la Warhol, nudity (accompanied by a women’s liberation statement), and excerpts from Nixon, Pompidou, and the Communist Manifesto, all ending with a blood-spattered hand painfully reaching for a red flag.