Believing that the narrative film—even when modified as in his own Breathless or Masculine Feminine—was outdated and bourgeois, Godard let loose a propagandistic audio-visual barrage on the senses that combines Maoism, the Beatles, multiple sound tracks, minimal cinema à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.

In April 1970, Godard and Gorin 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 and rarely screened document of that tour, made by a talented Harvard student, reveals the enormous appeal of these French filmmakers to a new generation of politically engaged young Americans.