In making Tout Va Bien (1972), Godard and his collaborator Jean-Pierre Gorin took this iconoclasm further. As one might expect from Godard, it's as much a political film as a film about making political films, laying bare not only its formal strategies, but its financial ones also: tracking shots are a question of economics. It opens with a man signing cheques for the film's own production. A pair of narrators explain that "if we hire stars, we'll get money... there'll be him, and there'll be her, and... obstacles between them."

Jane Fonda plays an American journalist in Paris reporting on a union-organised factory stoppage that has turned into a full-on strike and occupation, with the factory's boss taken prisoner. Fonda interviews representatives of all the participants - the unrepentant boss, the outraged union man, the radicals who subverted his plan - decides she can't assimilate the disparate parts into the kind of coherent whole her employers demand, and quits. Her husband, played by Yves Montand, explains to the audience that 'May' made him abandon fiction films for advertising - apparently a more "honest" way to make a living. Truffaut later tagged Godard the "Ursula Andress of militancy" for that kind of nonsense.

The film sides with Fonda; rather than attempting to deliver the kind of report her employers demand, it simply shows us the interview footage uncut. Godard refuses to subordinate the real political problem to an artificial narrative line; the union dispute is not part of someone's character arc: it is an independent event. Instead of following a protagonist, the film attempts to give all of the strike's participants a voice. Conflicting positions are not reconciled but laid bare; we are shown the problem, and it is up to us to find the solution.

Needless to say, this attempt at total coverage hardly comes off. The boss is a buffoon; the radicals look like Che Guevara - this much we might have expected. But it's the tactic of 'giving a voice' that is made dubious. The pro-union workers, who eventually abandon the occupation in disgust, are given a clued-up mouthpiece. He expounds on the effects of the hypermarchés on agribusiness, and on his union's plans to break the monopolies - he is a reformer, not a revolutionary.

All well and good, but after we've seen the radicals get their say, his stance looks rather tame. Their account of the numbing daily grind of factory work - in reality as much a concern of theirs as of the union workers - is always going to engage audience sympathies in a way that statistics cannot. Likewise, in Traffic's similarly multi-perspectival approach, the melodramatic broadside of the nice-girl-turned-crack-whore outguns any more empirical look at the futility of the 'war on drugs'. It's a fix.

Tout Va Bien was conceived as a work of Marxian historical analysis - it isn't about France in 1972; it is France in 1972. Well, so goes the press release. The tools of this analysis were in fact no less dated than the 'bourgeois' ideologies of humanists which Godard had begun to expel from his personal firmament after 1968. Tout Va Bien is a film haunted by the spectre of Marx, and by his rigidly linear conception of history. Marx's history was millennarian: taken in by the idea that the world could change overnight, as he argued it had in 1789 in France, or 1649 in Britain.

Godard hoped that 1968 would come to have the same ring as those epochal dates. This now looks doubtful; but the assumption that four years after an event one can make an historical assessment of it is ludicrous. By definition, the kind of historical perspective assumed by the film's characters is only available to us now.

A journalistic report on the aftershocks of 'May' in 1972, Tout Va Bien in 2001 is a primer in radical chic. Nowadays, 'Hanoi Jane' is remembered not as an outspoken critic of Kissinger, but as a former workout queen. The Red Guard-era Maoism of Godard and Gorin now looks foolish. Moreover, the film's account of 1968 is a little romantic. In Tout Va Bien, the student radicals are still at large and at one with the proletariat. But the class of '68 was something of a minority group in 1972, and I'm not sure that the increasingly violent action of the hard-liners was winning much sympathy on the factory floor.

Most workers had gone in strike in '68 not to overthrow world capitalism, but to win higher wages and better working conditions. Even among the students who kicked off the rebellion in Paris, world revolution was not the primary objective. More pertinent was the disillusionment of those who arrived at the newly centralised universities expecting to live the life of Chabrol's Cousins but finding instead the world of Godard's La Chinoise. But in Tout Va Bien it is only the extremists who are given a voice, and today the film looks like a kind of foundation myth for the soixante-huitards of Godard's dwindling audience.

But for all its contempt for stars and stories, Tout Va Bien was intended as a return to an audience not limited to the combined readerships of Screen and Cahiers du Cinéma. Godard and Gorin's post-'68 'Dziga-Vertov' films had trouble finding distribution. Gorin had been vilified as the Yoko Ono of the new wave. At a time when some of Europe's primo directors - Antonioni, Forman, Polanski - were working with American budgets (and Jack Nicholson), Godard's was increasingly a marginal voice. Godard did not want to slip into obscurity just yet - Tout Va Bien was supposed to bring the concerns of the Dziga-Vertov films into the mainstream.

Writing on the 'Counter-Cinema' in 1972, Peter Wollen contended that the Brechtian "unpleasure" of the Dziga-Vertov effort Vent D'est (1969), made in collaboration with student radical Danny Cohn-Bendit, could "change" audiences. This argument against pleasure, shared by Godard, was Tout Va Bien's fatal flaw. On the whole, the film exhibits a Calvinist preference for the Word over the image. Its 'unpleasure' is manifest. Whether the film might "change" an audience is moot; no-one went to see Tout Va Bien, supporting Lennon's theorem that "If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao / You ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow".

As Tout Va Bien wrapped in Paris, Bernardo Bertolucci began filming Last Tango nearby. Although Godard's influence - generally limited to the jump-cut and the film-buff reference - was everywhere in the mid-1960s, Bertolucci had shown the most promise in his formal radicalism and rampant cinephilia. By the time he came to Tango, Bertolucci had abandoned the more superficial elements of Godard's style, but was engaging with the themes of 'May' to exhilarating effect.

The film Bertolucci made a few years before, The Spider's Stratagem (1970), marked a very sophisticated response to the new Godard. Bertolucci began to look at the act of 'giving a voice' - common to Godard's more sociologically minded films from 2 Ou 3 Choses Que Je Sais D'elle (1966) onwards - more closely. The Spider's Stratagem is an investigation of how myth could graft its way on to history, a critique of films that, like Tout Va Bien, claim objectivity in their depiction of the revolutionary impulse.

The basic plot of the Stratagem is this: Athos Magnani Jr returns home to discover the truth behind his father's death at the hands of the Fascists. Although Magnani père is regarded as an anti-Fascist hero, his son finds that his death was staged by his allies after their discovery of his own treachery, in order to make him a martyr to their cause, rather than a traitor to the town. Despite his discovery, history cannot compete with myth and the father remains a hero to all.

But plot isn't everything. Godard's verbally orientated strategies of 'laying bare the device' look puny next to Bertolucci and ace cinematographer Vittorio Storaro's magnificent and never 'unpleasureable' invention in this film. The Stratagem's incredible visual texture - worthy of its model, Magritte - and Resnaisian editing pattern render past and present, fact and myth, inseparable, and the overall effect is to make any historical judgement look tenuous. If historical events were acted out for our benefit, then what are we to believe? The film is an appropriate commentary on May 1968, that most theatrical of uprisings, the truth behind which is only now becoming apparent.

To watch Tout Va Bien as a child, so to speak, of Naomi Klein and Coca-Cola, one shares Magnani's dilemma. No number of Brechtian effects and (rigged) attempts at even-handedness can distance the viewer from the way in which the film, in Situationist terms, spectacularised the revolution. 'May' remains seductive. Knowing what '68's consequences were - the enclosure of sex'n'drugs'n'rock'n'roll into the corporate estate, say - one has to go beyond the dramatic spectacle in order to reach an understanding of history. The ideologues managed to put their stamp on the epoch, but it was the forces one cannot catch on camera that won the real victory, as we are learning to our cost.

Henry K Miller