The idea of participation is integral to Godard's films: it confronts us on every level. To paraphrase Le Gai Savoir, these are not the films that should be made, but when those films are made they will have to follow some of the lines these films have laid down. The main focus of Godard's energies, ever since he started writing about film in 1952, has been towards an understanding of the phenomenon of film (and by extension other arts)…. (p. 102)

[The phrase "The sign forces us to see an object through its significance"] will be Godard's motto as a filmmaker a decade later: it is typically hermetic, almost mystical; it is as ambiguous as a line of modern poetry, yet it urgently wants to state a basic axiom: that there is no way we can sense the objective world without first understanding how our systems of signs—our languages...