Weekend is the last film of Godard's contemplative phase, a film which prepares the break of 1968. With Deux ou trois choses of the previous year, it is a site on which Godard discovers the economic structures which motivate human behavior….

In Weekend, Godard reveals civil society in its most corrupt form from the viewpoint of an entomologist; in Deux ou trois choses he shows the subjective problems of an individual caught in the economic meshes of this "society of needs." Civil society … is characterized by an unreal split between political and economic society. The civil man (Corinne, Roland, Juliette) finds political matters external to his life….

With Godard's 1968 break, this individual isolation disappears from his films. The personal interests of the disparate radicals in Vladimir and Rosa (1970) become united by the Chicago Trial into a community of emotion and purpose. In speaking of his break, Godard finds the...