Toward a Non-Bourgeois Camera Style

Godard has developed a new camera style in his later period. Its prime element is a long, slow tracking shot that moves purely laterally- usually in one direction only (left to right or right to left), sometimes doubling back (left to right then right to left, right to left then left to right)-over a scene that does not itself move, or strictly speaking, that does not move in any relation to the camera's movement. Examples of this shot are the automobile trilogy or triptych: the backed-up highway of cars in "Weekend", the wrecked cars piled up in "One Plus One", and the auto assembly line in "British Sounds"; most of the studio scenes with the Stones in "One Plus One"; several of the guerilla scenes in "Weekend" ("I salute you, old ocean"); and the shot of the University of Nanterre and environs in "La Chinoise". Before we consider this shot as part of a stylistic complex and in the various contexts in which it appears, we must consider the shot in itself-its structure and implications as shot.
(Brian Henderson, Film Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 2., Winter, 1970-1971)