Struggle in Italy

Godard's case study of an Italian girl's inner struggle to reconcile her revolutionary intent with her ingrained bourgeois tendencies.

Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin (under their 'Dziga Vertov Group' alias) pose the question of what constitutes revolutionary struggle, focusing on the day-to-day life of a woman militant. Paola is an Italian student of bourgeois extraction, but engaged in progressive ideas and action. The film shows, in the form of an essay on dialectical materialism, the struggle between idealism and Marxism in the mind and deeds of Paola.

Financed by Italian television and shot largely in Godard and his wife Anne Wiazemsky's home (as seen in the biopic Redoubtable), Struggle in Italy is believed by many to the most satisfying of Godard's attempts to create a radical, revolutionary cinema distinct from traditional modes of entertainment.