Godard's work was becoming ever more intellectual at a time when French society, high and low, was increasingly turning toward a quasi-American vernacular mass culture[….] As a living symbol of France's highest tradition, Godard was invulnerable, as a player in the industry, his place was shakier than ever.

Godard's response to the changing trends was to express his displeasure with them in diatribes that grew increasingly heated; he also became openly, publically nostalgic for the era before television, before mass media – 'It's true that, today, I can't find information, my information, in the newspapers' – and cited this failure as the resason for his switch to classical subject matters.

'That is to say, one can't find material [for a film] in the local news. So one has to copy, and since one has to copy, I prefer to copy Antigone than the life of Raymond Barre', a French politician. Contemporary life, Godard suggested, had become so impoverished that it no longer inspired his films; belonging to the age of living myths, he needed to resuscitate the great artistic legends as a way of telling his own story.

Brody, who is particularly good on Godard's 'classical' turn in the early 1980s.