On what Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend (1967) is doing that still feels radical more than fifty years later.

Weekend was one of Godard's last films before he abandoned mainstream filmmaking in favor of experimental and political video work. It is, among other things, a road movie, a satire of bourgeois consumption, and a prediction of the chaos of May 1968.

The film opens with a lateral tracking shot that lasts more than seven minutes, following a traffic jam on a rural French highway. The tracking shot is not a technical demonstration. It's a formal argument: the sequence is about the violence and frustration that bourgeois comfort generates when it is interrupted. The cars cannot move. The horns are constant. The camera moves past wreckage and bodies with the same pace it uses to move past ordinary cars.

Goddard's last title card reads: FIN DU CINÉMA. It's an announcement and a complaint: the cinema that was possible is over. What made Weekend radical in 1967 was its formal willingness to follow that complaint to its conclusion — to make a film that was explicitly breaking with the conventions of commercial narrative cinema.

What makes it radical now is that no one has matched the commitment of that break.