Kaja Silverman is Class of 1940 Professor of Film, Rhetoric and Art History at UC Berkeley, and the author of many books, including Flesh of My Flesh (2009).
Jonathan Haynes is a film scholar at UC Berkeley. His dissertation is called One Parallel Movie: Cinephilia in the MidAtlantic, and has a chapter devoted to Godard's Made in U.S.A.

Opening with a loving dedication to Nicholas Ray and Sam Fuller written in big, bold red, white, and blue-“To Nick and Samuel, who raised me to respect image and sound”-Godard's final collaboration with Anna Karina honors Hollywood heroes while embracing the radical politics that would soon dominate the director's work. Robert Aldrich, Otto Preminger, David Goodis, Marianne Faithfull, and Kenji Mizoguchi all get nods-but so do Richard Nixon, Robert McNamara, and the Moroccan leftist Ben Barka. Karina's character, Paula Nelson, scours an imagined Atlantic City for her missing boyfriend, listening to Marxist manifestos and encountering shady criminals while looking impossibly chic in a series of vibrant dresses and minis. An extremely loose adaptation of the crime novel The Jugger, Made in U.S.A. is a freewheeling, self-referential exploration of Hollywood cinema and simmering sixties politics. Or, as Paula famously puts it: “We were in a political movie, meaning Walt Disney with blood.”