I was about ready to yell Hades at the TV in the first several minutes of Here and Elsewhere (or Ici et ailleurs): a pro-Palestine documentary? Take down the Zionists? I had heard before of Godard and his collaborator Anne Marie Mieville being anti-semitic, but this was ridiculous. Really? Calling terrorists 'revolutionaries'? Maybe there is no line to cross and every terrorist is a revolutionary, to a degree or another on their subjectivity. But then an audience member has to bring their own subjectivity, too, and the argument gets struck up and gets heated. While I can despise Godard personally for this and other instances in his career where one saw his distaste towards Jews, it's hard for me to also not acknowledge some level of artistic integrity on his end. Or maybe not. Maybe he is a damn fraud who gets by on counterfeit intellectualism and repetitive editing to swing past his ideas.

But then I do have to give credit where it's due: he did make a documentary hybrid here that is somewhat more lucid than other indecipherable docs of his ilk. Maybe it's because he did try and make in the early 70s a decidedly and truly pro-Palestinian militant documentary- hence the access his cameras got in to ask questions- but after a motorcycle accident and the dissolution of his "filmmaking collective" based on the filmmaker Dziga Vertov, he had to contemplate things. While Here and Elsewhere has the typical Godard flaws of being boredom and complacent with semantic BS (and that calculator, come again?) there is a sense that Godard and Mieville are trying to criticize themselves, and the very nature of the image. There's even a moment when Godard talks about being around a group of "revolutionaries" some months before the Black September attack, and says it was tragic nothing could've been said, to which Mieville rebuts "You, could've said something."

Perhaps, if only for the self-reflexiveness and an attitude that is more towards an analysis of image and response, of contrasting images of Nixon and Hitler and the holocaust and the whole "theater" and "actors" taking part in the games of death, Here and Elsewhere does have a sensibility that is about trying to make a film first, politics second. Not only did I not agree with the politics of the doc, it made me angry, as angry as I've ever been watching a Godard film. This mixed with some stretches of boredom made it far less than what others have praised the film to worth. And yet, at the same time, it is a significant and usually watchable work from a director who is atoning not so much for his beliefs but for not taking into account the memory of image and its cost of relying so heavily on the present-tense. It's an uneasy but satisfying blend of propaganda and self-conscious "cinema" cinema.

The editing is explicit from the start. Images are assembled that have condensed from intense conversations of the time. What images hold powerful meanings? Let's look at them together and think about how to put them together. We have a sense of images taking part in democratic discourse, or perhaps rather that they must. Color fields can fill the screen and are wiped diagonally with the relentless questioning commentary… it has a very pop art sensibility at these times and at others it is angry and agitprop. I like this mixture a lot. The sense of struggle, passion, disappointment, grief even, is all a driving force to the torrent of imagery and words. One scene shows people queuing to present images to a camera.

Structural ideas are given early on: "She! You! He!"; "5 images and 5 sounds"; the place of Palestinian women in the struggle; binaries like normal or mad, dream or reality. Who are the actors? Apparently they were in danger of death in the early shooting, apparently by Gorin, in Palestine.

In the end, although the composition or narrative is loose and flowing, the main idea is to show how everyday life at the center (back home in France) is complicit with struggle, war and death at the 'periphery'. A poster of Guernica hangs above a girl doing her homework. Homework like Le Travail Politique.The ET of the title is made as a 3D model and used as the film's fulcrum of ideas.

Technology and screens of mediation are everywhere. Cameras, projectors and TVs are all part of the imagery. 

Commentary, I hear it is by Mieville, is relentless or rather feverish thinking, questioning, doubt everything. It is a process of passionate reflection on totality counterpointed with the flow of jumpily cut images moving and still. It's more like a music mix behind an obsessive and looping rap. Sometimes scenes are attention grabbing by composition and color, sometimes riveting film shots like the young boy declaiming with great passion, and at some length, amongst ruins of a building… what was he saying? The close-up of a Palestinian woman asked to repeat a long text relating to the struggle and gradually getting uncomfortable and bored being made to do this performance. The filmmakers commentary questions her indoctrination and how the scrutiny of the camera can show it is not effective. Later we see a revolutionary leader speaking to a crowd and the narrator observes that he is 'too far' from the people.

The whole film is an analysis of the tragic failure of revolution in Palestine at that time. The scene with the four or five Palestinian liberation fighters discussing strategy in a field is core as its meaning shifts from heroic to pathos as we learn later they were all killed.

That is why the film that was called 'Victory' in 1970 is by 1974 called 'Ici Et Ailleurs'. Amman September 1970 seems to be when the deadly gory reality of war brushes away the idealism expressed in events earlier in the year? We have to remember this is only two years after Paris 1968. The idealism of western revolutionary rhetoric is brought into conflict with the realities of violent revolution. This requires urgent reflection on everything!

The action repeatedly flips back home to a 'normal' western family watching TV. This banal scene repeats reminding us of our distance to the wars we finance and promote.

Allusions are made to 'The Silence' of the media. I assume this silence to be about anything that threatens the hegemony of the establishment. The Silence that becomes deadly.

Calls for an active discussion of our consumption of images? The later close-up shots of amplitude meters on recording equipment and a long shot of a volume slider control on an amplifier become metaphors as well as making the technology of making transparent.

Questioning the illusion-making of TV and cinema. ( A slightly longer version posted to my Blog)

French director Jean-Luc Godard had declared that his soul was Palestinian. That being the case, it was hardly surprising that, in 1970, the Palestinian nationalist political party, Al Fatah, commissioned Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, and others from the Dziga Vertov cinema set to produce a documentary of Al Fatah's ongoing conflict with the nation of Israel. However, the work could not be realised because a large percentage of the Palestinians utilised in its filming had been killed and it was clear that apart from those slain, there was insufficient subject matter that would be appropriate in order to complete the film. The documentary is woven of fragments taken from the original effort: JUSQU'À LA VICTOIRE (Until Victory),in its alteration becoming a cinematic treatise that explores quite different material: the failure of the initiating footage to credit the reality of its combined images that are than orientated by Godard, Gorin and Anne-Marie Miéville (Godard's third wife) into a political tract that centres upon such themes as genocide and socially acceptable persecution, concluding finally that any sort of staged presentation will be rampant with a medley of contradictions impeding, of necessity, completion of a filmed construct. The "Here" (ICI) of the title signifies a contemporary Parisian family of four, including two children, that is counterpoise for the "Elsewhere" (AILLEURS),referent to Palestine, and becoming a contrast of how each reflects the nature of varying images, and how reality may be determined through these. Godard's disaffection with Dziga Vertov cinema theory is palpable by his shift toward a "softer" use of sound, with less of the type of declamatory that inevitably will propel one voice to a position of dominance over others, regardless of their shared substance. In many instances, this piece will seem to some as having been abstracted from feminist politics that are saturated with impenetrable psychoanalytic dogma, especially whenever male and female voiceovers question the nature of the images that we see, yet we profit by realising that the film provides scaffolding toward the comprehension of the lengthy partnership between Godard and Miéville while offering early footage recording many Palestinians who were slain during the Black September hostilities. Godard states here "The actors in this film were filmed in danger of death". Later, as he tries to efficiently combine multiform imagery in the face of widespread unconcern, he avers that "everywhere things are going badly". A Maoist of long standing at the time of this production, Godard, who considered the Chinese leader as a grand theorist of revolutionary politics, depicts the wife and mother of the mentioned French family group reading the canonical text of Maoists: the Little Red Book. Additionally, he strives, as a moral obligation, to follow his own procedural hypotheses; yet, it is Miéville whose decision to remold the work from its disparate parts that bestows Godard with a fresh perception of death's immediacy. Further, it is Miéville who translates and clarifies for viewers the cadences and symbolic movements of a very young Palestinian girl who, during the film's early minutes, pleads for her fellow rebels to aggressively "reclaim the revolution". Gorin was the primary intellectual force that actuated French-based Maoism, and it was his support of Miéville for her effort to repattern the footage of JUSQU'À LA VICTOIRE that resulted in its modification beneath her hands and those of Godard, the two sharing, by voice-over, visual and audio rumination upon the meaning of history, utilising powerful cinematic imagery that brings established events into the grain of a viewer's consciousness. Ultimately, we must resolve to ascertain the meaning of these without assistance from external direction. The film has not been released in DVD format, but still can be occasionally located as a Facets VHS having good picture and sound quality. The text is in French with excellent English subtitles. This work will be of most value for Godard enthusiasts who will not mind unexplained detail, and for those interested in the aesthetics of deconstructionism, and in particular the critical compositions of Michel Foucault.