In 1970,
Godard, along with
Jean-Pierre Gorin and the Dziga Vertov Group, was commissioned by Al
Fatah, the
militant Palestinian group, to shoot a documentary. When the film
was
approximately two-thirds complete, production was halted since many of
the
Palestinians they had been filming had been killed. Years after
the
disintegration of the Dziga Vertov Group, Godard and his new
collaborator
Anne-Marie Mieville, whom he would work with through the 1990s,
re-edited this
footage into a cinematic essay exploring the failure of the original to
address
the reality of the images it presents. Dixon writes “Godard and
Mieville
now manipulate these images to address issues of genocide, social
injustice,
theatrical presentation, and the endless contradictions and internal
complications involved in creating any sound/image construct, fictive
or
documentary. Ici et Ailleurs acknowledges that although
the 1970
footage in the film is “real,” the editorial decisions involved in
constructing
the final film are equally “real,” and they shape, distort,
reconstruct, and
otherwise transform the flickering images of dead Palestinians into a
work
which is a meditation on the creation of history, and the images that
record
(and transmute) that history into the fabric of our lives.” At
this time,
Godard realized that the shortcomings of his more dogmatic Dziga Vertov
period
films were caused because “the sound was too loud”, or rather the truth
of
images they recorded in the Middle East were lost since the soundtrack
“insists
on one voice dominating another.”
In
reshaping the original footage,
Godard and Mieville are able to bring the “here”, in this case a
contemporary
French family unit, together with the “elsewhere”, Palestine, in a
vibrant
discussion of the nature of the image and how they come to define our
reality. Integral to this discussion was the idea that the images
in the
original film, Victory, failed in their political objective
since they
added up to zero. As Godard says, since in a film, images are
projected,
not simultaneously, but one after another, they cannot form a cohesive
whole
because the next image replaces the importance of the first.
In a passage of the film, Mieville narrates:
“All that, we had all
organized like that. All the sounds, all
the images, in that
order. All the sounds, all the images,
in that order saying: here is what was beautiful in the Middle
East. Five images, five sounds
that hadn’t been heard
or seen on Arab earth. The people’s
will, plus the armed struggle equal the people’s war, plus the
political work
equal the people’s education, plus the people’s logic equal the popular
war
extended until victory of the Palestinian people. And
this is what one, what he, what I, what
she, what you had shot elsewhere.”
The
humility in this statement is
even more remarkable when you take into account that Godard is
confessing to
the defects of his previous five years of filmmaking. The “flow
of
images” in the politically militant films of the Dziga Vertov Group are
as
guilty of manipulation as the classical Western style it
condemns. The narration
in Ici et Ailleurs addresses “the emotional, physical, and
historical
distance between the original footage, shot in 1970, and the ways in
which
Godard and Mieville now manipulate these images to address issues of
genocide,
social injustice, theatrical presentation, and the endless
contradictions and
internal complications involved in creating any sound/image construct,
fictive
or documentary.” A heavy emphasis is also put on the word “et” as
a way
of addressing the importance of accounting for the past and present,
the here
and elsewhere, and most importantly, the message and its audience.
Ici et
Ailleurs is important
in Godard’s filmography not only because it marked yet another shift in
his
cinematic form, but also because he became willing to engage in a
no-holds-barred discourse with his audience, rather than focusing his
intensity
on the purely revolutionary content of his message. His inclusion
of the
domestic space (represented by a typical middle class French family) as
the
point where “any politics must start” is evidence that in accounting
for the
“here” he has begun trying to link the political relationships and
philosophical concerns in his films with the plight of the ordinary
citizen. One senses that he is finally achieving what he set out
to do
after Deux ou Trois Choses, to “look around more than ever, the
world,
my kin, my twin.” This marked the end of the cold, calculating
revolutionary phase of Godard’s career and he would, after this, to
create
political films, making sure to include the cinephiles and leftists he
so
fervently speaks to.
Cinematic
Reflections
