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Ici et ailleurs
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Godard has always refused to make documentaries (however much documentary fascinates him). Everything that resembles documentary in his work is, in fact, a cinematic essay. That’s his way of seizing the abstraction of what is at stake.
One of the most immediately striking things about Ici et ailleurs, (2) when viewed in 2023 soon after the catastrophic, tragic outbreak of hostilities between Israel and Palestine, is the evident, sheer awfulness of the prior project that Godard & Miéville depart from: Jusqu’à la victoire or Until Victory. It comprised 16mm material shot during between March and August 1970 (JLG’s longest shoot, generating an enormous amount of material) by Godard, cinematographer Armand Marco and Jean-Pierre Gorin (who later refused a co-director credit on Ici et ailleurs) in the revolutionary training camps of the fedayeen in Jordan, Cisjordan and Lebanon. Filming had been preceded by several preliminary visits in late 1969. (3) From what we see of Jusqu’a la Victoire, it was numbingly bad and simplistic. Godard and Gorin were right to put it aside in ’70 – when, in a cruel irony of history, Israeli retaliation after the Black September incident led to the massacre of virtually everyone seen in the footage. They did, however, make several further attempts, over the subsequent three or four years, at structuring a film from the material they had. Gorin’s description of those efforts clearly prefigures Ici et ailleurs: “There was always the Palestinian film, which changed a lot … We could no longer do a film on Palestine, since the situation there had changed so radically that, now, it could only be a movie on how to film history”. (4) What were those comrade-sponsors – Fatah, formerly the Palestinian National Liberation Movement (a large faction within the Palestine Liberation Organisation or PLO)– expecting from Godard & Gorin? A stylish, stirring tribute in the style of the Godardian Nouvelle Vague ‘60s? (Unlikely.) A Dziga Vertov Group film? (Surely not!) A relatively straight, partisan, propagandistic, political documentary (which is probably the only thing that the footage we glimpse could have resulted in, however stiffly and awkwardly) of the sort that had been circulating since ‘68? DV Group member Jean-Henri Roger (later a director, several times in tandem with Juliet Berto) recalled in 1998: It was never a question of producing or reproducing propaganda images. But when you’re confronted with political organisations, their sole demand is for just that. The PLO wanted Jean-Luc Godard, great and world-famous director, to make a ‘democratic’ film that would tell the world that the Palestinians are unhappy, and that the PLO is right. (5) Harun Farocki: “Perhaps making images in Palestine was so difficult for Godard … because he understood that if the Palestinians were to bring something new to the world, images would not be able to grasp it”. (6) More on that line of thought later. Ici et ailleurs keeps winding back through the basic ‘concept’ for Jusqu’a la victoire: an analytical-historical structure designed to progress from ‘The People’s Will’ and ‘The Armed Struggle’ to ‘Political Work’ (the necessary education of the people!) and ‘The Popular War Extended’ (i.e., all the way ‘to victory’). Even when this gets turned, once back safely in France, into a strange militant-chic parade of slogans before a camera, it is a stunningly simplistic ‘conceptual sequence’ to superimpose on (any) political reality. But there were still worse things envisaged for Jusqu’à la victoire. There is only the faintest trace left in Ici et ailleurs of a rhapsodic political allegory that Godard was keen to work in, and shot the material for: a metaphor of childbirth, comparing what it would mean to bring a revolutionary “Palestinian child” into the world as opposed to a “Zionist child”. Even Dziga Vertov Group expert David Faroult has a hard time trying to justify and excuse JLG’s political naïveté on that point. (7) In the event, the Frenchmen seem as dazed and confused ‘on the ground’ in Palestine as Abbas Kiarostami was in the briefly overrated (but now almost completely forgotten) ABC Africa (2001). That is to say, they are totally out of their depth, 100% ignorant of the language and cultural context surrounding them, led around by the nose by El Fatah leaders (the filmmakers were under heavy protection at all times), constrained by what they were permitted to film … at the same moment that they fooled themselves over the amount of collaboration they thought they were instigating and achieving. On this level, Godard and his comrades are fully deserving of the acidic satire they receive in Christophe Donner’s sprightly 2014 novel Quiconque exerce ce métier stupide mérite tout ce qui lui arrive (“whomever adopts this stupid profession deserves everything that happens to them”), which imagines the disconnect between Godard (given ‘voice’ via quotations from his revolutionary rhetoric of that moment, sourced from Jean-Luc Godard: Documents) and the Palestinian sponsors. (Comments Farocki in 1987: “The 6,000 dollars from the Arab League did not make it easier”.) (8) Another ‘transplant’ from the pro-Palestinian revolutionary cells of Paris, Haifa-born poet and historian Elias Sanbar, was also present as G&G’s translator-assistant. Twenty-one years later, in a remarkable memoir-essay, he gave a withering assessment of the situation of filming Jusqu’à la victoire. Although retaining his admiration for Godard, Sanbar recalls that he realised, even at the time, the problematic extent to which the project had already been ‘scripted’, pre-planned – in all its rhetorical-political detail. The scenes were ‘thought out’ down to the tiniest detail before being filmed. At the outset I had the feeling – since everything had been discussed, systematised, written and broken-down – that the film was a sort of pre-established succession of empty slots that needed to be methodically filled. (9) While Sanbar also acknowledges the team’s capacity for re-thinking, re-filming and refining the material as they went – as well as Godard’s tendency to always ‘destabilise’ what had already been established (“There’s something very playful about working with Godard, but it is mixed with a type of permanent irritation”), (10) he ultimately arrives at a sober judgement: “We were too much prisoners of our schemas and analyses to pay proper attention” to whatever was unfolding right in front of them. (11) At this juncture, it can be objected: isn’t my critique of Ici et ailleurs actually the film’s own, declared starting-point? After all, Michael Witt (in his authoritative Jean-Luc Godard, Cinema Historian) describes it as: … a devastating indictment of the preceding Dziga Vertov group films and of the projection by Western intellectuals of their revolutionary zeal onto distant political struggles at the expense of the reality of their immediate environment and daily lives. (12) Nonetheless, it strikes me today as a film of multiple mystifications: mystification of the conditions of the initial 1970 project; mystification via a pose of self-critique; mystification of what it is that ‘images and sounds’ are able or unable to grasp (Farocki’s word), together or apart. There are felicitous touches throughout – such as the Chris Marker-like counterpoint of chant-like verbal repetitions-with-variations on the soundtrack with a heavily-worked image-flow – but, on the whole, it grates … and not in a good way. Anne-Marie Miéville had replaced Gorin as Godard’s principal collaborator by 1974. By all accounts, that co-authorship was, and would remain on all future projects, total. In the way it is presented via the montage of Ici et ailleurs, however, there’s a trace of too-clean, even smug ‘male feminism’ of a sort that dates back, in JLG’s career, to the Sheila Rowbotham-derived narration in a segment of British Sounds (1969): a woman’s voice-over ‘corrects’ and dialecticises the man’s. This is a paradoxically self-congratulating, ‘born again’ structure that Godard & Miéville would use at least once more in Comment ca va (1976); happily, the gender-dialectic has become rather more fluid by the 1980s, as in the interplay between her Le Livre de Marie and his Je vous salue, Marie (conjoined in 1985), not to mention the quotidian delights of Soft and Hard (1985). (13) The male feminist display is on par, rhetorically, with the principal (and oft celebrated) coup unveiled in Ici et ailleurs: the passage in which Godard & Miéville literally ‘turn up the volume’ on – and finally seek French translation of – what some of the Palestinian solider-subjects in the footage are saying and complaining about, at what can now be construed as a grimly fatal juncture. It’s a case of too little, too late – but the montage-masters manage to congratulate themselves on it, all the same. Ici et ailleurs unquestionably marks an intriguing transition point for Godard. On many levels, it’s part and parcel of that long period of materialist critique from 1968 to the end of the ‘70s, taking in Le gai savoir (1969), the DV Group and the video-driven films and TV series – but definitely terminating in the shift back to ‘personal cinema’ signalled by Sauve qui peut (la vie) in 1980. Farocki refers to it as a “preliminary study” for Numéro deux (1975), and I concur with that retrospective intuition. It's intriguing to observe, for instance, the relatively short-lived flirtation by Godard with performance art manoeuvres, which run from Léaud’s ‘real theatre’ monologue (enacted with a head bandage) in La Chinoise (1967) through to the ‘People’s Will’ parade (mentioned above). Although the same principle of theatre-like défilement is substantially reprised (to better effect) in Grandeur et decadence d’un petit commerce de cinéma (1986), that is already more re-embedded in a fictional-diegetic premise (however thin) than the ring-ins of Ici et ailleurs who, at one moment, are pure ‘presentational’ figures in a tableau and, at other moments, a supposed ‘typical French family’ (consumers all!) parked obediently in front of the transfixing TV box. Numéro deux will invest far more weight into that and similar stagings. The decisive transitional element here is Godard’s use of a certain kind of mental (and cinematic) free association as the springboard for theoretical and analytical speculation on complex social structures. This is a step further than either Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967) or Letter to Jane (1973). It’s a move from essentially code analysis (of semiotic structures and the like) to a different kind of heightened impressionism, based on a more freewheeling and way-out intuition of Baudelairean correspondences. A key example from Ici et ailleurs, as if inspired by the flatly presented image of a modern calculator on a desk (we often see a finger calling up number sequences on it), Godard dives into a reverie not only on money (capitalism), but also the two-facedness of numbers: how a string of zeros indicate to the millionaire his riches, but to most of us say only … that we have zero social status in the complex, overdetermined scheme of things. Like many of the fanciful schemas that JLG was to think, sketch and film over the coming decades – recall the account of the shot/reverse-shot ‘model’ from His Girl Friday (1940) in Notre musique (2004), or his contentious explanation of the Star of David, pen and pad in hand, in JLG/JLG – Self-Portrait in December (1995) – the zero-sum argument appeals less to materialist rationality than to a suggestive montage of affinities … and always in an ever-reformulatable interplay of images, gestures, spoken words, written words, and layers of sound. Sometimes it’s persuasive (as argument, and as cinema), sometimes it ain’t; but it’s the hill on which Godard increasingly staked his art (as well as his intellectual contribution to society, as he saw it – see his relentless pursuit of state ‘honours’ and academic recognition, invariably and inevitably dashed). Godard & Miéville bet their lot on a central idea in Ici et ailleurs: that the elsewhere, back where the footage was once filmed, cannot really be represented in any sense (depicted or spoken for); and that, concomitantly, emphasis must now shift to addressing the here, the place and situation in France where they assemble the work. There’s a poststructural misery, very redolent of its era, inherent here: the real-world referent is gone, vanished, ungraspable; only the communication-circuits of language and media can be reflected, exhibited and subversively addressed. “If the Palestinians were to bring something new to the world, images would not be able to grasp it”. Such a display of agony over what ‘the image’ – as distinct from these specific, paltry images – must inevitably fail to do! There’s no doubt in my mind, however, that the most successful element of the project is its interrogation of television (the ‘here’). More than ever, it became important for them to know from where they were speaking, and for whom. And that focused their attention on media communication – the way time, space and attention are streamlined and deployed. TV form thus beckons as one more microcosm of a ‘society of control’. The Deleuze & Guattari-inspired TV series of the ‘70s made by Godard & Miéville subverted the medium’s formatted parameters as often as, and in every way, possible. By the mid 1970s, Godard & Miéville had particularly become fixed on the notion of formatting. This refers to any form of organising, arranging and ordering elements in a given system. They saw formats as prime diagrams of power and hierarchy. (There is much on this theme in Godard’s 1978 lecture series, Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television.) The idea appealed to Godard’s free-associative mind because it could ‘scientifically’ uncover homologous phenomena: the format of a classroom could be compared to that of a factory, or a film studio … As so often in the 1968-1978 phase, Ici et ailleurs is fixed on image analysis – static images usually, as they appear in photojournalism or advertising. In Sauve qui peut, images (now moving rather than static) are also analysed via slow-motion and stop-frame – but, at the same time, they are also absorbed (even if only nominally) back into the fiction (Nathalie Baye on her bicycle … ). Later, in the more essayistic video or digital pieces (such as Histoire(s) du cinema [1988-1998]), Godard will return to another kind of image analysis, dreamy and poetic, via superimposition, contrast alteration, and other dispositifs. The video medium – and the literal, physical support of the TV monitor – allowed Godard a new attitude and approach to the image (while the fractured work on soundtracks remained much the same as it ever was, and will henceforth be, to the end of the director’s life). Reviewing the Jusqu’à la victoire footage in Ici et ailleurs, he laments the sequentiality and linearity of the typical, montaged image-chain: one at time, the next obliterates the last. Hence no real analysis on and in the screen; no possibility, no future. More overwrought, melodramatic misery inherent to ‘the image’! Or, at least, to a certain regime of the image. Although he had occasionally shuffled one image under or over another back in the ‘60s rostrum camera days, video gave Godard a whole new game to play: one image cuts into or cuts out another; text can be typed and shifted on screen; and TV sets stacked up in various arrangements (as also in Numéro deux), each blaring a different image or loop, preview the multi-screen form that Farocki would later baptize as soft (rather than hard) montage. A sequence 24 minutes into Ici et ailleurs poses “the first question: how is a schedule organised?”. A disturbing montage follows, comparing still images of prisoners in a concentration camp, and severed human heads carried on a stick (presumably in wartime), with a car factory assembly line, a plush hotel chain, an illustration of genetic DNA, an advertising vision of a typical idiot-grin family … and a bank of TV programs playing simultaneously on three sets (one of these sets shows, uncannily, an ad featuring the actor who will perform alongside Godard, over two decades later, in a Miéville film: Aurore Clément). Over each image, Godard’s voice flatly repeats, answering his own question on an otherwise silent soundtrack: “comme ça” (“like that”) – that’s what a schedule is. Here, the configuration of multiple images in diverse montages (soft and hard) does indeed grasp something – and the impact is chilling. MORE Godard: Aria, Contempt, Soigne ta droite, Hélas pour moi, Histoire(s) du cinéma 1A & 1B, For Ever Mozart, Masculin Féminin, Éloge de l'amour, Vivre sa vie, Sauve qui peut (la vie), La Chinoise, Made in USA, Film Socialism, Alphaville, Tout va bien, À bout de souffle 1. Jean-Henri Roger (interviewed by Stéphane Bouquet & Thierry Lounas), “Défense du cinéma”, Cinéma 68 (Cahiers du cinéma hors-série, 1998), p. 39. back 2. The year given for Ici et ailleurs, depending on where you look it up and how ‘release date’ is determined, often plumbs for ’75 or ’76, but it was definitely completed (and presumably shown to select viewers) in ’74. back 3. The principal sources of information on the making of Jusqu’à la victoire that I am drawing on are: Antoine de Baecque, Godard. Biographie (Pluriel, 2010); and Elias Sanbar, “Vingt et un ans après”, Trafic, no. 1 (Winter 1991), pp. 109-119. By contrast, Shaul Setter’s airy, rose-coloured, overly theoretical account of Ici et ailleurs in Collectivity in Struggle: Godard, Genet, and the Palestinian Struggle of the 1970s (Lexington, 2021) is poorly researched; for a book on collectivity, it errs badly in not mentioning Miéville until page 26 – and Gorin until page 56! And Armand Marco or Elias Sanbar, not at all. back 4. Quoted in De Baecque, Godard. Biographie, p. 473. back 5. Roger, “Défense du cinéma”, p. 39. Note that de Baecque mangles this passage when he quotes it, changing ‘democratic’ into ‘progressive and democratic’. back 6. Harun Farocki, “On Ici et ailleurs”, p. 12. This is a 1987 lecture published as a pamphlet by the Harun Farocki Institut in September 2018, numbered HaFI 008. back 7. David Faroult, “Du Vertovisme du Groupe Dziga Vertov. À propos d’un manifeste méconnu et d’un film inachevé (Jusqu’à la victoire)”, in Jean-Luc Godard: Documents (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2006), p. 137. back 8. Farocki, “On Ici et ailleurs”, p. 12. De Baecque documents, in addition, the large financial gift to the project by the famous actor Jacques Perrin. back 9. Sanbar, “Vingt et un ans après”, p. 111. back 10. Ibid., p. 112. back 11. Ibid., p. 115. back 12. Michael Witt, Jean-Luc Godard, Cinema Historian (Indiana University Press, 2013), p. 46. This standard line on Ici et ailleurs has recently been uncritically parroted by Vicky Huang in MUBI Notebook, 7 August 2024. back 13.
Serge Daney already had “Godard’s strange feminism” nailed,
spectacularly well, in his Cahiers
du cinéma January 1976 (no. 262/263) text on ‘Godardian pedagogy’: “It’s
not clear that feminist demands are satisfied … They don’t
necessarily gain by it”. English translation at: https://www.diagonalthoughts.com/?p=1620. back © Adrian Martin October 2022 / October 2023 / April 2024 |
