Here and Elsewhere

An unrealised film about Palestinian fighters is reborn as a comprehensive essay on the potential of political cinema. Special screening as part of the Afterword to the Collective Films Festival.

Ici et Ailleurs
1976, Jean-Luc Godard, Ann-Marie Miéville

France
53 minutes, French with Russian subtitles

Documentary

Here—an ordinary lower-middle-class French family watching TV. There—Palestinian fedayeen in a training camp in the Middle East. The film uses material shot by Godard in the early 1970s, when he travelled to Jordan in order to shoot the film Until Victory, funded by the League of Arab States. That project never happened, and several years later the director, together with Anne-Marie Mieville, used the footage to take a critical look at how he himself had tailored real-life images to fit his own ideas.

Still from Here and Elsewhere, 1976

This film assimilates many of the lessons Godard learned in Dziga Vertov Group without the posturing and masochism that marred much of his earlier work. The results are a rare form of lucidity and purity.

—Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Chicago Reader