Tikkun Magazine, January/February 2007
TELEVISION/FILM
Between Documentary and Agit-Prop
Jean-Luc Godard's Ici et Ailleurs
By Shai Ginsburg
The history behind the making of Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere) is somewhat difficult to trace. In 1970, the Arab League and/or Palestinian Organizations commissioned the French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin, possibly jointly with Jean-Luc Godard and/or Anne-Marie Miéville, to make a documentary entitled Until Victory. It was to be a portrayal of the Palestinian armed struggle against Israel. Initially, the task seemed easy. The film opens with footage filmed in May and June of 1970, and includes scenes of desert refugee camps; Palestinian live-ammunition training (is it just training?); school children drilling gymnastic exercises; a woman, standing in front of the camera as a rifle leans against the wall just behind her, struggling to read a text about the Palestinian revolution; a small boy proclaiming Palestinian slogans; and an older man repeating the same slogans. Against the backdrop of these images a narrator speaks in French. All that seemed to be called for at that stage was to combine all these elements together in order to impart a sense of a Palestinian people, of the Palestinian popular army, and of a war between a nation against its oppressor—a war that would be fought as part of the worldwide revolt against imperial oppression, until victory was won.
After the filmmakers' return to France, however, these film footages looked more complex. By the end of 1970, "Black September"—the clashes between the Jordanian army and Palestinian militias (in which Israeli and Syrian forces were also involved)—left many of the Palestinians who appeared in the film dead, and as Palestinian victory seemed more elusive, the filmmakers became uncertain about the relationship between the footage they shot and the film's intended subject. By then it was also hard to contend with the deceased human subjects. Some critics allege that Godard and Miéville joined Gorin only at this point. Additional fictional scenes depicting a middle-class French family were introduced as a juxtaposition to the original "Palestinian" footage. The filmmakers likewise added collages of still photos, film clips of news items, and commercials, and matched these with a composition of sound bites—of news and sport broadcasts, political speeches, television programs, Nazi and Palestinian marching songs, a memorial service to the dead of the Jewish Holocaust, and more. Finally, the directors composed a voice-over commentary that runs throughout the film, which recounts its production process alongside the moral and theoretical problems the directors had to face. In September 1976, Ici et Ailleurs was finally released.
As the title of the film suggests, Ici et Ailleurs was now perceived as being divided between the here of the French middle class and the elsewhere of "the Palestinian revolution." At the same time, as the filmmakers incessantly repeat, the conjunction et (and)—both as a written word on the screen and in the narrator's commentary—underscores the uncomfortable, even baffling, coexistence of the incommensurable realities of French affluent consumerism and Palestinian disenfranchisement. How, they ask, can the French middle class, preoccupied as it is with its own petty problems of unemployment, political affiliation and marital discordance, comprehend Palestinian misery? After all, Europeans are overwhelmed by television and the consumerism it celebrates. The bombardment of images and sounds that envelope everyday life elides the distinction between the significant and the trivial, obscuring the plight of the Palestinians. How, then, can the very real death of Palestinians—just one sound bite, one image among a throng of others—be salvaged and grasped for what it is?
Ultimately, by its very nature, Ici et Ailleurs misrepresents Palestinian reality. As an art form based on the incessant turnover of images and sounds to create the illusion of movement and life, cinema can only approximate the reality of silence and death. Moving images and sound trap both audiences and filmmakers themselves within the illusion that they are taking part in the fateful reality of their subject matter—in this case, that of the Palestinian people. Yet the violent death of so many of the Palestinians who appeared in Ici et Ailleurs' footage mercilessly exposes the unbridgeable gap between themselves and the filmmakers seeking to document their plight for foreign audiences.
The difficulties involved in capturing the complexities of Palestinian existence invoked by Ici et Ailleurs do not stop there. Godard, Miéville, and Gorin also explore the deception involved in the very making of a documentary film, because as they make clear in their commentary, the film's documentary-style footage is actually staged and manipulated. The Palestinian child, naive as she may be, dramatically reciting the poem "I shall resist" by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, against the backdrop of the ruins of Jordan's Karame refugee camp—the site of an Israeli/Palestinian battle in 1968, in which the PLO inflicted substantial losses on the IDF—is not playing an innocent part in the political drama that Ici et Ailleurs presents to its Western audience. Similarly, an interview with a young and beautiful pregnant Palestinian woman who pronounces her willingness to sacrifice her son for the sake of the Palestinian struggle is less innocent than it appears. As the director's on-film instructions reveal, the scene is again staged. In fact, the woman is not Palestinian or pregnant, but a Lebanese intellectual who was asked to play the role. "From secrets of this type to Fascism," the voiceover notes, "there is only one quick step."
Ici et Ailleurs is often celebrated (and censured) for the way it demonstrates the manipulation involved in the production of all filmic images—its own footage included—and for challenging our tendency to view all photographic imagery as natural and straightforward. At the same time, Ici et Ailleurs is one of the earliest sympathetic representations of the Palestinian struggle against Israel made in Europe, marking the beginning of the European Left's shift in alliance from Israel to the Palestinians.
Indeed, Ici et Ailleurs anticipates contemporary equations of Zionism with Nazism by reversing Israel's historical association with Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and Israel's enemies with the Nazis. True to ideological form, Palestinians and the French Left are depicted as though they are "common people," absent their political leadership, while Israel, on the other hand, is represented exclusively through its figureheads of the time—Moshe Dayan and Golda Meir, whose images are contrasted with those of Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and most notably, Adolf Hitler. This Manichean division of the world is meant to communicate how the Palestinians and the French are united in their opposition to the U.S. and Israel, who, in turned are depicted as though they are the heirs of Hitler's imperialist and racist politics. As the film returns time and again to footage of Nazi concentration camps, it wryly comments that when inmates arrived at the last stages of physical decay, they were called Musselman, that is, Muslim, thus linking European guilt and empathy towards the Jewish victims of the Holocaust to the Palestinians.
In the absence of any reference to Arab states, the PLO's leadership cadre, and the irresponsible role that both these respective parties have played in Palestinian tragedy—most notably the Jordanian civil war in the 1970s, in which tens of thousands are alleged to have been killed—this fascinating film ends up presenting a one-dimensional portrait of the Palestinians caught between the guilty conscience of the European Left and Israeli/American racial imperialism. Given the crucial role of social criticism in the narrative of documentary filmmaking, it's ironic that Ici et Ailleurs could not apply the same spirit of self-criticism to its portrait of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Shai Ginsburg is Tikkun's Television/Film editor. He teaches at Duke University.
Source Citation
Ginsburg, Shai. 2007. Between Documentary and Agit-Prop. Tikkun 22(1): 76.
