The Impossible Temporality of Revolution and Cinema in Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville’s Ici et Ailleurs

Introduction

Jean-Luc Godard once famously declared that his “soul (was) Palestinian.”¹ This affinity was not the result of some misplaced kinship but the outcome of a deeper political commitment; an understanding that the Palestinian struggle for freedom and sovereignty was fundamentally part of the global, and much larger, struggle against imperialism, “like Vietnam or Cuba.”² At various points in his career, Godard also declared that “Cinema is Dead.” Cinema first died through sonic output: “with the suppression of silent cinema by the talkie.”³ The second death was when cinema failed to document the atrocities of the Holocaust, when “6 million people were killed or gassed, principally Jews, and the cinema was not there.”⁴ The third death was when Godard and his contemporaries called for the death of bourgeois cinema, in the wake of May ’68, and the rise of a radical one.⁵ And then, cinema’s final death was the result of its relegation as an artform and the concurrent rise of a different, more degenerate, one: television.⁶

 It is perhaps through a need to resuscitate and redeem cinema, to save it from its own short-comings, that Godard approached the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO)’s office in Paris to make his interest in documenting the efforts of Palestinian revolutionary groups in Jordan known.⁷ The PLO not only agreed to grant Godard an invitation to witness the revolution and its principal actors, the fedayeen, but they also helped support the production of the project with 6,000 dollars of Arab League funding.⁸ Such efforts at the time were not uncommon. By the time that Godard and his Dziga Vertov Group collaborator Jean-Pierre Gorin arrived in Jordan in 1970, the Palestine Film Unit, which emerged in the wake of the Six-Day War of 1967, had already been established and engaged in its own filmmaking. One of its principal founders, Palestinian director Mustafa Abu Ali, assisted Godard and Gorin while they were in Jordan shooting the first iteration of their film, then known as Jusqu’à la Victore (Till Victory).⁹ A year later in 1971,  Japanese filmmakers Masao Adachi and Koji Wakamatsu also arrived in Amman to shoot their film, Red Army/PFLP, which like Godard and Gorin, centred the Palestinian fedayeen and was above all “an experiment with militant cinema in the context of the struggle for the liberation of Palestine.”¹⁰ But these experiments in militant cinema would soon be challenged when the subjects of their representation were killed, prompting another death of cinema, specifically the death of Godard and Gorin’s film Jusqu’à la Victoire, which, after the death of the fedayeen, could no longer resume production. The project was subsequently abandoned, and a new one emerged; Ici et Ailleurs, rehabilitated to some degree with another of Godard’s collaborators, Anne-Marie Miéville.

The primary subject of Ici et Ailleurs is, famously, the making of Ici et Ailleurs. In a 1972 article for Film Quarterly, James Roy MacBean described the delays that had befallen the film from which Ici et Ailleurs would later emerge: Jusqu’à la Victoire, which was originally envisioned as an on-the-ground chronicle of the Yasser Arafat-led Al Fatah group’s rise to Palestinian leadership upon the impending collapse of King Hussein’s reign in Jordan. Shooting came to a pause after two years (1970-71), during which time the fedayeen in Jordan suffered major losses at the hands of King Hussein’s troops, especially during the massacre in Amman known as Black September. MacBean wrote: “when I spoke with Gorin about Till Victory in Paris last summer he acknowledged that this setback at the practical level of revolutionary struggle was forcing him and Godard to take a long self-critical look at the theoretical analysis which led them to ally themselves with the Al Fatah position…their present plan is to transform the Palestinian film into a critical and self-critical analysis of how (and how not) to film history in the making.”¹¹ This is, of course, what would go on to happen; Ici et Ailleurs is a film that engages explicitly with its own process and its own failures. It is an attempt to locate the precise point of contact between a documentary film and the events of history: the events that give rise to the film, the events that the film itself produces, and—most importantly—those events which the documentary film fundamentally cannot grasp. Perhaps its most poignant political contribution is this engagement with the ungraspable and the impossible, represented most perfectly here through the vehicle of the et (the “and”): the point of connection that brings things together but nevertheless, paradoxically, sustains, and even affirms, difference. Ici et Ailleurs is film and video; it is Ici et Ailleurs and Jusqu’à la Victoire; it is Godard and Gorin and Godard and Miéville; it is documentary and fiction; it is about the fedayeen and it is about bourgeois French society; all of these all at once.

The objective of this article is to revisit this seminal film at a time when competing notions of representing Palestine and Palestinians are being challenged and reconfigured, particularly as genocide and atrocity loom large over the Occupied Territories, and as the war over narrative simultaneously rages on across multiple media fronts. A retrospective look at Ici et Ailleurs in the present moment illuminates the challenges that often befall films of this nature; films created by non-Palestinians who aim to mediate the Palestinian struggle and Palestinian death to the outside world. The intention of such endeavours is, of course, solidarity, but it is also an exercise in education and a call to mobilisation of some kind. Our ultimate focus on Godard in this sense is a deliberate choice; returning to the French as the originators and gatekeepers of cinema. Godard, in particular, was indisputably one of the establishment’s icons and paradoxically one of its biggest challengers. Yet, despite his artistic genius, even Godard was unable to overcome the challenges of documenting the Palestinian revolution in the face of a Zionist aggression that relapses and seemingly remits. In this, Godard faced comparable, if not the same, challenges as Palestinian filmmakers, writers, and narrators; when faced with calamity, they are interrupted and forced to begin anew. Although much has changed by way of the media landscape in the decades following the release of Ici et Ailleurs, that is, that Palestinians are now able to use the advent of new media to document themselves much more extensively, in life and in death, this film remains a signpost for militant cinema. It is a powerful model of solidarity, one that does not repress its inherent paradoxes or deny its own deficiencies. By refusing to collapse here with elsewhere, Godard lingers instead on the unbridgeable gap between places, languages, peoples, epochs; he asks us to look at and across that gap.

Along this vein, we liken the film’s interruptions and its fragmentation to the impossible (i.e intangible) and temporal qualities of the Palestinian revolution itself by examining the film’s reflexive critique of what it is and is not; what it has at once managed and failed to do in its process of documenting armed struggle. In addition, we borrow Mahmoud Darwish’s temporal marker of “present-absence” to demonstrate how Ici et Ailleurs at once comments on and emulates French cinema and television as well as French and Palestinian literary texts that represent Palestine and the material and existential conditions of its people. In so doing, we place Godard’s hyperfixation on the death of (and in) cinema in juxtaposition with its birth. Ultimately, it is outside the film—in its literary entanglement with Darwish and Jean Genet in particular—that we find the fullest extensions of its themes. This is Ici et Ailleurs’ ultimate gesture of solidarity: it reaches, perpetually and necessarily, beyond itself. 

The Birth of Cinema: Early Cinematic Representations of Palestine (as Here and Elsewhere)

To begin, the power of Godard’s filmmaking and, in turn, his solidarity—what they are and are not—must be understood against the greater backdrop of what cinema has historically meant both in Palestine and for Palestine. Godard’s impetus for capturing Palestinians in pursuit of liberation emerged from the “death of cinema,” but his predecessors made their way to Palestine after its birth. This holds especially true when considering how non-Palestinians have represented Palestine on film, dating back to the inventors of the motion picture itself: the Lumière brothers. Following on the heels of their invention of the cinématographe in 1895 and their subsequent release of the first motion picture, La Sortie des ouvriers de l’usine Lumière (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory), what was perhaps inconceivable to their first spectators at the time is that this technology, which documented the mundane comings and goings of workers in Lyon over 46 seconds, would immediately make its way to the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean. Indeed, in 1896, the Lumière brothers sent their representative, Alexandre Promio, on a tour of the Middle East and North Africa. Promio’s trip was far-reaching and reminiscent of the Grand Tour, spanning Algeria, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Turkey.¹²  Promio, a trusted employee of the Société Lumière, had been the organisation’s interlocutor on many voyages, of which Palestine was just one stop. As a photographer and engineer, he was tasked with marketing the cinématographe throughout Europe, educating operators on how to use the machine, and, of course, shooting motion pictures himself on location outside of France, at the behest of his employers.

In the spring of 1896, Promio arrived in Jaffa and made his way to Jerusalem where he shot the first recorded motion picture of Palestine. Comparable to their film of workers in Lyon, Promio—and by extension The Lumière brothers’—documentation of Palestine, titled Départ de Jérusalem en chemin de fer (Leaving the Jerusalem Railway), likewise shows images of Palestinians going about their mundane lives, embarking and descending off of a train. The cinématographe was installed on the back of the train as it left the station. It captured images of Palestinians dressed in three-piece suits, the tarbush on their heads, as they walked along the platform’s edge. These subjects exhibited a playful energy, looking at Promio’s cinématographe first with surprise and then with joy as they took off their headwear in acknowledgement, smiling and waving as it passed them by. In addition to this early footage, Promio also captured remarkable imagery of Jerusalem as worshippers of all faiths gathered in the Al-Aqsa compound to pray, artisans went about their business outside the Damascus Gate, and men and women passed by, some on foot, others on horseback.

Yet, neither the marvel of the motion picture nor the natural human instinct to smile at the camera can obscure the dark reality of how cinema, like other artistic mediums, was soon used to capture what Michael Allan has called “majestic monuments (that) had long been the subject(s) of representation” into a “vivid animated duration” beyond the static imagery of painting or the prosaic descriptions of such monuments and locales in both narrative and religious scripture.¹³ The cultural significance of Promio’s 43-second video of the Jerusalem railway, like its counterpart shot in Egypt titled Les Pyramides (vue générale), go beyond a documentation rooted in curiosity or artistic merit and into the realm of technological conquest. In fact, shortly after the screening of Départ de Jérusalem en chemin de fer and Les Pyramides (vue générale) to audiences in Lyon in 1897, the city’s local newspapers covered “Promio’s travels as an imperial conquest and marveled at how ‘the entire world’ (‘le monde entier’) might soon be ‘the conquest of the Cinématographe Lumière’ (‘la conquête du Cinématographe Lumière’).”¹⁴ Eventually, Société Lumière’s main competitors sent their engineers to the so-called Orient to emulate Promio’s tour. Among them was the Paris-based Pathé, whose UK subsidiary British Pathé was the leading media institution of the British Empire, responsible for, as Shahd Abusalama notes, representations of Palestine without Palestinians.¹⁵ Specifically, it was British Pathé’s continuous production and output of newsreels—from the invention of the medium in 1910 by Charles Pathé until the core years of the Nakba between 1947 and 1949—that allowed the British Empire to foreground and promote the Zionist agenda of Jewish settlement in Mandate Palestine.¹⁶ In so doing, the British Empire was at once successful in using the mediums of cinema and documentary to paint Palestine and Palestinian revolt as helplessly prone to violence, while simultaneously depicting the land in fantastical and Zionist terms as “without a people for a people of no land”; paving the way for the establishment of Israel in May of 1948. Departing from Promio’s first motion pictures of Palestine in its organic state, as a very clearly inhabited land, imperial representations of Palestine position it as an elsewhere onto which visitors, spectators, occupiers, and settlers can project their most ardent fantasies as well as their foremost colonial ambitions. The technological innovation of the cinématographe, the medium of the motion picture, and the establishment of the cinémathèque were, in the case of Palestine, a trifecta that facilitated the mass dissemination of propaganda and misinformation regarding the cause and quest for Palestinian liberation; aiding, abetting, and actualising the Zionist project in the process.

The reality of colonialist ambitions in Palestine unfortunately means that the establishment of a native, homegrown, and centralised national cinema industry remains incomplete, leaving directors to grapple with the moral conundrum of what the dimensions of ethical and veritable representations of Palestine and Palestinians should look like in film, especially if these representations stem from a commitment to and framework of solidarity as is the case in Ici et Ailleurs.¹⁷ While some filmmakers have repurposed Promio’s early footage of Palestine into their work, such as French-Moroccan Jewish filmmaker Simone Bitton in her 1996 documentary Palestine: Story of a Land;  to demonstrate that Palestine was a real place, a here inhabited by an autochthonous population, Godard’s intervention, like much of his cinematic output, moves beyond a reliance on traditional forms. That is, that Godard did not look to the Lumière footage to validate Palestinian existence, rather, his project began, first and foremost, on the ground among the forcibly displaced, using his invitation to witness the fedayeen’s guerilla tactics as the starting point for representation, and indeed, documentation of a world and subjects at peril.

From the Dziga Vertov Group to Sonimage: Ici et Ailleurs as dual text

Godard’s own trajectory as a filmmaker during this time period is well documented. A central figure of the French New Wave, he transitioned away from his earlier art cinema period of the 1960s following the events of May ‘68, and turned his focus—from that point until the end of his life—to explicitly political cinema. Ici et Ailleurs, specifically, would also come to bridge two distinct eras in Godard’s career: the end of his time with the Dziga Vertov Group and the beginning of his time with Sonimage, the production and distribution studio he founded in Grenoble in 1972 with his partner Anne-Marie Miéville.

Named for the so-called godfather of montage, the Dziga Vertov Group evokes the radical Soviet vision of cinema’s earliest days: put most simply, the belief that the ordering of images would provoke new associations in the mind of the viewer and, effectively, produce spontaneous, politically valuable modes of thought. Sonimage, on the other hand, marks the beginning of Godard’s forays into the worlds of television and video–media, like cinema, of which he remained wholly sceptical (and wholly enamoured) until the very end. Like the DVG, Sonimage reveals its founding principles in its very name, a hybrid word combining son (sound) with image. Here, we have moved beyond the careful sequencing of images into a space in which all parts of the medium are integrated, completely inextricable from one another.

Ici et Ailleurs is thus both a Sonimage piece and a DVG film, and it is also a film about both-ness. And so, it makes sense that it is simultaneously a kind of braided, impossible mise-en-abyme film—a film at once about another, elusive film, and about the film that it, itself, is—and a classical Marxist exercise in dialectical filmmaking. It is structured by a series of (increasingly tenuous) oppositions—here/elsewhere, this film/that film, now/then, France/Jordan, Muslim/Jew—that yield new resonances and new possibilities. Formally speaking, Godard and Miéville use a number of tactics to signify this simultaneity, this bothness: the layering of images, 

the arrangement of multiple video clips on the same screen;

and in one particularly memorable sequence, the film’s French actors line up in an orderly queue holding photographs of the fedayeen to present to the camera, eventually coming to stand next to one another against a wall, like members of a police lineup. This insistent multiplicity has a curious effect: it evacuates the image of its content, and in so doing, fixes it firmly in the present. That is, it turns the image into an image of images, an image of image-making; the image is briefly relieved of its documentary obligation (in this case, to reveal the past) and its narrative duty (to flow sensibly onwards). 

The opening moments of Ici et Ailleurs are also worth noting here: first mon (my) then ton (your) then son image — a play on words — son here meaning both sound and (singular) “their,” their image which is also the mixture of sound with image, which is to say, cinema. Sonimage was, of course, Godard and Miéville’s newly-founded production studio. And so this word, Sonimage, names the specific material forces through which Ici et Ailleurs came into being; and this very name reminds us of Godard’s preoccupation (here and elsewhere, as it were) with the ways that sound both animates and destabilises the image, makes it inscrutable and perhaps unseeable; and, finally, in this opening moment, Sonimage becomes the third option, after my image and your image: his image, her image, their image, belonging to neither filmmaker nor spectator, but rather, to an ever-absent Other.¹⁸

Here we would like to argue that the film’s repeated invocations of the mathematical and the numerical are also key to understanding its vision of solidarity. Curiously, Godard returns time and again in this film (and in this stage of his career) to questions of quantity, of arithmetic, of numeration and calculation. This motif works in several key ways: it evokes the constant, the concept that would seem to stand outside of history; it provides a counter-language, a secondary grammar; and it allows Godard to represent absence as a vital and structuring force, for political cinema in general but specifically Palestinian solidarity cinema—for art that, from so many vast distances, attempts to get close to a history so deeply shaped by loss, by erasure and death, as well as by dreams unfulfilled.¹⁹

The Revolution Cannot Be Quantified: Cinema Approaching Zero

In her work on Sonimage’s television productions of the late 1970s, Carolina Sourdis cites Godard’s Cahiers du Cinema essay, Le Dernier rêve d’un producteur: “‘Always 2 for 1 image’…The image will always be, at least,” write Sourdis, “the combination of its reflection and itself.”²⁰ The film image is inherently multiple—is always here (in the theatre, on the screen) and elsewhere (in place and time). This duality—and not its claim to realism—is why, for Godard, a documentary can be political. The claim to realism is, in effect, what Godard’s film works to undermine.²¹ In lieu of the real or the present, then, the documentary must summon absences—as in the images of images mentioned above. Ici et Ailleurs clearly derives its value from the absences around which it is structured: the lost film, the lost fedayeen, the lost past. 

In The Afterlife of Palestinian Images, Azza El-Hassan compellingly writes of the myriad absences that haunt Palestinian cinema and cinema about Palestine: 

Visual remains of plunder are usually ejected from public domains, first by violence, and second, as they become the private property of individuals who salvage them. Their absence from public spheres results in these images becoming unfamiliar and uncanny for the society that generated them in the past, rendering the society unable to relate to or even comment on its own past images.²² 

The destruction of property is compounded by the destruction of archives, of images, and eventually, as El-Hassan writes, of a “past that has been plundered.”²³ In her reading of Yousry Nasrallah’s 2004 Gate of the Sun, a French-Egyptian cinematic adaptation of Elias Khoury’s seminal 1998 novel of the same name, Terri Ginsberg writes about the significance of what she terms “absent-presence” in that film and its source text, which is worth quoting in full:

Khoury’s conception of literary narrative is that of a “three-dimensional space” creating an abstract image of history, nation and the self, wherein the present is understood “as a historical process” and history is reread “as a contradictory one” (Khoury, “Unfolding” 7). Temporality in this conception is the subjective effect of varying, quotidian experiences rather than an imposed, homogenising standard. On this socialising view, the “long voyage toward a national image (becomes evident) through the mirror of the other,” a dialectical (counter-)image, marginalised or suppressed within modern Arab narratives adapting Western standards and techniques, that “will later allow for the possibility of liberation from it” (5). Echoing Kiarostami, Khoury is concerned about the ideological selectivity of empirical or idealist reflectionism and therefore tries to invoke the absent-presence—the “authentic” reality—of (in this case) Palestinian history by “creat(ing) mirrors instead of allegories and metaphors” (Khoury, “Rethinking” 266). “(T)he allegory,” in his view, “pretends to reflect reality, while mirrors reflect other mirrors” which, when tactically arranged, can reveal a way out of the pain and suffering they collectively refract (ibid).²⁴

In refusing allegory and “creating mirrors,” Ginsberg argues via Khoury, Gate of the Sun is able to more accurately render a history and reality that is primarily structured by what is missing from it, by erasure and disappearance. And Khoury’s understanding of temporality as a “subjective effect” produced at the intersection of multiple forms of experience has a distinctly cinematic resonance. Nasrallah’s film is, of course, vastly and vitally distinct from Godard’s in both content and context. Yet, Ginsberg’s suggestion that Palestine solidarity cinema rests in part on the invocation of an ever-present absence can help shed some light on the continued and specific value of Godard’s project. In its clear evocation of multiple, incompatible temporal registers—the absent past, filmed; the absent first film; the second film through which the first one comes into being—Ici et Ailleurs creates mirrors of its own. And by playing with arithmetic and the zero, here we argue that the film reminds its viewers time and again of their own roles in negotiating the production of meaning. 

About a quarter of the way into the film, a calculator appears on the screen. “In adding hope to dream,” the narrator speaks, “our figures have likely been mistaken.” Hope and dream: unquantifiable but vital forces of revolution. And, addition: the unquantifiable but vital force of solidarity, of actions undertaken here in response to those elsewhere.

A finger punches numbers on the machine, perfectly synchronised with the sound of gunshots.

“Or rather: since we found ourselves approaching zero,” the voiceover continues, we didn’t add but, rather, subtracted.”    

The numbers on screen are being added to one another, clearly senselessly. Nothing is to be gleaned from their total. But the numbers themselves are far from senseless. These are key historical dates: 1789, the beginning of the French Revolution; 1968, which in this context speaks for itself; 1936, the beginning of the first Palestinian Revolution and the Berlin Olympics under National Socialism; 1917, the year that the Balfour Declaration named, as part of the British Mandate for Palestine, the establishment of Jewish state in Palestine. Added to one another, these numbers disappear twice over: into the sum, off the calculator’s screen. It is immediately after this sequence that the film begins to engage more directly with its title, styled on the screen now as Ici + Ailleurs rather than Ici et Ailleurs. Here and elsewhere, not as a pair of opposites but as combined entities. 

Our narrator speaks: “French revolution and – and – and – Arab revolution. Arab revolution and – and – and – French revolution.” Then the word et (and), lit first from the front, then from behind. The word et itself is at once meaningless and transformative, here transformed into a visible subject.

 The basics of arithmetic would have us know that the order of numbers in an additive sequence has no bearing on their sum. This stands in direct opposition to the basics of documentary cinema (and to Vertov), wherein the order of images is integral to the construction of meaning. Godard is asking here, among other things: Is the process of filmmaking a calculation or a syntax? Does it yield something more like a sentence or a number? Does the and create unity (as numbers swallowed into a whole) or difference (as here can never be elsewhere)? 

Shortly after this sequence, another mathematical aside: “Here is how the Capital works,” the speaker begins as a hand erases “vive la révolution” from a chalkboard: “one poor man plus a zero equals a less poor man; a less poor man plus another zero equals an even less poor one; a less poor man plus another zero equals a richer one; a rich one plus another zero equals an even richer one.”

The joke is simple enough: the “addition of zeros” here is not the addition of 0 to the digit but instead a simple exponential increase, taking us from 1 to 10 to 100 and so on. Zero, which symbolises nothing, is here functioning almost syntactically, creating a larger and larger number each time it is tacked on to the number’s end. This moment is certainly in keeping with the critiques of capitalism and the state that were so central to Godard’s work in this period–the revolution has been quite literally wiped out, replaced with numbers–but it also perfectly encapsulates the project of the film itself.  The zero is nothing on its own, nothing but a symbol of nothing, of absence; and yet the accumulation of zeros yields an ever-greater total. Always 2 for 1 image: the zero, like Khoury’s mirror, is a form of non-being that multiplies and amplifies. And by keeping the hand in the frame in both sequences, the film reminds us that these seemingly universal and constant abstractions are always grounded, always of our own making. The calculator and the chalkboard are wiped clean, and we begin again. The incomplete revolution finds itself perpetually back at its own starting point. It is impossible to fully move forward in time—towards the “post” of liberation—so long as the forces of solidarity remain deficient—unable to multiply and definitively counter the metastasising nature of colonial violence.

Godard would use this strategy elsewhere, for example in Sonimage’s 1976 series Six Fois Deux, in which he opens the second episode with a rumination on the “table”—the English phrase “editing table,” the site of montage, that is, the site where images are combined, and that of the multiplication table ( here he cuts to a familiar close-up on a calculator). The 12-episode France tour detour deux enfants, released in 1979, includes an episode titled “Desordre et calcul” (Disorder and calculation), in which, among other things, a child being interviewed is asked: “When you want to do something together, is that dividing or multiplying?” “Multiplying,” the child responds, without a moment’s hesitation. “And loving each other,” the offscreen interviewer continues, “is that dividing or multiplying?” Here, the child falters. This scene, though it is from a few years later, further exemplifies Godard’s understanding of political and artistic solidarity: at once a productive collaboration, yielding more than the sum of its parts, and an impossible, unquantifiable calculation. To imagine the sequencing of cinematic images not as their addition to one another but as their multiplication by one another is to understand the film as a producer of reality and not merely its capture; to imagine “doing something together” as a kind of multiplication is to understand the exponential powers of coalition. But as we have demonstrated, these arithmetical functions are always haunted by a powerful absence, and by the perpetual risk of deletion. 

In the Presence of Absence: Literary Engagements (with/in) Here and Elsewhere

In keeping with the notion that the DVG’s radical cinematic vision for Ici et Ailleurs is the belief, and indeed the hope, that the ordering of images would provoke new associations in the mind of the viewer—allowing for the production of valuable and committed modes of thought—the film itself is not only reliant on the duality of its images, but also its inherent failure to fully capture a complete representation of the Palestinian Revolution or the fedayeen; who were themselves forced to exist and engage in combat from within the liminal space between Palestine and elsewhere. The elsewhere, in this case, were of course the camps, which in and of themselves are structures subject to impermanence and whose residents are made not to belong in the host country; allegedly guaranteed the right of return to the native land under article 13(2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as UN Resolution 194. The former was meant to guarantee the rights of a universal global citizenry now potentially subject to a post-nation-state change of status and categorical creation: “the refugee.” By contrast, the latter resolution’s specific population of concern were the 750 thousand Palestinians expelled from their homeland at the onset of the ongoing Nakba (beginning in 1947 and culminating in 1948 and continuing into 1949); and whose descendants are now a population of an estimated eight million refugees. Ironically, both motions were passed in 1948.

Operating within this historical context, Ici et Ailleurs’s fragmented imagery moves beyond an organisational patchwork that incorporates footage from Godard and Gorin’s abandoned project, Jusqu’à la Victoire, into a new medium of the film essay. At times, this film essay deliberately engages with outside—yet, tangential—literary associations, such as Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s work, namely the long poem “Azhar al-dam” (“Roses of Blood”), the book-length prose-poem Fi Hadrat al-ghiyab (In the Presence of Absence), and the landmark interview “Exile Is So Strong Within Me, I May Bring It to the Land” conducted with Israeli journalist Helit Yeshurun in 1996. At others, the film, or rather its afterlives, is best understood in conversation with the work of Black September’s other (French/ foreign) witnesses, most notably French writer Jean Genet’s Un Captif amoureux (Prisoner of Love); a work of non-fiction that was likewise abruptly halted after the massacre of its subjects and returned to only after some years had passed. In the case of Genet, it was the recurrence of massacre, this time at the hands of radical Phalangists in Lebanon, against Palestinian life in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, which prompted a re-visitation of his manuscripts from his sojourn in the camps in Jordan across six months in 1970 to 1971. Finding himself in Beirut during the Israeli invasion of 1982, Genet was one of the first foreigners allowed to enter the Shatila Refugee Camp, a witness account that he chronicled in his essay “Quatres heures à Chatila” (“Four Hours in Shatila”); then igniting an urgency to document Genet’s encounters with the Palestinian fedayeen and the Black Panthers in the camps in Jordan in Un Captif amoureux. The latter was published posthumously four years later in 1986 by Gallimard.

The most obvious literary association with which Godard engages directly in Ici et Ailleurs is Mahmoud Darwish’s long poem Azhar al-dam (Flowers of Blood) which, as Dyer and Mulot have noted, “refers to the Kafr Qasim massacre of 1956, during which Israeli troops killed fifty unarmed villagers who were working in their fields and unaware that Israel had imposed a curfew on them.”²⁵  Beginning at minute forty, the scene shows a young Palestinian girl with short black hair, dressed in an olive-green military suit, standing in front of the ruins of Karameh, a village destroyed by Israel two years prior in 1968. The girl’s longing for justice is emphasised by her strong-willed stature, her arms waving by her sides and in front of her as she recites Darwish’s famous stanza: “Sa ‘uqawim” (“I will resist”). As Dyer and Mulot have acutely pointed out, it is here where Godard enters the scene through voice-over, informing the viewer that the “featured poem is titled “Je résisterai” (“I will resist”), (neglecting) to provide contextual information” that this is part of a larger poem, Azhar al-dam.²⁶ It is unclear whether or not Godard’s lack of fluency in Arabic is to blame here, though it is the likely outcome. By contrast, however, this scene is set against the backdrop of the film’s own depictions of public education initiatives within the camps, of which Darwish’s poem is just one snapshot. The girl reciting the poem—an ode to the massacred Kafr Qasim—amid the ruins of Karameh is juxtaposed with scenes of other women, including one learning how to read a manifesto at the very beginning of the film, stumbling through the words, while another, who appears in a scene just after the girl, is confident and impatient as she waits to repeat after the speaker standing behind the camera. In another scene, a young woman declares, “the people’s struggle is long and difficult and even if all (the fedayeen) are martyred … I am now pregnant and once my son is born…” he will, she insinuates, join the struggle. Off camera, you can hear Godard asking her to repeat certain parts of her declaration. Miéville enters via voice-over, admitting to the fictional construction of the scene, that the woman agreed to play a role. She is not pregnant, but her youth and beauty lend themselves to aestheticising the outward image of the revolution. Though she is not pregnant at the moment of documentation, her intention to produce children for the prolonged struggle remains intact. 

This admission of deception on the part of Miéville helps to better contextualise Godard’s future collaboration with Darwish in his 2004 film Notre Musique. It was through the help of his intermediary and Darwish’s translator into French, Elias Sanbar, that Godard was able to include Darwish in a cameo in Notre Musique.²⁷  In some ways, Darwish’s participation helps to retrospectively remedy some of the short-comings in Ici et Ailleurs, especially as they pertain to the contextualisation of Darwish’s poetry, while also allowing Godard to expand upon it. In one scene, Darwish is seen sitting in the lobby of the Holiday Inn Sarajevo, across from an Israeli journalist named Judith Lerner, who is portrayed by French-Israeli actress Sarah Adler. The dialogue in this scene is based on Darwish’s famous interview with Yeshurun, which is, in part, contextualised in a collection of interviews titled Palestine as Metaphor. In this scene, as in the interview with Yeshurun, Darwish speaks about the difference between loss and defeat and calls himself, or rather states that he is searching for, the “Poet of Troy.” The interview between Lerner and Darwish is conducted in both Hebrew and Arabic, with Lerner as the Israeli asking the questions in the occupier’s language and Darwish, though he understands Hebrew, responding to her firmly and exclusively in Arabic. It is while they are sitting in a hotel lobby in post-war Sarajevo, itself a city healing from atrocity and in the midst of reconstruction, that Lerner asks the following:

“Mahmoud Darwish. You once wrote that he who writes the story, inherits the land of the story. So, you don’t believe that Israelis have the right to the land? You say there is no room for Homer and that you are the Trojan’s Bard and that you love the vanquished.”

To this, Darwish replies:

“We (have) listened to Greek mythology and at times we have heard the Trojan victim speak through the mouth of the Greek Euripides. As for me, I am looking for the poet of Troy because Troy has not yet told its tale.”

The power and indeed the need to narrate, insists Darwish, is critical for those who have experienced khasara (loss), because there is “a deeper poetic romanticism in (it).” Yet, the record of events, especially as they pertain to the victims, cannot be recounted by the victor; Israelis cannot speak for Palestinians. In this scene, Darwish insists that neither the presence nor the absence of great poetry gives a victor the right to erase the story of another and that, in turn, the acquired dominance of the victor does not give his people authority over another. He notes that even if he were among the victorious, his empathy would be firmly rooted within the victim’s camp. It is this message that Godard seeks to impart on the viewer: the insistence on justice and the need for cinema to document how atrocity and genocide occur and are remembered by those who survive to tell the story or, conversely, how cinema and narrative commemorate those who have perished on the long road to freedom.

And then, there is also the fact that whether intentionally or unintentionally, Godard’s title Ici et Ailleurs is in itself reminiscent of Darwish’s famous poem “Ana min hunak” ( “I Am From There”) in which he writes: I am from there / I am from here/ and I am not there / and I am not here. A depiction of the impossible condition of exile, in which the feeling of unsettlement and alienation are so strong, one neither belongs to the here (of exile) nor can they return to or fully be there (the homeland) or elsewhere (at home or in exile). The exilic condition, and the curse of forced displacement that Darwish shared with the fedayeen, continued to plague the poet until the end of his life. It remained an unresolved, if not residual, alienation, even upon repatriation. This was precisely the subject of his last prose-poem, In the Presence of Absence, written at a time when Darwish was contending with a diagnosis of heart failure and was acutely aware of his own mortality: what it means to no longer be here, or to remain here only through poetry once he departs elsewhere. And yet, beyond the individual, there is also the temporality of the revolution itself, that is, that the loss of a battle, or the loss of life through massacre, does not extinguish struggle; it only quiets it from time to time. The prolonged struggle, to which Godard repeatedly refers, exists in a sequence of episodes; extended and consistent periods of slow violence, followed by outbursts of spectacular and world-altering violence. It is the latter form that interrupts the process of documentation, as was the case for Godard and Genet. But it is after the massacre and the return to slow violence—these periods that seem deceptively restful—where one must urgently return to negotiating the parameters of representation, and indeed, of the revolution.

In the Absence of Presence: On Death, Temporality and Ethical Representation

Godard, as noted in our introduction, notoriously and routinely declared cinema dead; but cinema has long and widely been theorised as death (and a perversion of it), and perhaps nowhere more famously than in André Bazin’s seminal essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” Bazin wrote that within the realm of the plastic arts, “the practice of embalming the dead might turn out to be a fundamental factor in their creation.”²⁸ In this, many artforms have a “mummy complex” that seeks to “face the reality of death by preserving flesh and bone,” that is, “to snatch it from the flow of time, to stow it away neatly.”²⁹  The desire to preserve and extend life, per Bazin, is at the heart of the cinematographic project. What does it mean, however, to return to a documentary once its subjects have perished? What does it mean to embalm them in time? Furthermore, what does it mean if the original project, which sought to document the revolutionary fervour and desires of the fedayeen—until they reach victory—is abandoned and revisited in the wake of their/a massacre? In Godard’s case, the massacre in question was Black September. In Genet’s, it was the ever-present nature of massacre, in this case Sabra and Shatila, which led him to return to a previous one: Black September.

Godard and Genet, united by their shared desire of seeing the world launch towards a Maoist utopia and what Antoine Krieger has termed “a fiery anti-Zionism,” were likewise united by their commitment to the Palestinian cause and their intimate knowledge of the fedayeen.³⁰ They represented the same figures and preserved, in a sense, the same revolutionary moment, but even these representations had their faults and, indeed, their limits. For the image or the photograph, as Genet poignantly describes it, “has two dimensions, so does a television screen: neither can be walked through.”³¹ The image, for instance, cannot capture the odious stench of “black and bloated corpses” as they are stacked against the doorway,  or “the feet (of the massacred) as they push against one wall and their heads pressing against the other.”³² The image fails to capture what the dead endured and what the witness-documentarian senses when stepping “over (the corpses)…all Palestinian and Lebanese.”³³  Put simply, there is no lexicon for this, just as there is no image that can sufficiently capture the revolution (or the massacre) in all of its dimensions; its invasion of the senses. But it can, to some degree, demonstrate the revolution’s temporality, what Genet melancholically describes as “its ethereality” and the “exceptional quality” of the fedayeen despite the fragility of their world and mission.³⁴

If we return to MacBean’s 1974 text—and the question of how, and how not, to “film history in the making”—the complex temporalities at play in this film are certainly evident. To film an event is to at once capture its presence, its immediacy, and to preserve it as past, to turn the moment into an object of history. As Mesquita Duarte has recently written: “Godard examines the complexities and ambiguities of a historical event in the light of the Now, in the light of the contemporary situation, seeking to put into dialogue, or reconcile, what has long been irreconcilable on the political level.”³⁵ Irmgard Emmelhainz, in turn, has argued that “Godard’s films of the DVG period show the political actuality, the now of political struggle, opposing in this way the logic of the avant-garde that envisions an emancipatory future world-image.”³⁶ There is an important tension, in Emmelhainz’s phrase, between the specific historical materiality implied by actuality and the ever-shifting ground of “now;” in Duarte’s between the “now” and the “contemporary situation.” How to achieve that elusive “now” to which these scholars refer—and how to achieve it in this fixed and endlessly reproducible format? If the film is always already a historical object, how can it create a clear distinction between its multiple temporalities (the history of the world, the moment of filming, the production of the finished film, the moment of viewership)?  The film is the place where present and past, here and elsewhere, meet, become one that is also two.

Ici et Ailleurs makes the case that the revolution’s temporality is a cinematic temporality, which is to say, an intersubjective temporality, structured primarily around absence. In “Death Every Afternoon,” his short but seminal essay on Pierre Braunberger’s 1951 film La course de taureaux (Bullfight), Bazin would further elaborate on the medium’s singular kinship with death: “Before cinema,” he wrote, “there was only the profanation of corpses and the desecration of tombs. Thanks to film, nowadays we can desecrate and show at will the only one of our possessions that is temporally inalienable: dead without a requiem, the eternal dead-again of the cinema!”³⁷ This is a step beyond the photograph’s embalming of time. It is a destabilisation of the very structure of death. In making the moment of death–which is by nature unrepresentable because it is singular and unknowable—repeatable (even rewindable!), Bazin argues, the cinema performs a kind of metaphysical obscenity, a coupling of two fundamentally incompatible temporalities. 

Importantly, Ici et Ailleurs does not show death onscreen except through a singular and exceptional image. Its inclusion is referred to by John Drabinski as a “ghostly disturbance” that haunts Ici et Ailleurs temporally through a floating and recurring photograph of a “burned Palestinian corpse”—the same type of “black and bloated body” that incidentally haunts Genet’s text.³⁸ The film is otherwise devoid of such imagery, focusing instead on the spectral and ominous quality of the striking,  if not inevitable, presence of death in the lives of the fedayeen at the time of shooting and the conversion of the film into an archival requiem for the dead after its completion and release. To this end, just before those initial calculator shots, the following sequence unfolds:

Cut between clips of footage shot in Jordan, black screens announce, in flickering letters: Almost all the actors are dead /the actors in the film were filmed in danger of death/death is represented in this film by a flow of images /a flow of images and sounds that hide silence. Emmelhainz reads these moments as part of Godard’s project of enunciation:  “he and Miéville …slow down the chains of images” produced by the mass media, she writes, “and dissect them to enable themselves and viewers to find their own place within those chains.”³⁹  In this sequence, the slowing down of the “flow of images” is also a key moment of convergence (we might say collapse) between this film and Jusqu’à la Victoire. On the one hand, we move clearly and cleanly back and forth between these two sets of images: footage and commentary. These images, however, not only transform one another by virtue of their sequence—to know that the subjects are dead is inevitably to see all subsequent footage differently—but trouble the boundary between one film and the other. Which of the two does the commentary refer to? These so-called interruptions still come to form part of the flow of images. Mon – ton – son image. It is not that Ici et Ailleurs completes Jusqu’à la Victoire, but that the earlier film’s incompleteness comes to bleed into the later one. A film that hides silence, a film built on an accumulation of zeros. 

Perhaps more explicitly, the film’s critique of silence lays bare the cost of inaction in its use of what Kamil Lipiński calls  a “network narrative (that) juxtaposes both East and West as well as the period in which the initial footage was shot” with whatever periods come after.⁴⁰ The West, read here as France and emblematised through the recurring image of the French family seated in front of a TV, is an extended metaphor for the outside that has witnessed a consistent loss of Palestinian land and life across eight decades,  and that, though implicated and complicit in its erasure, fails to translate the act of witnessing into an actionable form of solidarity or accountability. As Lipiński notes, Godard and Miéville’s use of this “vision” is not only a critique of an apathetic and desensitised middle class but a judgement cast on a “peculiar irony” that transposes any desire for revolutionary change onto other people that exist in the spatially intangible faraway of elsewhere; that is, Palestine and the camps.⁴¹ Because the question of Palestinian liberation is, as of yet, unactualised, Ici et Ailleurs’s representation of the revolutionary episodes of the 1970s remains relevant (as a precedent) to the present-day reality of Palestinian life and death. If a revolutionary “impetus were sustained throughout time”—continuously reinforced, as it were, through solidarity, perhaps there would not be a return to the mundane ever-presence of slow violence, wherein global solidarity is somewhat muted.⁴² The prolonged struggle that Godard refers to throughout Ici et Ailleurs requires an unfaltering sustenance if it is to reach its liberatory end; ending the cycle and the images of death.

Conclusion

When Godard and Gorin left the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan with footage of what was intended to be a chronicle of a nation engaged in a prolonged struggle for liberation, they had no way of knowing that those subjects would be massacred entirely by King Hussein by 1971. Two years after he approached the PLO in their Paris office, asking to document the Palestinian revolution, a rift would open between Godard and the organisation in the wake of Black September.⁴³ According to Red Army/PFLP’s director Masao Adachi, Godard wanted to include an analysis of Black September in Jusqu’à la Victoire, but the PLO, which had just emerged from the clashes with King Hussein’s forces, was “anxious not to provoke the Jordanian regime further.”⁴⁴ It is through the death of the film’s subjects and the inability to narrate the events in a way that appealed to the architects of these exercises in militant (and Marxist) cinema that the project was ultimately abandoned, at least for four years. And yet, in spite of its short-comings, Ici et Ailleurs, and by extension the social and political commitments of a director like Godard, continue to be subjects of interest; of analysis and debate. This interest is not only due to cinema’s near-infinite capacity for affect, but also the unfortunate reality that the cause at the centre of this film has not yet reached its intended goal: liberation. And to some degree, it is worth noting that the forces that hindered any potential for a complete or near-complete representation of Palestine and Palestinians then are the same forces at play now. The challenge of rendering Palestinians visible, in a way that they would want to be seen, remains as much of a challenge today in Gaza and the West Bank as it was when Godard arrived at the camps. This is half of the battle. The other half is compounded by violence and the barrage of images flowing out of Gaza right now. It is difficult to understand how one makes sense of such nonsensical injustice; how these images could be organised in such a way that render any action other than spectatorship possible, given the seeming unwillingness of outside governments to act. To this end, Godard’s commitment to the potential of the cinematic image, and its ability to make us not only see the truth but see differently, in spite of its faults (its always-too-late temporality; its inevitable failures; in other words, its impossibility) is an endeavour to be followed if we are to pursue any cinema at all.

Endnotes