Ici et Allieurs - Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin & Anne-Marie Miéville

i film di JL Godard non sono quelli d'evasione.
ci sono molte domande, per chi guarda, e non si può fuggire (se non abbandonando la visione del film).
a partire da un film sulla Palestina, poi mai fatto, nel 1970, si arriva a Ici et Allieurs, nel 1974.
non è più un film sulla lotta armata dei palestinesi, ma un film su noi, che guardiamo le immagini girate nel 1970.
e magari qualche affermazione e qualche domanda sono sempre più di attualità.
non è un film per evasori, bisogna impegnarsi, ma vale lo sforzo - Ismaele

It is not so much a political film as it is about political films, about the ways in which images, sounds, and their combinations can contribute to or impede understanding. It is also a study in contrasts, with the title's dual concepts the central dichotomy at work: "here" for the familiar, the domestic; "elsewhere" for the unfamiliar, the foreign. This dichotomy arises, naturally for Godard, in the very process of making his film. Here and Elsewhere began in 1970 as a project for Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin's Dziga Vertov Group; the duo visited Israel to make a film about Palestinian guerrillas, only to have the film fall apart unmade once they returned to France with their footage. Five years later, Godard completed the film with his new partner Anne-Marie Miéville, and the result is as much a commentary on the unfinished film and its failures as it is a film about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict…

…The film is predicated on the French family depicted as "here" realizing that the Palestinians they see on TV are in fact their mirror image. Godard holds up images of the distant oppressed to the oppressed at home, hoping to create a new consciousness. If the film doesn't quite succeed at that, it is nevertheless a flawed but fascinating document of Godard's emergent video-editing techniques and his vision of their political potential.

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A unique film in Godard's repertoire, made several years into his Maoist period with the Dziga Vertov Group, examining footage he took in Israel and Jordan on the Palestinian 'revolutionaries' (AKA terrorists). This is actually two films in one: One is a notorious work of propaganda, with its blinders firmly on, that tries to portray the Palestinians as some kind of revolutionary group suffering under Israeli fascism where Palestinian women fight side by side with the men towards noble and socialist goals. The Fatah fighters were all killed while filming (and Godard allows the audience to believe it was Israelis that killed them when it was really Jordanians) making the project impossible. So, instead, Godard and co. sit and examine the footage with an ongoing self-reflective narrative and difficult deconstruction, attempting to take apart the failure of trying to transport people from here (France) to there (Israel) using images, sounds and words. Cheap shock tactics are used such as juxtaposing Hitler and Golda Meir, politicians with pornography, and footage of a burned human corpse, but then they point out and visually demonstrate and deconstruct the artifice of it all, proving how some sounds and images can overpower others, and how they may come together to create something unwanted while failing to transport its audience. And then they question themselves. But, given that it's all towards the goal of more efficient propaganda, and the fact that they lost the forest while musing endlessly over the trees, it's too little too late.

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Qui e altrove, qui o altrove, noi qui e gli altri altrove: bla bla bla. Godard si diverte a fare questo tipo di film, ma il pubblico? Le alternative sono purtroppo sempre le solite: se non si è sufficientemente e snobisticamente convinti del 'marchio' Godard sul film, ci si annoierà mortalmente per l'intera durata della visione. Perchè al cineasta francese tutto ciò che interessa è di riversare le proprie verbosità come commento esterno a immagini non sempre direttamente imparentate con le speculazioni in sottofondo, per parlare di politica, di sesso, di religione, di vita e di morte e di qualsiasi altra cosa gli passi per la mente. Eterno profeta del vaniloquio oppure geniale e spiazzante innovatore? Il dubbio è perennemente lecito nei confronti del personaggio, autore (parola certamente azzeccata nei suoi confronti) di un cinema mai banale, ma allo stesso tempo neppure sempre necessario; sapiente nel rimescolare e rimaneggiare i più disparati ed eterogenei materiali, ma caotico nel dare forma a questi pluricefali assembramenti di idee sparse: Godard è Godard - punto e basta…

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…The “here” of the title is France — a working-class family watching TV, Godard and Miéville watching the Godard-Gorin footage and communicating offscreen. The “elsewhere” is not merely Palestine, but the film that Godard and Gorin wanted to make there in 1970. Like sound and image, now and then, or life and death, here and elsewhere essentially define one another dialectically, through a series of relays and exchanges — a process that for Godard and  Miéville is indistinguishable from their responsibility to their subject…

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