Oct 4, 2025
1655.) Returning to the work of the late, incredibly great Uncle Jean (aka JLG, aka Godard), this week I devote an entire episode to one of the early works that he made with his collaborator and partner, Anne Marie Mieville. Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere) runs under an hour, but to my mind it is the best of their Seventies collaborations, as it tackles an extremely important issue while also deconstructing the way in which that issue was initially presented. The film is built around clips from “Until Victory,” a film about the Palestintine Liberation Organization shot in 1970 by Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin but never edited together. Ici shows us segments from that film, allowing the message about the PLO and their struggle against Israeli colonialism to come right through. Godard offers his reflections on the unfinished film, noting that all the PLO members who spoke on camera had since died in combat. While clearly having no problem with the political message of the original film, Mieville does note in the narration the manipulative ways that Godard and Gorin framed that message, with fictional moments incorporated into the documentary; both Godard and Mieville also discuss the way television news covers struggles for independence. The film remains one of Godard’s most controversial because it is the work where he first delved into the Israel-Palestine issue in depth and offered a series of striking juxapositions that can still strike sparks today. (One of them drove Andrew Sarris into a self-acknowledged fit of liberal guilt, saying he could not give the film a good review despite thinking it was excellently made.)
