Here and Elsewhere (Ici et Ailleurs) [1976]

 During 1970, DVG compatriots Godard and Gorin travelled to Jordan, Lebanon and the West Bank on the Arab League’s invitation in order make a film in support of Palestinian people and causes – whilst covering the lives, training camps and struggles of the fedayeen (guerilla fighters) – titled Jusqu'à la Victoire (Until Victory). However, when most of their subjects were killed by the Jordanian army during the Black September conflict, they shelved this project. 6 years later during Godard’s “SonImage” transitional period – by now he’d parted ways with Gorin, begun collaborating with Anne-Marie Miéville, and moved to a post-DGV period marked with abstruse, eclectic, avant-garde video essays – the unfinished work was revived and converted into a complex, dense, deconstructive and somber meditation on politics, oppression, media, propaganda, and the intertextuality of images and sounds. It was positioned along and informed by two key thematic concerns – meta-analysis on cinema as political weapon, alongside a sharp autocritique. These examinations were conducted using oblique analytic devices – footage of Palestinians in occupied territories in the Middle-East from his earlier abandoned film, complemented with those of a working-class French family watching TV at their cozy apartment in Paris, thus emphasizing the underlying duality of “here” and “elsewhere” in the film’s title. And these were accompanied by reflections on images and videos – be it the consumerization of resistance and struggle or the indictments of war, fascism, colonialism and militarism through juxtaposed visuals of Hitler, Golda Meir, Nixon, Kissinger et al. As a postscript to the film’s polarizing legacy, a Zionist group had planted a bomb at the theatre in Paris where this was being screened, but fortunately it was diffused before any damage could be caused.

 

 

 

 

 

Directors: Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Mieville

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Experimental Film

Language: French

Country: France

Numero Deux [1975]

While his Nouvelle Vague phase was defined by his distinctively anarchic voice and auterist signature, and his Dziga Vertov Group phase by his confrontational Marxist-Maoist politics and dissociation from bourgeois aesthetics, Godard’s third phase – the brief and obscure “Sonimage” period where he begun collaborating with Anne-Marie Miéville, who’d become his companion too – was marked by complex, esoteric and eclectic essays made on low-fi video. Numéro Deux, the first film in this creative burst that formed a vital preamble to his enduring association with video technology – and made after three years of isolation – was as formally dazzling and fabulously experimental a work as it was defiant, challenging, minimalist and profoundly meditative in its discourses on working class, women’s agency, politics, sexuality, banal domesticity, consumerism, mortality and cinema. It began with a disheveled looking Godard’s deadpan monologue on the financing of this project and how everything – from people to places – can be likened to either factories or landscapes; these, while football, news, etc. played in the background in his cramped, poorly lit Grenoble editing room. It then provided muted and disconcertingly candid glimpses into the seemingly quotidian lives of a middle-class family comprising of a sexually liberated married couple – a philandering husband and his bored housewife – their lively kids, and the grandparents. The political and feminist commentaries were brilliantly allusive, except for a short section where the grandfather recounts memories of his guerilla communist resistance days during WW2. And, like how Warhol did in The Chelsea Girls and Luis López Carrasco would later do in The Year of the Discovery, the vignettes were audaciously presented through parallel television screens that added layered, disconsolate and even troubling commentaries through this electrifying juxtaposition.

 

 

 

 

 

Directors: Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Mieville

Genre: Drama/Experimental Film/Essay Film

Language: French

Country: France

One P.M. [1971]

 The fascinating rise of New Left, Black Power, anti-war protests and the counterculture movement had excited Godard to the extent that he felt that revolution was imminent in the US. And hence, to capture this potentially epochal moment, he joined hands with Direct Cinema pioneers D.A. Pennebaker and Richard Leacock on One A.M. (One America Movie) where he envisioned a synthesis of cinéma vérité and heavily experimental formal fluidity, through blending of “real” with its fictionalized representations / interpretations. However, mid-way through the production, he lost interest in the project – compounded by the realization that there’s no revolution coming – and hence abandoned it. Pennebaker, thereafter, compiled the footage – including a fair bit that he’d shot on the making of it – and released that under the revised moniker of One P.M. (One Parallel Movie). The work, as may therefore be conjectured, wasn’t anything how Godard had envisaged as part of his indictments on imperialism, capitalism, racial oppression, social inequality and the military-industrial complex. Rather, it was often disjointed and transitory. It has instead become an intriguing time capsule, an evocation of the 60s zeitgeist and a peek into what this might’ve been. This alternate version, which begins with a lyrical sequence featuring two little girls in an industrial waterfront (ironically, Godard had intended to end with this vignette) comprised of six tableaux – activist Tom Hayden sharing his views on labour rights and Vietnam War; Eldridge Cleaver speaking about black experience and carceral society; sequences featuring Rip Torn, including in a working-class school; a passionate street music performance by black nationalists; interactions with a Wall Street woman; and a scintillating roof-top gig by Jefferson Airplane that gets cops running helter skelter.

 

 

 

 

 

Directors: Jean-Luc Godard, D.A. Pennebaker & Richard Leacock

Genre: Documentary

Language: English

Country: US

Letter to Jane: An Investigation About A Still [1972]

 Fellow cinéastes, avant gardists and enfants terribles Godard and Gorin formally concluded their Groupe Dziga Vertov journey with an essay that couldn’t have provided an apter summation of their heady, prolific, short-lived Marxist-Maoist collective. Facile mix of political and poetic, unabashedly confrontational and non-conformist, gleefully infuriating and alienating, packed with sardonic harangue, and profoundly invested in making films politically as delineated by its manifesto, this was a daring period of intriguing, dense, radical and polarizing agitprop experimentation. Most of these attributes were discernible in Letter to Jane, a curious postscript and companion piece to their magnificent previous film Tout Va Bien. Right after the latter’s making, Jane Fond – who’d transitioned into an outspoken civil rights, feminist and anti-war activist during this time, which, coupled with her stardom, made her a complex, fascinating individual – travelled to North Vietnam and earned herself the moniker of “Hanoi Jane”. A B/W photograph – shot by Joseph Kraft and published in L’Express – of her interacting on the foreground with a Vietcong man, where she towers over him (accentuated by the low-angle) and his face is largely hidden as the camera’s focused steadfastly on her, with another Vietcong man grainy in the background, formed the film’s singular topic. Made in the form of a long, rambling lecture, this was a meditation, examination, investigation and deconstruction of this single photo with the two filmmakers alternately speaking offscreen in their lilting, accented English. The near obsessive work – in equal measures analytic, impudent, caustic, argumentative, verbose and even exasperating – was accompanied with cinematic detours from silent films to talkies, using movie stills to draw analogies, including one from The Grapes of Wrath featuring the actress’ renowned father Henry Fonda.

 

 

 

 

 

Directors: Jean-Luc Godard & Jean-Pierre Gorin

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Experimental Film/Agitprop

Language: English

Country: France

Tout Va Bien [1972]

 Godard, who’d just survived a near-fatal motorcycle accident, and Gorin achieved the apotheosis of their collaboration with the bold, brilliant, boisterous, trenchant, lively and formally flamboyant Tout Va Bien. It remains particularly arresting in its evocation of Godard’s Nouvelle Vague films – stylistic flourishes, tonal exuberance, iconic stars, ingenious set-pieces and wicked humour – within the distinctive Dziga Vertov Group framework marked by radical left-wing politics, caustic critique of the bourgeoisie and consumerist capitalism, provocative diatribes, and dialectical subversion. After travelling to the UK, US, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Palestine and Jordan, they returned to May’68 four years after that momentous event and in turn A Film Like Any Other with which they’d heralded the DVG phase, while joining hands with two immensely popular actors – Jane Fonda, who’d become an outspoken anti-Vietnam War activist, and Yves Montand, well-known for his participation in leftist causes and films. It dealt with a wildcat strike at a sausage factory where a disenchanted expat journalist (Fonda) and her husband (Montand), a former intellectual who now makes TV commercials, witness class struggle – thus developing bitter perspectives about themselves, their marriage and post-1968 French society – while held captive with the plant’s hilariously buffoonish head (Vittorio Caprioli). Striking turns by the actors and ambitious use of diverse narrative / Brechtian devices aside, it was especially memorable for three aspects – caustic commentary on the commercial dependence of cinema through a deadpan off-screen dialogue accompanied by a plethora of cheques signed towards its production; an unforgettable cut-out set that allowed the entire factory cross-section and goings-on to be seen simultaneously; and an extraordinary unbroken dolly shot where the camera glided laterally across a massive supermarket, observing the gradual brewing of a riot.

 

 

 

 

 

Directors: Jean-Luc Godard & Jean-Pierre Gorin

Genre: Black Comedy/Political Satire/Avant Garde/Experimental Film

Language: French

Country: France