Embodies the 70s Godard aesthetic of excessive stimulation not only because it employs it, but because that’s what it’s dealing with on the thematic level as well. Even in the bourgeois French home, the children watch TV, then do homework, then eat dinner—an itinerary with little room for deviation. The idea of overstimulation is similar: if we are being faced with an unending succession of stimuli, which will each naturally seem to build upon the prior given the simple fact of how these signals are interpreted, how can we deviate and watch/listen to something else.

By assaulting our senses and thoughts (is it possible to fully process such wordy musings given the speed at which they’re related to us?), Godard…

Ici et ailleurs, Here + Elsewhere, Everywhere and Nowhere

"Learn to see here, in order to hear elsewhere"

To Jean-Luc Godard, the extreme leftist years 1968-1972 were all about aggressive attemps to influence the audience with Jean-Pierre Gorin; and then, poof. What was something idealistic and seemingly simple (Jusqu'à la victoire - Until victory), faced the cold truth: death.

We are but an endless montage. Sequences in space and time, images, sounds, triumphs, failures, truths, lies. Shouldn't the world be so simple, or did something just complicate and corrupt it? War, politics and how easily cinema can manipulate reality. Should we ever allow lies, even for a good cause?

Hopes and dreams turn to dust, noise to silence. Here and…

When confronted with the question of the Israel-Palestine conflict, most people respond by digging their head in the sand, hoping the problem magically goes away on its own. Been that way for three-quarters of a century now. Jean-Luc Godard, however, ain't like most people. Over the years, Godard has defended the Munich massacre, made countless parallels between Zionism and Nazism, boycotted Israeli-produced cinema, and even labeled Israel "a cancer on the map of the Middle East." Many like to frame themselves as "revolutionaries" and "anti-imperialists," but Godard actually puts his money where his mouth is, consistently using his voice, in cinema and in day-to-day life, to challenge the imperialist powers—regardless of the consequences. Truly, a fearless filmmaker.  

Out of all…

Not to be performatively sanctimonious, but it's gross to have this rare footage of soon-to-die Palestinian revolutionaries, and to use it as mere grist for your postmodern despair. The movie self-flagellates on its manufacture and manipulative intent, such as when a summary "translation" is interrupted by a second narrator who rebuts the first summary for being too academic and then relays what the people in the footage are actually saying. This doesn't stop the filmmakers from, say, taking their footage of a guy making a long, mechanically-amplified speech that I must presume outlines a perspective on the war, and leaving it untranslated, again talking over it, satirically pontificating on the physical distance the audience has to keep from speakers, or…

O que inicialmente era um filme do grupo Dziga Vertov sobre uma guerrilha pró-palestina, acabou tendo seu destino alterado após trágicos eventos do chamado setembro negro, 5 anos após as gravações Godard retoma esse material para construir um filme ensaio sobre a própria natureza das imagens e seu uso como política.
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Com uma construção narrativa baseada na associação e no embate de imagens e de sons, Aqui e em qualquer lugar nos oferece uma reflexão sobre o papel do cinema como produtor de imagens, e mostrando o seu poder de manipulação e principalmente as suas limitações, e sua impossibilidade de emular a vida real.
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O grupo Dziga Vertov foi fundado pelos cineastas Jean-Luc Godard e Jean-Pierre Gorin, e…

a passage of this film seems to call back to one of godard's earlier films entitled un film comme les autres, a film which I consider to be (up to this point) godard's worst feature length film. the scene features a group of palestinian freedom fighters discussing tactics for a future attack that would eventually lead to their deaths. the scene shares uncanny resemblance to that of the previous film, which features leftist students who participated in the may 68 protests discussing how to put theory into action. godard presents this scene, not only to highlight their revolutionary struggle, but also as a biting self critique. in his voiceover dialogue with mieville, he admits to his overcomplicating of revolutionary action,…

ICI ET AILLEURS communicates a sense of helplessness above all. In the film, Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville note how in France (aka "Here") middle-class families complacently watch TV while in Palestine (aka "Elsewhere") revolutionaries mourn fallen comrades. The work incorporates documentary footage that Jean-Pierre Gorin shot in Palestine at a revolutionary training camp in 1970; the narration informs us that the footage was intended for a film called "Victory." That film was never made, and five years later, Godard and Miéville inform us, many of the subjects of that footage are dead. The damning images of the middle-class family echo shots from Godard and Miéville's NUMÉRO DEUX, released the year before this; the Palestinian footage looks back to the…

Godard appears to have grown up a bit since 1972, or at least he is contemplating the manner in which he crafted his films during his time under the Dziga Vertov Group. Compiled with unused footage from the dropped Victory, due to the film's subjects dying during Black September, Here and Elsewhere abandons what would've been pro-Palestinian propaganda into a self-critique—one of Godard himself and one of the country he lives in, France. With four years of maturity, Godard and his partner Miéville instead focus on the complicity of reporters, artists, and media-consumers (a.k.a. almost everyone) as they view the struggles of others under the voices of others, relying on headlines, interpreted quotations, and television footage to understand that which…