Month: November 2012

By Jean-Luc Godard

Originally published in ‘El Fatah’, July 1970, without title. Another translation was published in ‘Free Palestine’, January 1971. The text was written while Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin – as the Dziga Vertov Group – were working on a film documenting the Palestinian struggle. The footage was used as the basis for ‘Ici et Ailleurs’, which was released six years later and served as a critical reflection on some of the ideas evoked in this text. Drawings are taken from Godard’s shooting notebook, found in Michael Goodwin & Greil Marcus, ‘Double Feature’ (Outerbridge & Lazard, 1972)

We found it more appropriate, politically speaking, to come to Palestine, rather than to go elsewhere: Mozambique, Columbia, Bengal. The Middle-East has been directly colonised by the French and English Imperialisms (the Sykes-Picot treaties). We are French militants. It seemed more appropriate to come to Palestine because the situation here is complex and unique. There are many contradictions and the situation is less obvious than in South-East Asia, at least in theory.

Our tasks, as artists who are struggling today through cinema, are still on a theoretical level. To think differently in order to create revolution… that’s where we’re still at. We are several decades behind Al-`Asifah’s first bullet (1).

Mao Zedong says good comrades go where the difficulties are, where the contradictions are at their peak. To make propaganda for the Palestinian cause, yes. With images and sounds. Cinema and television. To make propaganda is to spread problems over a carpet. A film is like a flying carpet that can go anywhere. There is no magic. It’s political work. One has to study and search, record this research and this study, and then show the result (the montage) to other fighters. Demonstrate the fedayeen’s struggle to their Arab brothers who are being exploited by the bosses in the French factories. Show Fatah’s militiawomen to their sisters of the Black Panthers who are being chased by the FBI. Make a film politically. Show it politically. Distribute it politically. It’s long and hard. It’s solving a concrete problem every day. Finding a fedaï, an officer, a militia member, figuring out together how to create images and sounds of their struggle. Telling them: “I will film an image of you shooting Al-`Asifah ‘s first bullet.” Knowing which image should come first, and which one should follow, for the whole to have a meaning. A political, revolutionary meaning – that is to say which helps the Palestinian revolution, which helps the global revolution. All of that is long and hard. One has to know what is cinema…, what information for Fatah means, and what the contradictions with the other organizations are. Fatah, for example, fights against American Imperialism. But American imperialism is also the New York Times and CBS. We, we are fighting against CBS. There are a lot of journalists who sincerely consider themselves as leftist, and who are not fighting CBS and the New York Times. They may think they are helping Fatah by publishing an article in the bourgeois press. But they are not fighting. It’s Fatah who is fighting and working. It’s the fighters of Fatah who are dying. One has to really see that. Literature and art, fighting on two fronts. The political front and the artistic one: this is the present stage, and we have to learn to resolve the contradictions between these two fronts. In the newspaper published by Fatah, we still see too many pictures of leaders and too little of fighters. One has to see where this contradiction is situated, and how to resolve it. It’s not an artistical problem of layout. It’s a political problem in the ideological domain (the press). We have to learn how to fight the enemy with ideas, not only with guns. It’s the Party commanding the gun, and not the other way around (2). And the complexity of the Palestinian struggle is connected to the difficulty of constructing the Party here (like in France). The originality of Fatah, even before the Suez Canal was overtaken, is that it refused to call itself a Party or a Front. It’s about saying to a Musulman: “don’t abandon your ideas, just leave your organisation, and join our ranks.” The Fatah does not need to be Marxist in words, because they are revolutionay in facts. They know that ideas change along the way. That the longer the way to Tel-Aviv, the more the ideas will change, which will finally lead to the destruction of the state of Israel.

Political front and artistic front
We have come here to study: to learn lessons, if possible to record these lessons, to distribute them here, or elsewhere in the world. Almost a year ago, two of us have come to investigate the Democratic Front. Then an other went to Fatah. We have read the texts and the programs. As French maoists, we have decided to make the film with Fatah and its title would be Jusqu’à la Victoire. We have the Palestinians say the word “revolution” in the film. But the real title of the film is The methods of thought and action in the Palestianian liberation movement. With the comrades of the democratic front, we have the same discussions as with militants in Paris. We learn nothing. Not them, nor us. With Fatah, it’s different. It is very difficult to talk to a leader about the image that has to be created of the Palestianian revolution, and about the sound that has to accompany (or contradict) this image. But it is exactly this difficulty that is positive. It poses in concrete terms the contradiction between theory and practice: between political front and artistic one.

When we arrived in Amman, we were told “what do you want to see?” We answered “everything!”. We have seen the Ashbals, the training of the militia, the bases in the South, the North and the Centre. We have seen the school of martyrs. We have seen the school of officers, the medical centers. Then they told us “what do you want to film now?”. We said “we don’t know” – “How come you don’t know?” – “No, we would like to talk, study a bit with you. You don’t have a lot of munition for the Kalachnikovs and RGB’s. We don’t have many images and sounds. The Imperialists (Hollywood) have ruined or destroyed them. So we can’t waste them. They are ideological munition. We have to learn to use them to kill the enemy’s ideas. That’s why we need to talk with you”. – “fine, with who would you like to speak?” We said: “with Abu Hassan (3)”. We didn’t know who he was, but we had read one of his article in the first issue of Fedayin. He talked to us. Politically. For example, he said: “the people’s army does not consist of sophisticated radars. They are 10.000 children with binoculars and walkie-talkies.” That is a revolutionary image. Straightaway, we see that the Egyptian army is not an army of the people. Instead of 10.000 children, there are 10.000 Soviet instructors.

The bullet close to the ear
Abu Hassan also said: Al-`Asifah ‘s first bullet has to be fired close to the ears of the farmers, so that they can hear the sound of liberation of the land. That is a revolutionary sound. That is a discussion which allows to establish political relations between an image and a sound, rather than simply making images that are so-called “real” but mean nothing, say nothing because they have nothing to say, nothing that we don’t know already. And what use is it to say what we already know? In any case, not for the revolution looking for the new behind the old. That takes time. It’s long and hard. But there is no reason for a film of the Palestinian revolution to not encounter the difficulties of this revolution. Why would this film be shown on American television? Does Fatah control the Yankee tv stations? No, they don’t even control the cinemas in Amman. They control Amman. But every night, in the dark cinemas, the imperialist rottenness blinds the masses. Luckily, the morning after the June crisis the unified Commandment was able to reopen their eyes by publishing a newspaper henceforth (4). The problem of revolutionary information is a very important one. We say: “cinema, secundary task of the revolution for us currently in France.” But we make this secondary task our primary activity. Let us look, then, at this contradiction between this secondary task and the primary task of the revolution, which is, here, the armed war against Israel. Let us also look at the other contradictions between cinema and the other secondary tasks of the Palestinian revolution. See that at a certain moment, in a given place, the secondary transforms in primary. That is what we call politically posing the fact of making a political film. Not only interviewing Habash or Arafat or Hawatmeh (5). Not only spectacular images of “lion cubs” wading through flames, but relations between images, relations between sounds, between images and sounds that point out the relations, in the Palestinan revolution, between the armed struggle and the political work.

Each image and each sound, each combination of images and sounds are moments of relations between forces, and our task consists of directing these forces against those of the common enemy: imperialism – that is: Wall Street, the Pentagon, IBM, United Artists (entertainment from Trans-America Corporation) etc. For example, we think that Fatah, in the course of the crisis of June, was defeated in the domain of information. With regard to the capitalist European countries, of which the Times, Il Messagero, Le Monde and The Figaro have spoken? Of the response that the masses have given to the deadly provocations of the Jordanian reaction? No. Of the role played by Fatah in waging this response politically and military? No. All these papers, as well as the East-European televisons and radios have blown George Habash out of proportion to the detriment of Yasser Arafat (5). Our task as revolutionary militants of information is also to analyze the why and how of such operations. For Imperialism, it was not only necessary to try, once again, to break down the unity of edification of the Palestinian resistance, but also to deter the sense of its liberation fight in the eyes of the English, Italian, French etc. masses and in doing so hit a one more blow to the revolutionary elements of these masses, for whom the Palestinian revolution, just like the Vietnamese, is a precious ferment. Today, it’s terrible that a text like the one written by Abou Lyad in dialogue with Fatah is not translated in French (6). These are perhaps minor defeats, but still one has to have the revolutionary honesty to analyze them as being defeats: struggle, faillure, new struggle, new faillure, new struggle untill victory, such is the logic of the people, according to the Chinese comrades. Such is also the logic of the Palestinian people in its movement of national liberation under the direction of Fatah. That is what we are trying to show in our film, in your film. Where will the film be shown? This will depend on the actual state of the struggles. It can be shown on a road in a village in South-Libanon. We put up a sheet between two windows, and we project. In front of the students at Berkeley. Amongst workers at strike in Cordoba or Lyon. In a school of Amílcar Cabral (7). That is, in general, it will be projected in front of the advanced elements of masses. Why? Because it represents forces in struggle.

The relations between images
It should be possible to use it, on short or long term, by other elements of these forces on the moment of their struggle. That is to say at the moment when it will useful for their struggle. An example: we show an image of a fedai crossing the river, followed by an image of a Fatah militia woman who teaches refugees in a camp to read, followed by a image of a “lion cup” in training. These three images, what are they? They are a whole. Non of them has value on their own. Perhaps a sentimental, emotively of photographic value. But not a political value. In order to have a political value, any of these three images has to be connected to the two others. At that moment, what becomes important is the order in which they will be shown. Because they are parts of an overall politics; and the order in which we arrange them represents the political line. We are on the line of Fatah. So we arrange the images in the following order: 1° Fedayeen in operation; 2° Militia woman working in a school; 3° children training. Which means: 1° armed struggle; 2° political work; 3° prolonged popular war. In the end, the third image is the result of the two others. It comes down to: armed struggle + political work = prolonged popular war against Israël. It also comes down to: man (triggering the fight) + woman (being transformed while creating her own revolution) who give birth to the child who liberates Palestine: the generation of victory. It’s not enough to show a “lion cub” or a “flower” and say “it’s the generation of victory”. One has to show why and how. An Israelian child can’t be shown in the same way. The images which produce the image of a Zionist child are not the same of those of a Palestinian child. Moreover one shouldn’t talk of images; one has to talk about the relations between images.

The Lebanese lackeys of Hollywood
It’s imperialism that taught us to consider images in themselves, making us believe that an image is real. While common sense shows us that an image can’t be anything but imaginary, precisely because it is an image. A reflection. Like your reflection in the mirror. What is real, is first of all you, and then the relation between you and this imaginary reflection (8). What is real then is the relation you establish between these different reflections of yourself, or these different pictures of you. For example, you say to yourself: “I am beautiful” or “I look tired”. But in saying that, what are you doing? You are doing nothing but establishing a simple relation between several reflections. One in which you seem in good shape, another in which you look less so. You compare, meaning you establish a relation, and then you can conclude: “I look tired.” To make a film politically means establishing this kind of relations politically, in order to resolve a problem politically. Which means in terms of work and battle. And precisely imperialism, in wanting to make us believe that the images of the world are real (while they are imaginary) aims to prevent us from doing what we have to do: establish real (political) relations between these images; establish a real (political) relation between an image of Ashbal training and an image of Fedayeen crossing the river. The only revolutionary reality is that (political) reality of that relation. Political, because it poses the question of power; and a chain of images such as the one we just described declares that power is at the end of a gun. Imperialism would like us to be content with showing a Fedai crossing a river, or a farmer learning to read, or Ashbals training. Imperialism has nothing against that. It produces images like that every day (or their slaves do it at it’s service). Every day it distributes them on BBC, in Life, Il Expresso, Der Spiegel. On one hand there is UNRWA (9) (for the stomach), on the other Hollywood and its Lebanese and Egyptian lackeys of cinema (for the ideas and images that provoke ideas). Imperialism has taught us not to set up a relation between the three images we just mentioned, or perhaps to set it up, but then in a certain order, so their plans wouldn’t be disrupted.

The ideas and the contradictions
And our own task, as militants currently active in the domain of anti-imperialist information, is to fight fiercely in this domain. To liberate us from the chains of images imposed by imperialist ideology, through all their devices: press, radio, cinema, records, books. It’s a secondary task which we have make our principal one, trying to resolve the contradictions this entails. For example, in fighting on the secondary front, we often collide with other comrades. These comrades, here in Fatah for example, have advanced and rightful ideas on the principal front of the armed struggle, and ideas that are often less on the secondary front of information. For us all, it’s about learning how to resolve this contradiction as part of the contradictions within the people. Not contradictions between the enemy and us. To create contradictory images means to make progress on the road of the resolution of these contradictions. And here, after having posed the problem of the production of this series of three images (to take the same example), you can now pose the problem of distribution in a more rightful, more political way. And it’s because these (imaginary) images have a real (contradictory) relation between them, it’s because of this real relation that those who watch and listen to these images will also have a real relation with them. Viewing the film will be a moment of their real existence, of their reality. Political reality, this time. For an oppressed farmers, a striking worker, a revolting student, a fadai carrying a kalachnikov… this is what we would like to say by saying “down with the spectacle, long live the political relation.”

The teeth and the lips
That is how literature and art can become, as Lenin wanted, a small living screw in the mechanisme of revolution. Thus, to sum up, not by showing a wounded fedai, but showing how this wound will help the poor farmer. And to arrive at this is long and hard, because, since the invention of photography, imperialisme has been making films to prevent those it oppresses to make them theirselves. It has made images to conceal the reality from the masses it oppresses. Our task is to destroy these images and learn how to create other ones, more simple, to serve the people, so the people can use of them in their turn. Saying “it’s long and hard” is saying that the (ideological) fight here is part of he prolonged war against Israel conducted by the Palestinian people. It’s saying that elsewhere this fight is connected with all the people’s wars against imperialism and its allies. Connected like the teeth and the lips (10). Like mother and child. Like the land of Palestine and the Fedayeen.

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Translated by Stoffel Debuysere (Please contact me if you can improve the translation).

In the context of the research project “Figures of Dissent (Cinema of Politics, Politics of Cinema)”
KASK / School of Arts

translator’s notes

(1) Al-`Asifah was the “mainstream” armed wing of the Fatah.
(2) Godard also used Mao’s formula “the Party commands the gun” in‘La Chinoise’.
(3) Abu Hassan was the code name of Ali Hassan Salameh, who later become known as the chief of operation for the Black September organization.
(4) In June 1970, Palestinian guerrilla groups and the Jordanian army clashed in Amman, but fighting ceased after an agreement was struck allowing Palestinian fighters to continue their presence (until Black September).
(5) George Habash was the founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which defined itself as a Marxist-Leninist movement in 1969. In the same year an ultra-leftist faction under Nayef Hawatmeh split off as the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP), later to become the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP).
(6) Abou Lyad or Salah Mesbah Khalaf was deputy chief and head of intelligence for the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the second most senior official of Fatah after Yasser Arafat.
(7) Amílcar Cabral was a Guinea-Bissauan and Cape Verdean agricultural engineer, writer, and a nationalist thinker and politician. Also known by his nom de guerre Abel Djassi, Cabral led the nationalist movement of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde Islands and the ensuing war of independence in Guinea-Bissau.
(8) This questioning of the “reflection” owes a lot to certain texts by Alain Badiou – notably ”The Autonomy of the Aesthetic Process’ (1966 – written in ’65), which is also quoted in ‘La Chinoise‘ and Louis Althusser – notably ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ (1970), which was adapted by Godard and Gorin as ‘Lotte in Italia’ (1969).
(9) Created in December 1949, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is a relief and human development agency, originally intended to provide jobs on public works projects and direct relief for 652,000 Arabs who fled or were expelled from Israel during the fighting that followed the end of the British mandate over Palestine.
(10) Here Godard paraphrases Louis Althusser: “class struggle and marxist-leninist philosophy are connected like teeth and lips.”

By Gilles Deleuze

Originally published as ‘Trois questions sur Six fois deux’ in ‘Cahiers du cinéma’ no. 271. (nov. 1976). English version found in ‘Gilles Deleuze: Negotiations 1972-1990’ (Columbia University Press, 1995), translated by Martin Joughin.

— Cahiers du Cinéma has asked you for an interview, because you’re a “Philosopher” and we wanted to do something philosophical, but more specifically because you like and admire Godard’s work. What do you think of his recent TV programs?

Like many people, I was moved, and it’s a lasting emotion. Maybe I should explain my image of Godard. As someone who works a great deal, he must be a very solitary figure. But it’s not just any solitude, it’s an extraordinarily animated solitude. Full, not of dreams, fantasies, and projects, but of acts, things, people even. A multiple, creative solitude. From the depths of this solitude Godard constitutes a force in his own right but also gets others to work as a team. He can deal as an equal with anyone, with official powers or organizations, as well as a cleaning lady, a worker, mad people. In the TV programs, Godard’s questions always engage people directly. They disorient us, the viewers, but not whoever he’s talking to. He talks to crazy people in a way that’s no more that of a psychiatrist than of another madman, or of someone “playing the fool.” He talks with workers not as a boss, or another worker, or an intellectual, or a director talking with actors. It’s nothing to do with adopting their tone, in a wily sort of way, it’s because his solitude gives him a great capacity, is so full. It’s as though, in a way, he’s always stammering. Not stammering in his words, but stammering in language itself. You can normally only be a foreigner in another language. But here it’s a case of being a foreigner in one’s own language. Proust said that fine books have to be written in a sort of foreign language. It’s the same with Godard’s programs; he’s even perfected his Swiss accent to precisely this effect. It’s this creative stammering, this solitude, which makes Godard a force.

Because, as you know better than I do, he’s always been alone. Godard’s never had any popular success with his films, as those who say “he’s changed, from such and such a point onward it’s no good” would have us believe. They’re often the very people who initially hated him. Godard was ahead of, and influenced, everyone, but not by being a success, rather by following his own line, a line of active flight, a repeatedly broken line zigzagging beneath the surface. Anyway, in cinema, they more or less managed to lock him into his solitude. They pinned him down. And now he’s used the opportunity presented by the holidays, and a vague demand for creativity, to take over the TV for six times two programs. It may be the sole case of someone not being duped by TV. You’ve usually lost from the outset. People wouldn’t have minded him promoting his films, but they can’t forgive him for making this series that changes so many things at the heart of TV (ques­tioning people, making them talk, showing images from a variety of sources, and so on) . Even now it’s over, even if it’s been stifled. Many groups and associations were bound to get annoyed: the statement from the Union of Photographic Journalists and Cameramen is a good example. Godard has at the very least stirred up hatred. But he’s also shown that a differently “animated” TV is possible.

— You haven ‘t answered our question. Say you had to give a “course ” on these programs… What ideas did you see, or sense in them? How would you try to explain your enthusiasm? We can always talk about everything else afterward, even if it’s what ‘s most important.

OK, but ideas, having an idea, isn’t about ideology, it’s a practical matter. Godard has a nice saying: not a just image, just an image. Philosophers ought also to say “not the just ideas, just ideas” and bear this out in their activity. Because the just ideas are always those that conform to accepted meanings or established precepts, they’re always ideas that confirm something, even if it’s something in the future, even if it’s the future of the revolution. While “just ideas” is a becoming-present, a stammering of ideas, and can only be expressed in the form of questions that tend to confound any answers. Or you can present some simple thing that disrupts all the arguments.

There are two ideas in Godard’s programs that work this way, constantly encroaching on one another, getting mixed up and teased apart bit by bit. This is one reason why each program has two parts: as at primary school there are the two elements of learning about things and learning about language. The first idea is to do with work. I think Godard’s constantly bringing into question a vaguely Marxist scheme that has spread everywhere: there’s supposed to be something pretty abstract called “labor” that one can buy or sell, in situations that either mark a basic social injustice or establish a little more social justice. But Godard asks very concrete questions, he presents images touching on what exactly is being bought and sold. What are some people prepared to buy, and others to sell, these not necessarily being the same thing? A young welder is prepared to sell his work as a welder, but not his sexuality by becoming an old woman’s lover. A cleaning lady’s happy to sell the time she spends cleaning but won’t sell the moment she spends singing a bit of the “Internationale”, why? Because she can’t sing? But what, then, if one were to pay her for talking about not being able to sing? A specialist clockmaker, on the other hand, wants to get paid for his clockmaking efforts, but refuses to be paid for his work as an amateur filmmaker, which he calls his “hobby”; but the images show that the movements he makes in the two activities, the clockmaking sequence and the editing sequence, are so remarkably similar that you can mistake one for the other. But no, says the clockmaker, there’s a great difference of love and warmth in these movements, I don’t want to be paid for my filmmaking. But then what about filmmakers and photographers who do get paid? What, furthermore, is a photographer himself prepared to pay for? He’s sometimes prepared to pay his model. Sometimes the model pays him. But when he photographs torture or an execution, he pays neither the victim nor the executioner. And when he photographs children who are sick, wounded, or hungry, why doesn’t he pay them? Guattari once suggested at a psychoanalytical congress that analysands should be paid as well as analysts, since the analyst isn’t exactly providing a “service,” it’s more like a division of labor, two distinct kinds of work going on: there’s the analyst’s work of listening and sifting, but the analysand’s unconscious is at work too. Nobody seems to have taken much notice of Guattari’s suggestion. Godard’s saying the same thing: why not pay the people who watch television, instead of making them pay, because they’re engaged in real work and are themselves providing a public service? The social division of labor means it’s not only work on the shop floor that gets paid but work in offices and research laboratories too. Otherwise we’d have to think about the workers themselves having to pay the people who design the things they make. I think all these questions and many others, all these images and many others, tear apart the notion of labor. In the first place, the very notion of labor arbitrarily sets one area of activity apart, cuts work off from its relation to love, to creativity, to production even. It makes work a kind of maintenance, the opposite of creating anything, because on this notion it’s a matter of reproducing goods that are consumed and reproducing its own productive force, within a closed system of exchange. From this viewpoint it doesn’t much matter whether the exchange is fair or unfair, because there’s always selective violence in an act of payment, and there’s mystification in the very principle of talking in terms of labor. It’s to the extent that work might be distinguished from the productive pseudoforce of labor that very different flows of production, of many disparate kinds, might be brought into direct relation with flows of money, independently of any mediation by an abstract force.

I’m even more confused than Godard. Just as I should be, since the key thing is the questions Godard asks and the images he presents and a chance of the spectator feeling that the notion of labor isn’t innocent, isn’t at all obvious–even, and particularly, from the viewpoint of social criticism. It’s this, quite as much as the more obvious things, that explains the reactions of the Communist Party and some unions to Godard’s pro­grams: he’s dared to question that sacrosanct notion of labor… And then there’s the second idea, to do with information. Because here again, language is presented to us as basically informative, and information as basically an exchange. Once again, information is measured in abstract units. But it’s doubtful whether the schoolmistress, explaining how something works or teaching spelling, is transmitting information. She’s instructing, she’s really delivering precepts. And children are supplied with syntax like workers being given tools, in order to produce utterances conforming to accepted meanings. We should take him quite literally when Godard says children are political prisoners. Language is a system of instructions rather than a means of conveying information. TV tells us: “Now we’ll have a bit of entertainment, then the news… ” We ought in fact to invert the scheme of information theory. The theory assumes a theoretical maximum of information, with pure noise, interference, at the other extreme; and in between there’s redundancy, which reduces the information but allows it to overcome noise. But we should actually start with redundancy as the transmission and relaying of orders or instructions; next, there’s information-always the minimum needed for the satisfactory reception of orders; then what? Well, then there’s something like silence, or like stammering, or screaming, something slipping through underneath the redundancies and information, letting language slip through, and making itself heard, in spite of everything. To talk, even about yourself, is always to take the place of someone else in whose place you’re claiming to speak and who’s been denied the right to speak. Orders and precepts stream from seguy’s open mouth. But the woman with the dead child is open-mouthed too. An image gets represented by a sound, like a worker by his representative. A sound takes over a series of images. So how can we manage to speak without giving orders, without claiming to represent something or someone, how can we get people without the right to speak, to speak; and how can we restore to sounds their part in the struggle against power? I suppose that’s what it means to be like a foreigner in one’s own language, to trace a sort of line of flight for words.

That’s “just” two ideas, but two ideas is a lot, it’s massive, includes loads of things and other ideas. So Godard brings into question two everyday notions, those of labor and information. He doesn’t say we should give true information, nor that labor should be well paid (those would be the just ideas) . He says these notions are very suspect. He writes FALSE beside them. He’s been saying for ages that he’d like to be a production company rather than an auteur, and to run the television news rather than make films. He didn’t of course mean he wanted to produce his own films, like Verneuil, or take over TV. But that he wanted to produce a mosaic of different work rather than measuring it all against some abstract productive force, and wanted to produce a sub-informational juxtaposition of all the open mouths instead of relating them all to some abstract information taken, as a precept.

— If those are Godard’s two ideas, do they correspond to the theme of “sounds and images” that constantly recurs in the programs? Images-learning from things-relating to work, and sounds-learning the language-relating to information?

No, there’s only a partial correspondence: there’s always information in images, and something at work in sounds. Any set of terms can and should be divided up in various ways that correspond only partially. To try and articulate the relation between sounds and images as Godard understands it you’d have to tell a very abstract story, in several episodes, and then finally see that this abstract story corresponds to a single episode of something terribly simple and concrete.

1 . There are images, things are themselves images, because images aren’t in our head, in our brain. The brain’s just one image among others. Images are constantly acting and reacting on each other, producing and consuming. There’s no difference at all between images, things, and motion.

2. But images also have an inside or certain images have an inside and are experienced from inside. They’re subjects (cf. Godard’s remarks on Two or Three Things I Know About Her in Godard on Godard, pp. 239-42) . And there’s a gap between actions upon these images and the reactions they produce. It’s this gap that enables them to store up other images, that is to perceive. But what they store is only what interests them in other images: perceiving is subtracting from an image what doesn’t interest us, there’s always Less in our perception. We’re so full of images we no longer see those outside us for what they are.

3. There are also aural images, which don’t seem to have any priority. Yet these aural images, or some of them, have an other side you can call whatever you like, ideas, meaning, language, expressive aspects, and so on. Aural images are thus able to contract or capture other images or a series of other images. A voice takes over a set of images (the voice of Hitler, say) . Ideas, acting as precepts, are embodied in aural images or sound waves and say what should interest us in other images: they dictate our perception. There’s always a central “rubber stamp” normalizing images, subtracting what we’re not supposed to see. So, given the earlier gap, we can trace out as it were two converse currents: one going from external images to perceptions, the other going from prevailing ideas to perceptions.

4. So we’re caught in a chain of images, each of us in our own particular place, each ourself an image, and also in a network of ideas acting as precepts. And so what Godard’s doing with his ”words and images” goes in two directions at once. On the one hand he’s restoring their fullness to external images, so we don’t perceive something less, making perception equal to the image, giving back to images all that belongs to them-which is in itself a way of challenging this or that power and its rubber stamps. On the other hand, he’s undoing the way language takes power, he’s making it stammer in sound waves, taking apart any set of ideas purporting to be just ones and extracting from it just some ideas. These are perhaps two reasons among others why Godard makes such novel use of the static shot (“plan fixe”). It’s rather like what some contemporary musicians do by introducing a fixed aural plane so that everything in music is heard. And when Godard puts a blackboard on the screen and writes on it, he’s not making it something he can film but making the blackboard and writing into a new televisual resource, a sort of expressive material with its own particular current in relation to the other currents on the screen.

This whole abstract story in four episodes sounds a bit like science fiction. But it’s our social reality these days. The strange thing is that the story corresponds in various ways to what Bergson said in the first chapter of Matter and Memory. Bergson’s seen as a sedate old philosopher who’s no longer of any interest. It would be good if cinema or television revived interest in him (he should be on the IDHEC syllabus, maybe he is) . The first chapter of Matter and Memory develops an amazing conception of the relations between photography and cinematic motion, and things: “photography, if there is such a thing as photography, is caught from the outset in, drawn from the start right into the interior of things, and this at every point in space,” and so on. That’s not to say Godard’s a Bergsonian. It’s more the other way around; Godard’s not even reviving Bergson, but finding bits of Bergson along his way as he revivifies television.

— But why does everything in Godard come in twos? You need two to get three… Fine, but what are these twos and threes all about?

Oh, come on, you know better than anyone it’s not like that. Godard’s not a dialectician. What counts with him isn’t two or three or however many, it’s AND, the conjunction AND. The key thing is Godard’s use of AND. This is important, because all our thought’s modeled, rather, on the verb “to be,” IS. Philosophy’s weighed down with discussions about attributive judgments (the sky is blue) and existential judgments (God is) and the possibility or impossibility of reducing one to the other. But they all turn on the verb “to be. ” Even conjunctions are dealt with in terms of the verb “to be” – look at syllogisms. The English and the Americans are just about the only people who’ve set conjunctions free, by thinking about relations. But when you see relational judgments as autonomous, you realize that they creep in everywhere, they invade and ruin everything: AND isn ‘t even a specific conjunction or relation, it brings in all relations, there are as many relations as ANDS, AND doesn’t just upset all relations, it upsets being, the verb… and so on. AND, “and… and… and… ” is precisely a creative stammering, a foreign use of language, as opposed to a conformist and dominant use based on the verb “to be.”

AND is of course diversity, multiplicity, the destruction of identities. It’s not the same factory gate when I go in, and when I come out, and then when I go past unemployed. A convicted man ‘s wife isn’t the same before and after the conviction. But diversity and multiplicity are nothing to do with aesthetic wholes (in the sense of “one more,” “one more woman”…) or dialectical schemas (in the sense of “one produces two, which then produces three”). Because in those cases it’s still Unity, and thus being, that’s primary, and that supposedly becomes multiple. When Godard says everything has two parts, that in a day there’s morning and evening, he’s not saying it’s one or the other, or that one becomes the other, becomes two. Because multiplicity is never in the terms, however many, nor in all the terms together, the whole. Multiplicity is precisely in the “and,” which is different in nature from elementary components and collections of them.

Neither a component nor a collection, what is this AND? I think Godard’s force lies in living and thinking and presenting this AND in a very novel way, and in making it work actively. AND is neither one thing nor the other, it’s always in between, between two things; it’s the borderline, there’s always a border, a line of flight or flow, only we don’t see it, because it’s the least perceptible of things. And yet it’s along this line of flight that things come to pass, becomings evolve, revolutions take shape. ”The strong people aren’t the ones on one side or the other, power lies on the border.” Giscard d’Estaing made a sad observation in the lecture on military geography he recently gave the army: the more that things become balanced at the level of the largest groups, between West and East, u.s. and USSR, with planetary consensus, link-ups in space, global policing, and so on, the more they become “destabilized” between North and South – Giscard cites Angola, the Near East, the Palestinian resistance, but also all the unrest that produces “a regional destabilization of security, ” airplane hijacking, Corsica . . . Between North and South we’ll keep on finding lines that derail the big groups, an AND, AND, AND which each time marks a new threshold, a new direction of the broken line, a new course for the border. Godard’s trying to “see borders,” that is, to show the imperceptible. The convict and his wife. The mother and child. But also images and sounds. And the clockmaker’s movements when he’s in his clockmaking sequence and when he’s at his editing table: an imperceptible border separates them, belonging to neither but carrying both forward in their disparate development, in a flight or in a flow where we no longer know which is the guiding thread, nor where it’s going. A whole micropolitics of borders, countering the macropolitics of large groups. At least we know that’s where things come to pass, on the border between images and sounds, where images become too full and sounds too strident. That’s what Godard’s done in Six Times Two: made this active and creative line pass six times between them, made it visible, as it carries television forward.

By Serge Daney

Originally published as ‘Le Paradoxe de Godard’ in ‘Revue Belge du Cinéma’ (1986). English version found in ‘Forever Godard’, edited by Michael Temple, James S. Williams and Michael Witt (Black Dog Publishing, 2004).

Winter 1985. Having published a large collection of his writings for Cahiers du Cinéma, Jean-Luc Godard agreed to a promotional “one-man show” taking the form of a cinema masterclass for members of the Cinémathèque française, who, it goes without saying, were already won over. Among a number of overly reverential questions, which he had no difficulty answering, two young men asked two rather disjointed questions: why did Godard not make adventure blockbusters that everybody wanted to see, and for that matter, why did he no longer communicate his great love of cinema in his films? Godard was naturally able to answer the first question (he had already answered it in his video Scénario du film Passion, 1982), but he was somewhat taken aback by the second one and paused. When it comes to a love of the cinema, cinephilia, fond citations from old movies, he believed (as did everybody else) that he’s “been there, done that.” To such an extent that his name is now emblematic of a passion which even his detractors have to concede, namely a passion for the cinema. The name “Godard” (after Welles, Fellini, Kubrick or more recently Wenders) designates an auteur but it is also synonymous with a tenacious passion for this region of the world of images that we call cinema.

A love of the cinema desires only cinema, whereas passion is excessive: it wants cinema, but it also wants cinema to become something else, it even longs for the horizon where cinema risks being absorbed by dint of metamorphosis, it opens up its focus onto the unknown. In the early years of cinema, filmmakers believed that the art that they were inventing would be a resounding success, that it would play an incredible social role, that it would save the other arts and would contribute towards civilizing the human race, etc. For Gance and for Eisenstein, nothing had been decided. For Stroheim or the young Buñuel, on the face of it, nothing was impossible. The evolution of cinema had not yet been indexed to the evolution of the Hollywood studio talkies, the war effort, the introduction of quality criteria (which, with hindsight, make studio productions look like the hand-crafted harbingers of industrial TV movies). As soon as that happened, the future of cinema was no longer anybody’s passion (even on a theoretical level). It was only after the war, after the early warning signs of an economic recession, followed by the New Wave kamikaze patch-up job, that the idea of another cinema, one that would open on to something else, was possible again.

Possible, yes, but no longer with the conquering optimism of the early years (“you’ve seen nothing yet, cinema will be the art of the century”). Instead, it is accompanied by a lucidity tinged with nostalgia (“we’ve seen many films, cinema has indeed proved itself to be the art of the century, but the century’s almost over.”) There is an awareness that for a moment a perfect balance was struck (with Hawks, for instance), but that trying to reproduce it would be pointless, that new media are emerging, and that the material nature of the image is mutating. What is ambiguous about Godard, as well as his New Wave friends, is that his cinema straddles this change of direction. In a way, he knows too much.

For he is not just a great filmmaker. Once again, he excels at being the filmmaker who expects everything from cinema, including “that cinema should free him from cinema,” to paraphrase Maitre Eckhart. He foils our calculations and disappoints those who worship him too readily; Godard has always kept moving, in every sense of the word, within a film-world that is still big enough to allow you to move about and show your restless energy. He is a philosopher, a scientist, a preacher, an educator, a journalist, but all this is as an amateur; he is the last (to date) to have been the (coherent) witness and (moral) conscience of what’s afoot in cinema.

One could argue that all contemporary filmmakers, provided they feel strongly enough about certain issues, can come to terms with the “death” of cinema and its future metamorphoses. Judging from the radicalism of Duras and Syberberg, the technological utopias of Coppola, not to mention the submerged iceberg of “experimental” filmmakers and video artists, it is clear that these filmmakers have accepted the notion that cinema belongs to the past. If Godard, like Rossellini in his day, had given up his starting point (cinema) and had let himself be proclaimed a preacher or a prophet, his image would be more clear-cut. But he has consciously resisted being categorized this way.

For it should not be forgotten that there is a difference between prophets and inventors. Using established forms as a starting point, Godard “invented” (indeed, cobbled together) the current shape of our perception of images and sounds. He has always been a little ahead of his time, but nothing has protected him from the average illusions of the day (and when his films become more political, crafty though he was, he came up against the same naivete and dead-ends as any other “Maoist” of the age). Vertov was a prophet, and Godard is, strictly speaking, his contemporary. The aesthetic strokes of genius of his early career simply allowed him to be slightly ahead of his audience (and for a little longer than anticipated). Otherwise, like many formal inventors, he advances back-to-front, apprehensively, facing what he is leaving behind. He is not so much the man who opens doors as the one in whose gaze a previously familiar and natural landscape changes with hindsight: he is worn down by an alarming feeling of alienation and overcome by the mystery that occurs when one feels that one no longer knows how to do things.

This sums up the Godard paradox. He is caught between a recent past and a near future (unlike prophets who can easily combine archaism and the future), he is crucified between what he can no longer do and what he cannot yet do, in other words, he is doomed to the present. Despite his strong sense of dialectic, we should not forget this sharp and voluntarist taste for the present, to which he is inextricably bound. He is able to find this present through a tremendous manipulation of contradictions, or, to save time, through a mysticism of the image, the ultimate in reality. Godard is too Bazinian to commit himself to the loss of “reality”, which is replaced by a generalized interplay of references from one image to another, or to an acceptance that the image can no longer be used as a human means of communication, even negatively.

Godard has been so easily described as an “enfant terrible,” an “avant-garde filmmaker,” an “iconoclast” and a “revolutionary” that we have failed to notice that, right from the start, he respected the rules of the game (unlike Truffaut). In fact, Godard is troubled by the absence of rules. There is nothing revolutionary about Godard, rather, he is more interested in radical reformism, because reformism concerns the present. He never implicates the audience, financial profits or producers, or even certain ways of making films. His own utopia is to demand that people open themselves up to the possibility of doing things “differently” even while continuing as before. This utopia is less about doing something different than about doing the same thing, differently. At that price, it continues to bear fruit.

Antoine de Baecque’s account of the production process of ‘Ici et Ailleurs’ is taken from ‘Godard: biographie’ (Grasset, 2004) and was translated by Ted Fendt. Serge Daney’s text was presented in New York at the first ‘Semaine des Cahiers du Cinéma’ in 1977 and was translated by Laurent Kretzschmar and Bill Krohn.

In February 1969, Yasser Arafat is elected president of the PLO – the Palestinian Liberation Organization, created in 1964 – and his party, the Fatah, becomes the majority leader of it. In this frame, the first films of the Palestinian cinema appear since a film unit is founded by the Fatah in Amman, Jordan under the aegis of three pioneers, Hany Jawhariyya, Sulafa Jadallah and Mustapha Abu Ali, who made, for example, The Burnt Land in 1968 and No to the Defeatist Solution in 1969, the first militant films against the Israeli attacks and the Rogers Plan. It is also by the intermediary of the Fatah, at least due to its financial, logistical, and ideological support, that a Western “anti-Zionist cinema” is born with films such as Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan’s Palestine vaincra, the current events series Palestine made by French reporter Paul-Louis Soulier, and the medium-length film Biladi in 1969 and 1970, an inspired and lyrical but equally poetic and sometimes disenchanted piece of reporting about the Palestinian people directed by Francis Reusser (a young Swiss filmmaker of the extreme left).

It is in this political and cinematic context that Godard and Gorin’s project, entitled Until Victory, is born. Contacted by the Arab League, via Hany Jawhariyya (the “official” filmmaker of the Fatah), Godard received a commission in 1969, for about 6,000 dollars, and an invitation in good and due form to be able to shoot in the Palestinian camps in Jordan, the West Bank, and Lebanon, under the protection of the Fatah, who also put guides and interpreters at his disposal. Godard obtained supplemental financing from Jacques Perrin (the actor-producer gave 20,000 francs), German and Dutch TV stations (8,000 and 5,000 dollars respectively), and the usual Claude Nedjar (8,000), or a total of about 70,000 francs.

Before leaving, Godard, Gorin and Marco drew up the “outline of a Palestinian film commissioned by El Fatah” that summed up in several slogans their still imprecise intentions: “What happened to the American Indians can not happen to the Palestinians. The armed struggle is not a military adventure; it is the struggle of the people. Palestinian face and Arab heart. War of national liberation = social struggle. First create unity (El Fatah).” This preparatory document ends with several verses from Mahmoud Darwish’s poem Identity Card, a veritable Palestinian hymn published in the collection Leaves of Olives in 1964:

“Record!
I am an Arab
You have stolen the orchards of my ancestors
And the land which I cultivated
Along with my children
And you left nothing for us
Except for these rocks.
So will the State take them
As it has been said!?

Therefore!
Record on the top of the first page:
I do not hate people
Nor do I encroach
But if I become hungry
The usurper’s flesh will be my food
Beware…
Beware…
Of my hunger
And my anger!”

Next, Godard and Gorin worked non-stop to put together a precise storyboard about what they wished to film in Palestine. This takes the shape of a big spiral-bound notebook where most of the shots of the future film are drawn, often sequences of an allegorical kind or short cautionary sketches, accompanied by slogans, words and emblematic phrases, including notes about movements, colors, and references to certain texts. The explicit goal of the film as prepared in Paris consisted in “understanding the thought and working methods of the Palestinian revolution”: “As Frenchmen, we have conceived the film as a film on the Arabs that was never made during the Algerian War.” Godard seemed to want to make up for the time lost ten years before when he made Le Petit soldat instead of a film supporting the NLF.

The three Vertovians left for Jordan for the first time at the end of November 1969, and made a total of six trips to the Middle East until the following August, regularly punctuated by return trips to Paris or trips to other parts of the world – especially for Godard who was often called back to France, for example, to attempt to deal with the crisis that effected his relationship with Anne Wiazemsky. Elias Sanbar, a young intellectual and militant French-speaking Palestinian called from Paris by the Fatah to serve as a guide and interpreter recounted his visits and the shoot in a beautiful article published in Trafic (‘Vingt et un ans après’, in Trafic vol. 1). The future editor-in-chief of the Revue d’études palestiniennes returned to Amman, the capital of Jordan, in the beginning of March 1970 at the request of Mahmoud Hamchari (the Palestinian leader in Paris), and met the “three Frenchmen,” including Godard who, during the first meeting at the Continental Hotel, arrived walking on his hands to the amazement of the young Palestinian militants. Setting off on a location scout towards the Jordan Rift Valley in a Land Rover, Sanbar quickly perceived the degree of the film’s preparation in the two French filmmakers’ heads and notebook. The film was already partially done “on paper”: “Throughout the trip,” writes Sanbar, “Godard did not cease to look at his notes, to add comments to them, to eliminate passages with the help of three different colored markers. This manner of preparing the shoot was maintained for the length of time that work on the film lasted. Godard wrote a lot, with a certain jubilation that seemed to abandon him during the shooting to be replaced by a certain detachment. The scenes were thought out in the smallest details before being filmed. At the beginning, I had the feeling – with everything being discussed, systematized, written and planned – that the film was a kind of pre-established succession of empty cases that we had the task of methodically refilling. […] So well that when something was happened and we were saying to him, ‘Come film this,’ he would respond: ‘I don’t need it for the film…’”

Thus, it was sometimes more a matter of confirming an established plan on location than going to discover a country and a people. According to the Dziga Vertov group, revolutionary cinema is done at this cost: structure and manufacturing precede the recording of reality. Marco attests to this: “We went there to confirm a plan, not to discover a situation that we didn’t know.” This obviously lead to some misunderstandings, like the time when, in a Fedayeen training camp in southern Jordan, Godard and Gorin asked Palestinian fighters to recite an extract from Mao’s Little Red Book that they didn’t know anything about, which they did while laughing wildly behind their keffiyehs. Another time, returning from a mission, Godard waited for the fedayeens to propose to them a “critique and self-critique” meeting, which the Palestinians did not understand, setting themselves to talking in Arab in the background while in the foreground an interpreter continued in English with conventional Fatah slogans. If they had a revolutionary manner – at this Godard started regularly wearing military fatigues, as reported by a journalist from L’Express who went to meet them in Amman in 1970 –, the two French filmmakers were sometimes a bit lost in an unknown territory.

Neither Godard, Gorin, or Marco spoke or understood Arabic, and on both sides the incomprehension mounted. Gorin recounted this often delicate dialogue: “It was a long difficult gestation. We had drawings, outlines in black and red, plans, interruptions. We showed them to the Palestinians who didn’t understand. We didn’t understand any of the language. The translators translated as they wished, generally by slogans they knew by heart. This sometimes became comical, everything that was said to us was summed up as “We will fight until victory,” so often that we ended up laughing. In a pathetic way it confirmed our title. For us, it rather quickly became a silent film, or rather a musical.” But Elias Sanbar describes just as much the opposite phenomenon, when the environment made the filmmakers rethink their judgement and to “remake the film” in another way. Godard returned to his ultra-quick “thief” and “disrupter” of reality reflexes, which greatly impressed his Palestinian companion. “Often, from the moment of return from meetings or filming, and the immediate viewing of the images that we had just “brought back” thanks to heavy video equipment, a confrontation began between the pre-existing text and the images that had just been shot. It ended up most of the time with re-writing and a new request to shoot the same scene, to the great astonishment of the Palestinian representatives. Over the course of days and weeks, Godard appeared to me more and more of a terrific destabilizing force. […] There is something very playful about working with him, but mixed with a form of permanent irritation, because hardly had things been constructed with his meticulous care that he pressed himself to deconstruct them with care to disrupt the gaze that you can bring to the reality that surrounds you.”

The shoot, which actually began in March 1970, to continue with breaks until August, was one of Godard’s longest, and he returned to Paris with more than 40 hours of rushes. Certain things had been impossible to shoot which the Frenchmen had not foreseen. “When the women were teaching themselves to read and write in the Palestinian camps,” remembers Gorin, “the presence of men bothered them, so they refused to be filmed and we didn’t understand why.” Likewise, Jean-Pierre Gorin being Jewish, some other doors were closed to them, notably in the Fatah training camps. Other events fortunately jostled the foreseen plan, notably the meetings with the combatants, animated and joyful in the middle of the dangers of the desert, like in Ghawr al-Safi, in southern Jordan, coming back from which Godard confided to Sanbar, “You know, every people, every revolution possesses a particular characteristic, like an element of its own identity. For the Vietnamese, it was hard labor; for the Cubans, it was dance, and for you, it’s certainly laughter.”

Godard also wanted to meet and film the Palestinian leader. He secured a meeting. The filmmaker posed two questions to Yasser Arafat, the first about the concentration camps. “I asked him if the origins of the Palestinians’ difficulties had something to do with the concentration camps. He said to me, ‘No, that’s their story, the Germans and the Jews.’ And I said, ‘Not exactly, you know that in the camps, when a Jewish prisoner was very weak, close to death, they called him Muslim.’ And he responded, ‘So?’ I said, ‘You know, they could have called them black or an entirely different name, but no, they said Muslim, and that shows that there is a relationship, a direct relationship between the Palestinians’ difficulties and the concentration camps.” The second question was very short, “what is the future of the Palestinian revolution?” And Arafat’s response was even shorter, “I have to think about it, come back tomorrow.” Godard finished the story, “He never came back. At least he was honest.” In mid-July 1970, Armand Marco had to return to France after having badly sprained his knee. The shoot neared its end, Gorin returned to Paris, leaving Godard and Sanbar alone in Amman.

At the beginning of the month of August 1970, Kamal Adwan, Fatah’s information manager, asked Godard to go film Palestinian dancers. As Elias Sanbar recounts, “Kamal greeted us and, a very unusual thing for Palestinians, went directly into the subject, ‘Tell your friend that a Palestinian folklore troupe just arrived in Cairo and that I want you to leave tomorrow to film the show.’ I transmitted the request, smoothing out the angles with paraphrased bits, I didn’t wanted Godard to be hurt. Godard immediately told me and with a stubborn tone, ‘Tell him that his dance story is entirely stupid. I won’t go to Cairo.’ […] Kamal looked Godard straight in the eye and said, ‘And I think you have to go film this troupe,’ to which Godard responded again, ‘I won’t go to Cairo…’ I was allowed two or three repetitions of this exchange before Kamal got up and said, ‘Go to your hotel and wait for instructions.’…” Consigned and forgotten in their rooms at the Amman Continental, Godard and Sanbar waited a good week before discretely leaving for Tyre in south Lebanon, where the filmmaker left a part of his video equipment with the local Fatah director, a movie fan and amateur filmmaker. Then they stayed at the translator’s mother’s house in a village in the Lebanese mountains, before going to Beirut where they met with militant Palestinians from the information section. Godard returned to Paris on August 21, 1970, not without leaving Elias Sanbar, who had become a close friend, the ten volumes of Brecht’s complete poetry.

Gorin and Godard, upon their return to Paris, put in a notebook the list of “filmed images,” notably: “Fedayeen march. Darwish’s poem ‘I Resist’ in the ruins of Karameh. Militia construction. Meeting in the south. Militia in the cave. Two women at typewriters. Militia with machine guns. Preparations, leaving, operation. Dispensary. Ashbal-Zaharat training. Abou Hassan conference. Peasant militia text. Doctor text. Women reading Abou Hassan text. Democratic Front school. “Grassroots organisation” discussion and self-critique. Two AK-47s firing. Safi song. Militia training, with flag. Crowd of children. Fedayeen camouflage. Directors: Abou Latov, Abou Ayad, Abou Daoud, Abou Hassan.” Or, an enormous amount of rushes to view and texts to decipher and translate. The work appeared like it will be long, but Godard and Gorin were happy about one thing: Armand Marco’s cinematography was beautiful and rarely had the filmmaker found himself with material so dense and of such a large quantity, in spite of the numerous misunderstandings of an overly prepared shoot in an unknown land. It is no doubt that it is the quantity, quality and cryptic character of this film material that explains in part the difficulty of transforming it into a film.

Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin – barricaded in their editing studio on Avenue du Maine, completely closed off because they were afraid, at this moment of high tensions in the Middle East, of being victims of agents from Mossad, militants from Betar, or Jordanian secret service agents – will not manage to finish Until Victory. Several reasons may explain the abandonment of the project. First, the ambiguity between two irreconcilable positions – felt on location while shooting – had not been resolved. Was it a propaganda film for the Fatah or a political essay, and thus a critique, on the methods of the Palestinian resistance? The Dziga Vertov group refused to create a militant film as they had been commissioned. This paradox was not new and re-surged with Until Victory as Jean-Henri Roger said, “It wasn’t a question of produce or not producing propaganda images. Now, when you find yourself in front of political apparatuses that is the only kind of request. The PLO wanted Jean-Luc Godard, the great, world renowned filmmaker, to make a ‘progressive and democratic’ film that told the world that the Palestinians were suffering and that the PLO was right.”

Moreover, several weeks after Gorin’s and then Godard’s departure from Jordan, a fair number of fighters, militants, and Palestinian leaders who were in the film were killed during the Black September massacres, when King Hussein decided to liquidate the Palestinian resistance and send its remains to the refugee camps in Amman. 25,000 were counted dead. Gorin said he felt the tension mounting, “the arming of the Jordanians by the Americans,” and the rivalry sharpen between the Jordanian power and its two opponents which were the Fatah and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Following these massacres, the Palestinian situation changed completely. Decapitated and decimated, the liberation movement no longer thought of “victory,” but thought instead about rearming and regrouping. This explosion of internal violence in the Arab camp began to frustrate the Until Victory project, as if the armed struggle, that occupied the film, had been displaced to the very heart of the Palestinian camp. Godard and Gorin were profoundly shaken by Black September. Additionally, the idea of showing the rough cut of the film to the Palestinian militants, dear to the filmmakers, that they had filmed became impossible, since the majority of them had died and going back to the location was problematic. Until victory thus lost its first audience. Godard and Gorin, orphaned, conceived of three or four different versions of the film, but none satisfied them. The later recognized this in an interview with American critics, “There’s still the Palestinian film, that changed a lot. It’s in its third or fourth version and now it is going to have to be done in another way. We can no longer make a film about Palestine because the situation there has changed so radically that, as a result, it will be a film about how to film history.” Until Victory was overtaken by the dramatic story of the people of whom it wanted to offer a revolutionary portrait.

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The film consists of 3 parts, and it’s important to understand the movement animating these 3 parts.

1. The film was undertaken in 1970. At the request of the PLO, JLG goes to the Middle East and shoots several hours of rushes. He returns to France. After the Amman massacres (Sept 1970), he starts wanting to edit the film. But he discovers he can’t do it.

The first part of the film is composed of the images that JLG went looking for in the Palestinian camps. Eventually, he retains only 5 of them, which are like the image force of the PLO’s politics. These images are those that the PLO wants to see broadcast in France. In that sense, they are the images of any propaganda movie. This is the material the film is going to work with.

2. Between 1970 and 1975, Godard tries to come up with an order to edit his film, but he can’t find one. He is very conscious of the fact that many of those he has filmed are now dead and that, as a filmmaker and survivor, he has their image at his disposal. Instead of giving up, he modifies the film and adds other images to the pictures of Palestine, images of France. Mainly of an average French family (the father is unemployed) who watch television. In France, the Left is in a period of retreat and assessment (many dreams have crumbled). It’s also a period where more questions are being asked about the media and their effect on people, about advertising, propaganda, etc.

The second part of the film, the longest and the most complex, cannot be summed up here. It’s an analysis of the “chains of images” in which we are all caught. One of its conclusions is what Godard denounces as “playing the sound too loud” (including the the Internationale), i.e. covering one sound with another, thus becoming incapable of simply seeing what’s in the images.

3. The third part of the film returns to the images of the beginning. But with a dialectical change. There’s no longer one but two voices-over who take the time to watch the images again (like on an editing table) to see both what they are really saying and what’s wrong, to listen to these images. This part is therefore a kind of critique of the first part because it criticises any propaganda, if propaganda means – for a filmmaker – using the image of others to make this image say something else than what the others are saying in it. So what’s at stake is the engagement of a filmmaker as a filmmaker. For it’s in the nature of cinema (delay between the time of shooting and the time of projection) to be the art of here and elsewhere. What Godard says, very uncomfortably and very honestly, is that the true place of the filmmaker is in the AND. A hyphen only has value if it doesn’t confuse what it unites.