One Shot invites close readings of the basic unit of film grammar.
Here and Elsewhere (Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, 1976).
In 1970, Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin traveled to Jordan to work on a documentary titled Jusqu’à la victoire (Until Victory) about the Palestinian resistance group Al Fatah. Only a couple of months after filming ended, Jordanian armed forces stormed Fatah’s base and massacred thousands of Palestinians, including civilians. The defeat dimmed Godard’s spirits, and the film was subsequently abandoned. Four years later, Godard and his partner, Anne-Marie Miéville, reworked the footage into an entirely new project called Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere) (1976). Instead of focusing on the resistance, the revamped film condemns Jusqu’à la victoire for its embellished imagery, misleading editing, and fabricated narratives, which, as Godard admits, would’ve turned the people he had intended to uplift into a consumable fiction for the Western maw.
Godard and Miéville’s critique is channeled through an extended shot of postmodern domesticity: a glibly “socialist” father, his wife, and their two daughters, plopped on and around a green couch, staring vacuously at a television set. In an earlier sequence, their screen shows a matrix of commodity images, interspersed with photos of veiled women, armed fedayeen, and a child’s burnt body. Eyes trained dutifully on the glowing box, the characters look on unfazed, desensitized to the horrors unfolding “elsewhere.” On their side of the world, the existential crisis faced daily by Palestinians is no more than an evening broadcast to unwind to.
The television is a piece of technology that compresses time and space: a tool, like binoculars, that draws the exotic near. But as the shot demonstrates, the screen habituates a lazy form of engagement. Thanks to its mediation, the family can trek through the carnage with complete immunity. And when the image becomes too palpable, too provocative, too real, a simple click of a remote saves them from having to confront their passivity.
From the vantage point of the family’s television, the fixed camera produces a composition that reflects our own—we, too, sit in front of an apparatus to watch Here and Elsewhere. The foregrounding of spectatorship is a classic Brechtian-Godardian technique that reflexively alludes to the status of art as a commercial production. But the mirror image also functions as a metonymic warning. In a society of spectacle, genocide transmutes into another pernicious newsreel or disingenuous headline: visuals which manufacture consent for Palestine’s destruction. Only with a critical eye toward the power relations embedded in the circulation of images can we begin to bridge the gap between “here” and “elsewhere.”