Recencies van critici

The film that Godard and Miéville would produce in the wake of Until Victory‘s failure, released to small and largely hostile audiences in 1976 as Ici et Ailleurs, is a radical, acerbic, and completely remarkable work of deconstructive self-criticism, and if it's not remembered as a great film, if it's indeed remembered at all, it should still stand, for Godard, as an important first step away from propagandistic abstraction and toward a recalibrated, newly reenergized approach to filmmaking.

As a first document of Godard and Miéville speaking together in the first person and representing their personal and artistic relationship, the film is an important step in Godard's artistic reconstruction. As a political film, it is a work of propaganda, not inquiry.

The marriage of form and upheaval remains dysfunctional, but the film has the elation of hope: When Anne-Marie Miéville's voice joins in to complement, question, and undercut the Godard-Gorin collage, there is the unmistakable optimism of mutual dialogue trumping proletyzing harangue, and pushing forward.

It's perhaps the most complex of all of these works [the Dziga Vertov Group films], a stunning reflection on the Palestinian resistance, on the political dimensions of sound and image, and on the failure of European radicalism after 1968... Ici et ailleurs is one of the greatest of all political films, achieving an extraordinary formal density with its layered images, sounds, and histories, as well as a political lucidity that remains all too relevant today.

A stunning and disturbing work, ICI ET AILLEURS is structured around many dichotomies and juxtapositions... and makes provocative, distressing analogies between the Holocaust and the Palestinian uprising. The film's summation – a rich and brilliant flurry of ideas – attempts to draw these "either/or" conditions into the dialectic of the "et" or "and" of the title, striving to see images, and the world, whole.

As Colin MacCabe points out, when "Godard went to Palestine to find images of the revolution that had never been seen in France, the sound (the political analysis, the practice of the Dziga-Vertov group) was too loud... so loud that it was impossible to see one's own activity in the image, finally too loud even to see what was in the image itself." Honestly, modestly, even beautifully, Ici et Ailleurs sets out to redress that imbalance, and it does so without vanity or masochism.