Here and Elsewhere + Godard in America + ScreenTalk

This double bill brings together two films made around Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin’s unfinished project Until Victory, tracing its journey from the Palestinian resistance to American university campuses and, later, Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville’s critical return to the material. Together, the films explore the possibilities and contradictions of revolutionary filmmaking, while reflecting on how images of political struggle are made, circulated and re-examined across time and place.

Here and Elsewhere (Ici et Ailleurs), dir. Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, France 1976, 53 min.

In 1970, the Groupe Dziga Vertov began making Until Victory, a film about the Palestinian resistance in a refugee camp in Amman, Jordan, but the project remained unfinished. Four years later, Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville revisit the footage and invest video resources to review the image by the light of the present, their present and that of French society, with the crises and representations that mark it. Here, the home of an ordinary French family gathered around its TV set. Elsewhere, exiled people express themselves, get organized and fight in the hope of returning to their land.

Godard in America, dir. Ralph Thanhauser, 1970 USA, 44 min.

In 1970, Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin travelled across American universities to raise funds for Until Victory, their unfinished film about the Palestinian resistance. Godard in America captures the pair debating revolutionary politics with politically engaged students and presenting Godard’s plans for the film through storyboards and drawings. The film offers a vivid portrait of American universities during a period of growing radicalism, while revealing the tensions and contradictions of Godard and Gorin’s own

The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with Claire Nicolas, Abla Kandalaft and Jamal Awar.

They will discuss Godard's films in and engagement with Palestine in context, as well as their relevance both at the time and today, given the wider geopolitical changes and changes within the global Palestine solidarity movement. The discussion will touch on the role and responsibility of artists, the use of language and the rights of who gets to tell those stories.

Here and Elsewhere (Ici et Ailleurs), dir. Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, France 1976, 53 min.