Monday Night – 03.06.06 — Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere) — Groupe Dziga Vertov
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Contents:
1. About Monday Night
2. About Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere)
3. Excerpt from”THE ARTICULATION OF PROTEST”
4. link to last week’s screening of Vladimir et Rosa and information on the Dziga Vertov Group
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1. About Monday Night
What: Screening / discussion
Where: 16 Beaver Street, 4th floor (directions below)
When: Monday Night 03.06.2006 @ 7:30 Pm
Who: Open and Free To All
Last week we screened Vladimir Et Rosa, and the idea is to go on with our discussion about the work of the Dziga Vertov Group, and to screen another film, Ici et Ailleurs.
hope you can make it.
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2. About Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere)
Directed by Groupe Dziga Vertov Anne-Marie Mieville, Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin 1976
Short Description:
Initially begun as a documentary about Palestinian revolutionaries, Ici et Ailleurs (in English, Here and Elsewhere) was ultimately transformed into an hour-long filmed essay addressing the relationship between politics and image, the problems of documentary filmmaking, and the danger of media saturation. Collaborators Jean-Pierre Gorin and Anne-Marie Melville began the film with funding from Palestinian forces, under the title Victory, intending to create a sympathetic portrait of the revolutionaries as a true people’s movement. Not long after the filmmakers’ return to France, however, most of their subjects were killed in warfare, and the issues behind the film no longer seemed so simple. At this point Jean-Luc Godard joined the production, helping create a series of scenes focusing on the life of a middle-class French family; this is the “Here” portion of the film, with Palestine as “Elsewhere.” By editing together documentary and fictional footage, and commenting on these images through photo collages, title screens, and other reflexive techniques, the film questions the association between political thought and the structures of fiction.. ~ Judd Blaise, All Movie Guide
In a passage of the film, Mieville narrates:
“All that, we had all organized like that. All the sounds, all the images, in that order. All the sounds, all the images, in that order saying: here is what was beautiful in the Middle East. Five images, five sounds that hadn’t been heard or seen on Arab earth. The people’s will, plus the armed struggle equal the people’s war, plus the political work equal the people’s education, plus the people’s logic equal the popular war extended until victory of the Palestinian people. And this is what one, what he, what I, what she, what you had shot elsewhere.”
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3. Excerpt from”THE ARTICULATION OF PROTEST” by
Hito Steyerl
http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors3/steyerltext2.html
Ici et Ailleurs
In this film, on the other hand, this method of the mere addition of demands resulting together in the “voice of the people” is severely criticized – along with the concept of the voice of the people itself. The directors, or rather the editors of the film Ici et Ailleurs[3], Godard and Mieville, take a radically critical position with respect to the terms of the popular. Their film consists of a self-critique of a self-produced film fragment. The collective Dziga Vertov (Godard/Morin) shot a commissioned film on the PLO in 1970. The heroizing propaganda film that blusters about the people’s battle was called “Until Victory” and was never finished. It consisted of several parts with titles such as: the armed battle, political work, the will of the people, the extended war – until victory. It showed battle training, scenes of exercise and shooting, and scenes of PLO agitation, formally in an almost senseless chain of equivalencies, in which every image, as it later proved, is forced into the anti-imperialistic fantasy. Four years later, Godard and Mieville inspect the material more closely again. They note that parts of the statements of PLO adherents were never translated or were staged to begin with. They reflect on the stagings and the blatant lies of the material – but most of all on their own participation in this, in the way they organized the pictures and sound. They ask: How did the adjuring formula of the “voice of the people” function here as populist noise to eliminate contradictions? What does it mean to edit the Internationale into any and every picture, rather like the way butter is smeared on bread? Which political and aesthetic notions are added together under the pretext of the “voice of the people”? Why did this equation not work? In general, Godard/Mieville arrive at the conclusion: the additive “and” of the montage, with which they edit one picture onto another, is not an innocent one and certainly not unproblematic.
Today the film is shockingly up to date, but not in the sense of offering a position on the Middle East conflict. On the contrary, it is the problematizing of the concepts and patterns, in which conflicts and solidarity are abridged to binary oppositions of betrayal or loyalty and reduced to unproblematic additions and pseudo-causalities, that makes it so topical. For what if the model of addition is wrong? Or if the additive “and” does not represent an addition, but rather grounds a subtraction, a division or no relation at all? Specifically, what if the “and” in this “here and elsewhere”, in this France and Palestine does not represent an addition, but rather a subtraction?[4] What if two political movements not only do not join, but actually hinder, contradict, ignore or even mutually exclude one another? What if it should be “or” rather than “and”, or “because” or “instead of”? And then what does an empty phrase like “the will of the people” mean?
Transposed to a political level, the questions are thus: On which basis can we even draw a political comparison between different positions or establish equivalencies or even alliances? What is even made comparable at all? What is added together, edited together, and which differences and opposites are leveled for the sake of establishing a chain of equivalencies? What if this “and” of political montage is functionalized, specifically for the sake of a populist mobilization? And what does this question mean for the articulation of protest today, if nationalists, protectionists, anti-Semites, conspiracy theorists, Nazis, religious groups and reactionaries all line up in the chain of equivalencies with no problem at anti-globalization demos? Is this a simple case of the principle of unproblematic addition, a blind “and”, that presumes that if sufficient numbers of different interests are added up, at some point the sum will be the people?
Godard and Mieville do not relate their critique solely to the level of political articulation, in other words the expression of internal organization, but specifically also to the organization of its expression. Both are very closely connected. An essential component of this problematic issue is found in how pictures and sounds are organized, edited and arranged. A Fordist articulation organized according to the principles of mass culture will blindly reproduce the templates of its masters, according to their thesis, so it has to be cut off and problematized. This is also the reason why Godard/Mieville are concerned with the chain of production of pictures and sound, but in comparison with Indymedia, they choose an entirely different scene – they show a crowd of people holding pictures, wandering past a camera as though on a conveyor belt and pushing each other aside at the same time. A row of people carrying pictures of the “battle” is linked together by machine following the logic of the assembly line and camera mechanics. Here Godard/Mieville translate the temporal arrangement of the film images into a spatial arrangement. What becomes evident here are chains of pictures that do not run one after the other, but rather are shown at the same time. They place the pictures next to one another and shift their framing into the focus of attention. What is revealed is the principle of their concatenation. What appears in the montage as an often invisible addition is problematized in this way and set in relation to the logic of machine production. This reflection on the chain of production of pictures and sounds in this sequence makes it possible to think about the conditions of representation on film altogether. The montage results within an industrial system of pictures and sounds, whose concatenation is organized from the start – just as the principle of the production sequence from Showdown in Seattle is marked by its assumption of conventional schemata of production.
In contrast, Godard/Mieville ask: how do the pictures hang on the chain, how are they chained together, what organizes their articulation, and which political significances are generated in this way? Here we see an experimental situation of concatenation, in which pictures are relationally organized. Pictures and sounds from Nazi Germany, Palestine, Latin America, Viet Nam and other places are mixed wildly together – and added with a number of folk songs or songs that invoke the people from right-wing and left-wing contexts. First of all, this much is evident, this results in the impression that the pictures naturally attain their significance through their concatenation. But secondly, and this is much more important, we see that impossible concatenations occur: pictures from the concentration camp and Vnceremos songs, Hitler’s voice and a picture of My Lai, Hitler’s voice and a picture of Golda Meir, My Lai and Lenin. It becomes clear that the basis of this voice of the people, which we hear in its diverse articulations and at the level of which the experiment takes place, is in fact not a basis for creating equivalencies, but instead brings up the radical political contradictions that it is striving to cover up. It generates sharp discrepancies within the silent coercion – as Adorno would say – of the identity relationship. It effects contraries instead of equations, and beyond the contraries even sheer dread – everything except an unproblematic addition of political desire. For what this populist chain of equivalencies mainly displays at this point is the void that it is structured around, the empty inclusivist AND that just keeps blindly adding and adding outside the realm of all political criteria.
In summary we can say that the principle of the voice of the people assumes an entirely different role in the two films. Although it is the organizing principle in Seattle, the principle that constitutes the gaze, it is never problematized itself. The voice of the people functions here like a blind spot, a lacuna, which constitutes the entire field of the visible, according to Lacan, but only becomes visible itself as a kind of cover. It organizes the chain of equivalencies without allowing breaks and conceals that its political objective does not go beyond an unquestioned notion of inclusivity. The voice of the people is thus simultaneously the organizing principle of both a concatenation and a suppression. Yet what does it suppress? In an extreme case we can say that the empty topos of the voice of the people only covers up a lacuna, specifically the lacuna of the question of the political measures and goals that are supposed to be legitimized by invoking the people.
So what are the prospects for the articulation of a protest movement based on the model of an “and” – as though inclusion at any cost were its primary goal? In relation to what is the political concatenation organized? Why actually? Which goals and criteria have to be formulated – even if they might not be so popular? And does there not have to be a much more radical critique of the articulation of ideology using pictures and sounds? Does not a conventional form mean a mimetic clinging to the conditions that are to be critiqued, a populist form of blind faith in the power of the addition of arbitrary desires? Is it not therefore sometimes better to break the chains, than to network everyone with everyone else at all costs?
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4. link to last week’s screening of Vladimir et Rosa and information on the Dziga Vertov Group
http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday/archives/001822.php