...with the possible exception of Godard's masterly "Marxist
Western" WIND FROM THE EAST. Godard's onetime crony Jean-Pierre Gorin shot some 16mm footage of Palestinian
resistance fighters in 1970; shortly thereafter, almost all the
people Gorin recorded were dead. Godard's film--with some
pungent, questioning commentary by Anne-Marie Mieville--uses
the footage to ask questions about "the representation of the
other": the interesting part is that Godard includes "the politically
sympathetic representation of the other" into his mix. Just when
you start noticing that Gorin's images of cute Palestinian children
doing commando exercises smacks of the Riefenstahlian, Mieville
comes along to point that out more succinctly and poetically than
you ever could. As poetic and eggheadily insular as Godard's
dialectic is, he interrogates the political image more thoroughly
than anyone else in movies. He does it by way of a close reading
that will only fail to exasperate those used to old-school
deconstructors: Godard mines a tremendous amount of insight
through a searching examination of his own use of the word "and"!
In an age when our experience of World War Three is massively
mediated by MSNBC and Fox News (and, as Godard points out,
their images, not just their Limbaughian play-by-play), ICI ET
AILLEURS is a needed deprogramming device. For God's sake,
find some obscure video store and rent it.
