Godard in a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan during the filming of “Here and There” (Facebook)
with Jean-Luc Godard dies (September 13, 2022), the discussion regarding his sympathy for the Palestinian cause, which is evident in the completion of his period of commitment, was raised once more, and some revived the accusation of anti-Semitism, which reached its climax when he announced that he won an “honorary Oscar” for all of his films, in 2010.
distance 1967 setbackGodard took a pro trend for the Palestinian cause, and anti-Zionism, in keeping with the spirit of the internationalist left, which saw Israel’s invasion of Arab lands as a violation of international legitimacy, and a further persecution and displacement of the Palestinian people, as a new extension of global imperialism in the Middle East. At the end of 1969, Godard and his companion from the “Dziga Vertov” group, Jean-Pierre Goran, received an offer from the Fatah movement, to shoot a film entitled “Until Victory” in the Palestinian camps in Jordan and Lebanon, with a budget of only $6,000. Film critic and historian Antoine de Biac recounts that Godard asked to meet Yasser Arafat during filming, using the services of a young translator, Elias Sanbar, and asked him two questions. The second, for which he did not receive an answer, dealt with Arafat’s vision of the future of the Palestinian revolution; While the first carried with it Godard’s central position on the Jewish question: “Is there a connection between the suffering of the Palestinians and the extermination camps?” The Palestinian commander replied, “No. This is the history of the Germans and the Jews.” “Not really,” said Godard. “Do you know that German soldiers used to call a Jewish prisoner ‘Muslim’ when he became very weak and near death?” Then, Abu Ammar asked: “So what?” The director replied: “(…) This shows that there is a direct relationship between the plights of the Palestinians and the extermination camps.”
Weeks following the end of filming, the events of “Black September” in Jordan (starting on September 12, 1970) caused the killing of most of the revolutionary resistance fighters depicted in a film, the duration of which exceeded 44 hours. His new companion, Anne-Marie Melville, part of it in a film, called “Here and There” (1976), in which they provided an eloquent cinematic lesson on the interaction of images with sounds, the theory of mixing layers of sound (from the basics of Godard’s style, according to Jean Duchet), and how to manipulate the means of The media, in the forefront of television, with pictures, obscuring the most important ones, in order to serve certain economic and political interests.
The two directors completed a superimposed montage between several images, from the perspective of historical comparison, including images of burned corpses in World War II, and scenes of burning the corpses of Palestinian guerrillas in Jordan. But putting a picture of Adolf Hitler next to a picture of Golda Meir, raising her hand in a kind of Nazi salute, made for the still inkblot shot. From the film’s commentary, there is a sentence that has stuck in mind: “The Jews are making the Arabs taste what they themselves suffered from the Nazis.”
Jean-Luc Godard’s preoccupation with the “Jewish Question” began since “Married Woman” (1964), when he dealt with the Auschwitz trials from the angle of dark irony (on the limits of decent) of the naive anti-Semitism, prevalent among the French bourgeoisie at the time, and followed – in what seemed to be anticipatory For the dialectical montage format, which would later be central to the perception of his documentaries – screen shots, “Night and Fog” (1956), Alain Resnais’ documentary regarding extermination centers, features scenes of love between the heroine and her lover in a hotel room. A duality that expresses a vision that Godard expressed early in critical texts in which he touched on films such as “Capo” (1961) by Gilo Pontecorvo (on the extermination of the Jews), and “Hiroshima, my love” (1959) by René (on the atomic bomb). An aesthetic synthesis of images belonging to the lexicon of extermination is a breach of morality (citing Luc Mollet, “The follow-up shot is a matter of morality”), and a vulgarity that evokes the commodification of sex prevalent in television at the time.
Then came his huge project, “History/History (Stories) of Cinema” (1988 and 1998), to answer a complex of guilt that has kept haunting the director of “Alfaville” (1965), which is the inability of cinema to record history and its major events, foremost of which is “The Holocaust.” , as the most important event of the twentieth century, and formulated the events of its second half, in the absence of cinema, which, in his view, turned into a machine for serving totalitarian propaganda and imperial interests, bearing in its genes the features of the great project of murder, the “final solution”, or the idea of “death within the eye” ( 2004), the title of the reference work for Stefan Zgdansky, which later fueled a long and inspiring dialogue between the two men.
As a picture director, Godard found it very difficult to grasp the law of words, constantly researching their roots and derivations: “A Catholic, I know what it means: a person who goes to Mass. But I don’t know what ‘Jew’ means. I don’t understand.” Jean-Luc Godard, in Alain Fleischer’s film, ‘Cut Conversations with Jean-Luc Godard’ (2007) is pleased.
In “Our Music” (2004), filmed during the European Book Conference in Sarajevo, Godard added an important building block to his committed achievement in the cause of Palestine. The “Promised Land”, which they have long imagined and dreamed of, and the other presents Palestinians expelled from their lands to exile overseas, commenting: “Jews join the field of fiction, while Palestinians become material for documentary.” Godard’s synthesis, rather than aligning and rapprochement, divides and separates, in the words of Gilles Deleuze (another sympathizer with the Palestinian cause), in his book “The Image – Time” (1985).
“Musicana” ends with an explosion in a cinema hall in Israel, following it began with a young Israeli journalist in “Haaretz”, carrying out an investigation, the subject of which is “Why Sarajevo? Because there is Palestine…”. Godard managed to provoke misunderstandings, and to keep his work open to interpretations and counter-interpretations, being a porter of aspects, not content with repeating postulates, and not content with ditching in simple and Manichean judgments. In his view, cinema works like a microscope and a telescope, when it shows us only what we cannot see without it.