The editing is explicit from the start. Images are assembled that have condensed from intense conversations of the time. What images hold powerful meanings? Let's look at them together and think about how to put them together. We have a sense of images taking part in democratic discourse, or perhaps rather that they must. Color fields can fill the screen and are wiped diagonally with the relentless questioning commentary
it has a very pop art sensibility at these times and at others it is angry and agitprop. I like this mixture a lot. The sense of struggle, passion, disappointment, grief even, is all a driving force to the torrent of imagery and words. One scene shows people queuing to present images to a camera.
Structural ideas are given early on: "She! You! He!"; "5 images and 5 sounds"; the place of Palestinian women in the struggle; binaries like normal or mad, dream or reality. Who are the actors? Apparently they were in danger of death in the early shooting, apparently by Gorin, in Palestine.
In the end, although the composition or narrative is loose and flowing, the main idea is to show how everyday life at the center (back home in France) is complicit with struggle, war and death at the 'periphery'. A poster of Guernica hangs above a girl doing her homework. Homework like Le Travail Politique.The ET of the title is made as a 3D model and used as the film's fulcrum of ideas.
Technology and screens of mediation are everywhere. Cameras, projectors and TVs are all part of the imagery.
Commentary, I hear it is by Mieville, is relentless or rather feverish thinking, questioning, doubt everything. It is a process of passionate reflection on totality counterpointed with the flow of jumpily cut images moving and still. It's more like a music mix behind an obsessive and looping rap. Sometimes scenes are attention grabbing by composition and color, sometimes riveting film shots like the young boy declaiming with great passion, and at some length, amongst ruins of a building what was he saying? The close-up of a Palestinian woman asked to repeat a long text relating to the struggle and gradually getting uncomfortable and bored being made to do this performance. The filmmakers commentary questions her indoctrination and how the scrutiny of the camera can show it is not effective. Later we see a revolutionary leader speaking to a crowd and the narrator observes that he is 'too far' from the people.
The whole film is an analysis of the tragic failure of revolution in Palestine at that time. The scene with the four or five Palestinian liberation fighters discussing strategy in a field is core as its meaning shifts from heroic to pathos as we learn later they were all killed.
That is why the film that was called 'Victory' in 1970 is by 1974 called 'Ici Et Ailleurs'. Amman September 1970 seems to be when the deadly gory reality of war brushes away the idealism expressed in events earlier in the year? We have to remember this is only two years after Paris 1968. The idealism of western revolutionary rhetoric is brought into conflict with the realities of violent revolution. This requires urgent reflection on everything!
The action repeatedly flips back home to a 'normal' western family watching TV. This banal scene repeats reminding us of our distance to the wars we finance and promote.
Allusions are made to 'The Silence' of the media. I assume this silence to be about anything that threatens the hegemony of the establishment. The Silence that becomes deadly.
Calls for an active discussion of our consumption of images? The later close-up shots of amplitude meters on recording equipment and a long shot of a volume slider control on an amplifier become metaphors as well as making the technology of making transparent.
Questioning the illusion-making of TV and cinema. ( A slightly longer version posted to my Blog)
Structural ideas are given early on: "She! You! He!"; "5 images and 5 sounds"; the place of Palestinian women in the struggle; binaries like normal or mad, dream or reality. Who are the actors? Apparently they were in danger of death in the early shooting, apparently by Gorin, in Palestine.
In the end, although the composition or narrative is loose and flowing, the main idea is to show how everyday life at the center (back home in France) is complicit with struggle, war and death at the 'periphery'. A poster of Guernica hangs above a girl doing her homework. Homework like Le Travail Politique.The ET of the title is made as a 3D model and used as the film's fulcrum of ideas.
Technology and screens of mediation are everywhere. Cameras, projectors and TVs are all part of the imagery.
Commentary, I hear it is by Mieville, is relentless or rather feverish thinking, questioning, doubt everything. It is a process of passionate reflection on totality counterpointed with the flow of jumpily cut images moving and still. It's more like a music mix behind an obsessive and looping rap. Sometimes scenes are attention grabbing by composition and color, sometimes riveting film shots like the young boy declaiming with great passion, and at some length, amongst ruins of a building what was he saying? The close-up of a Palestinian woman asked to repeat a long text relating to the struggle and gradually getting uncomfortable and bored being made to do this performance. The filmmakers commentary questions her indoctrination and how the scrutiny of the camera can show it is not effective. Later we see a revolutionary leader speaking to a crowd and the narrator observes that he is 'too far' from the people.
The whole film is an analysis of the tragic failure of revolution in Palestine at that time. The scene with the four or five Palestinian liberation fighters discussing strategy in a field is core as its meaning shifts from heroic to pathos as we learn later they were all killed.
That is why the film that was called 'Victory' in 1970 is by 1974 called 'Ici Et Ailleurs'. Amman September 1970 seems to be when the deadly gory reality of war brushes away the idealism expressed in events earlier in the year? We have to remember this is only two years after Paris 1968. The idealism of western revolutionary rhetoric is brought into conflict with the realities of violent revolution. This requires urgent reflection on everything!
The action repeatedly flips back home to a 'normal' western family watching TV. This banal scene repeats reminding us of our distance to the wars we finance and promote.
Allusions are made to 'The Silence' of the media. I assume this silence to be about anything that threatens the hegemony of the establishment. The Silence that becomes deadly.
Calls for an active discussion of our consumption of images? The later close-up shots of amplitude meters on recording equipment and a long shot of a volume slider control on an amplifier become metaphors as well as making the technology of making transparent.
Questioning the illusion-making of TV and cinema. ( A slightly longer version posted to my Blog)