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Propaganda and its interrogation, "pauvre idiot de révolutionnaire." Palestine ca. 1970, fedayeen training camps for children (cp. Herzog's Ballade vom kleinen Soldaten), Uzis and anthems in the desert. The divided world, Cocteau's "death at work" in the filming of guerilla fighters soon to be killed. Some six years later a Parisian working-class family manacled to their TV set, absorbing and forgetting sights and sounds within a "vague and complicated system." A Jean-Luc Godard film twice made, first with Jean-Pierre Gorin as an unfinished Dziga Vertov Group pamphlet and then with Anne-Marie Miéville as a meditative criticism of it. Here and elsewhere, questions and answers, theory and practice, art and audience. "D'abord évidemment le peuple." Montage is a line of folks holding photographs before the camera, no longer enough, a wall of screens provides an alternative. Lenin to Hitler to Golda Meir, Auschwitz and Treblinka to Munich. "L'Internationale" thunderous and silent, the persistent yearning for "images that leave marks." Middle East upheaval in 16mm and European complacency in the studio and in the household, Godard sorting through footage (one Lebanese speaker is selected for her beauty and youth, another quickly grows bored with the long text she's given to recite) in tandem with Miéville's inquiries. Blackboards and calculators, a matter of adding zeros, flickering puns for Nixon "the gangster" and other figures. "KILL. KISS. INGER." The little Fatah girl amid ruins reads a poem by Darwish, the one at home does her homework under a Guernica poster. Theaters of upheaval then and now, the first step is getting off the couch. "The contradictions explode, and you with them." Prénom Carmen takes up the static monitor at the close.
--- Fernando F. Croce |