Product Review

Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless) initiated his radical video period with this startling film that combines videotape and film, enabling him to superimpose more than two images simultaneously. Made as part of the "Dziga Vertov Group", with Jean-Pierre Gorin and Anne-Marie Mi‚ville, the film was commissioned by the Palestinians and originally titled Until Victory. The film's original purpose was to examine life in the Palestinian camps. But following the defeat of the Palestinian army in the Six Day War, Ici et Ailleurs was radically transformed becoming a meditation on how cinema records history. Godard, Gorin and Mi‚ville contrast a French family (Here) with an impressionistic portrait of Palestine (Elsewhere) reflected and transmitted by television, books and pictures.