Elsewhere: Dialogue of Points of View: Jean-Luc Godard and Tiersmondisme

In 1969 Godard, Armand Marco and Jean-Pierre Gorin (the Dziga Vertov Group) visited Palestinian training and refugee camps to make a film sponsored by the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Drawing a genealogy of Western intellectuals’ engagement with Third World struggles, I posit anxiety of blindness and the fear of blind naive identification as the key issues Godard grappled with as he completed the film as Ici et ailleurs in 1974 in collaboration with Anne-Marie Mieville. In order to sustain this claim, I compare Ici et ailleurs to Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1974) and Chung Kuo Cina (1976). Antonioni was asking many of the same questions as was Godard in this regard: Is it possible to go beyond the ideological veil imposed by the framework of the official visit? How is it possible to account for one’s position as an external observer? Finally, both Godard and Antonioni tackled the problem of “objectivity” in relationship to objectivity and the circulation of images of conflict “elsewhere” in the mass media.