Genre Documentary

Here and Elsewhere (1976)

Item: Here and Elsewhere
Author: Ross McLaren

Here and Elsewhere has an origin story that is, in itself, a kind of lesson in the gap between intention and outcome. In 1970, Jean-Luc Godard was working collectively under the banner of the Dziga Vertov Group, a politically radical filmmaking project he had co-founded with Jean-Pierre Gorin in the aftermath of May '68. The group travelled to Jordan and Lebanon to document Palestinian fedayeen fighters, producing material that was intended as an act of cinematic solidarity. Then came Black September in 1970, and the footage sat in limbo. Years later, Godard returned to it with his creative and life partner Anne-Marie Miéville, and the two of them transformed it into something altogether different: a fifty-five-minute film produced through their own Sonimage company and the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel, released in 1976. What had begun as a fairly straightforward (if politically charged) documentary became a reflexive, essay-form interrogation of the very project it had set out to be.

Godard by this point in his career had long since left behind the nouvelle vague playfulness of the 1960s. The Dziga Vertov period had been wilfully difficult and aggressively Maoist, and Here and Elsewhere can be read as a kind of reckoning with that phase, a filmmaker turning the camera on his own assumptions and finding them wanting. The film's French title, Ici et Ailleurs, sets up the central tension immediately: the "here" of a French family passively watching television, and the "elsewhere" of Palestinian camps and struggle. Miéville's contribution is not incidental; she is credited as co-director and the film's moral and formal intelligence bears her imprint as much as Godard's. For those who have explored other French documentary work on this site, such as Nom Tèw (2009) or the formally inventive Little by Little (1970), the collision of politics and form will feel like familiar, if demanding, territory.

The cast, if that word even applies here, consists essentially of Godard and Miéville themselves, present as voices and organising intelligences rather than performers in any conventional sense. The film's human subjects are the Palestinian families and fighters caught on that original footage, people whose images are handled with a self-consciousness that becomes the film's whole subject. It sits in an unusual position among documentaries of its era: far more formally radical than the observational tradition, and far more ethically troubled than the agit-prop films it grew out of. Compared to other documentaries of the period covered on this site, including Candomblé in Togo (1972) and A River Called Titas (1973), it occupies genuinely unusual ground, polished but unremarkable it is not.

Here and Elsewhere (1976), originally conceived as a pro-Palestinian documentary by Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, and Anne-Marie Miéville, evolved into something far more complex. A self-interrogating meditation on image-making, political idealism, and the ethics of representation. What began as footage shot in Palestinian refugee camps during the early 1970s was reworked years later into a fragmented, essayistic film that questions not only Western complicity in Middle Eastern conflict but also the filmmakers’ own assumptions about truth, solidarity, and cinematic responsibility. The result is intellectually rigorous, emotionally harrowing, and deliberately disorienting. Rather than offering a linear narrative or clear polemic, the film layers voiceover, still images, archival material, and staged scenes to expose how easily images can lie, even when made with good intentions. It confronts the gap between revolutionary rhetoric and lived reality, between the romanticised “elsewhere” of distant struggle and the quiet violence of everyday erasure. The personal becomes political in the most unsettling way: children reciting slogans they don’t understand, families displaced yet dignified, landscapes scarred by war and neglect. What makes it so tragically resonant today (nearly 50 years later) is how little has changed. The cycles of displacement, occupation, and failed diplomacy continue, rendering the film not just a historical document but a chilling prophecy. Its insights feel painfully current, its warnings unheeded. Here and Elsewhere is not easy viewing, it’s dense, abstract, and at times alienating by design. But its moral urgency and formal daring make it essential. It doesn’t tell you what to think; it forces you to question how you see. A harrowing, brilliant, and deeply humanist work that lingers long after the screen goes dark, especially when the same tragedies keep repeating, decade after decade.

I'll be honest: films like this one don't make it easy to know what to do with yourself afterwards. You sit with it, turn it over, and find it still there the next morning, which is about the highest compliment I can pay any film of fifty-five minutes. The question of how images travel, who controls them, and who gets erased in the editing feels, if anything, more live now than it did in 1976. I'd point anyone who wants to keep pulling at that thread towards some of the other French productions I've covered here, particularly Mustang (2015) and Sugar Cane Alley (1983), both of which wrestle, in very different registers, with questions of visibility, power, and who gets to tell whose story. Here and Elsewhere won't be for everyone, and it doesn't particularly want to be. But it earns every difficult minute.

Rating: Not rated | Year: 1976 | Watched: 2026-05-13

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