Consuming Palestine: anticapitalism and anticolonialism in Jean-Luc Godard’s Ici et ailleurs

Abstract

This article examines the historical conjunction of anticapitalist and anticolonial movements in France in the late 1960s and early 1970s through a close reading of Jean-Luc Godard’s short film on Vietnam, Camera-eye, and the pro-Palestinian film he made in collaboration with Jean-Pierre Gorin and Anne-Marie Miéville, Ici et ailleurs. Though Ici et ailleurs is exemplary of the double critique of capital and empire that crystallised in the Marxist–Leninist and Maoist discourses of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Godard and Miéville’s film does not take for granted the convergence of progressive leftist and anticolonial discourse. On the contrary, it deconstructs the facile consumption of Third World revolutions in order to pose the conditions of a truly political engagement with anticolonial struggles. The apparently unrelated critique of consumer culture in what was initially a propaganda film for the Palestinian resistance enables Godard and Miéville to advocate for ‘the cause of the other’ without turning Palestine into an object of consumption for a complacent, post-revolutionary left.