Pages 467-473 of Antoine de Baecque's GODARD BIOGRAPHIE on the making of Godard and Gorin's Jusqu'à la victoire.
In February 1969, Yasser Arafat is elected president of the
PLO – the Palestinian Liberation Organization, created in 1964 – and his party,
the Fatah, becomes the majority leader of it.
In this frame, the first films of the Palestinian cinema appear since a
film unit is founded by the Fatah in Amman, Jordan under the aegis of three
pioneers, Hany Jawhariyya, Sulafa Jadallah and Mustapha Abu Ali, who made, for
example, The Burnt Land in 1968 and No to the Defeatist Solution in 1969,
the first militant films against the Israeli attacks and the Rogers Plan. It is also by the intermediary of the Fatah,
at least due to its financial, logistical, and ideological support, that a
Western “anti-Zionist cinema” is born with films such as Jean-Pierre Olivier de
Sardan’s Palestine vaincra, the
current events series Palestine made
by French reporter Paul-Louis Soulier, and
the medium-length film Biladi in 1969
and 1970, an inspired and lyrical but equally poetic and sometimes disenchanted
piece of reporting about the Palestinian people directed by Francis Reusser (a
young Swiss filmmaker of the extreme left).
It is in this political and cinematic context that Godard
and Gorin’s project, entitled Until
Victory, is born. Contacted by the
Arab League, via Hany Jawhariyya (the “official” filmmaker of the Fatah),
Godard received a commission in 1969, for about 6,000 dollars, and an
invitation in good and due form to be able to shoot in the Palestinian camps in
Jordan, the West Bank, and Lebanon, under the protection of the Fatah, who also
put guides and interpreters at his disposal.
Godard obtained supplemental financing from Jacques Perrin (the
actor-producer gave 20,000 francs), German and Dutch TV stations (8,000 and
5,000 dollars respectively), and the usual Claude Nedjar (8,000), or a total of
about 70,000 francs.
Before leaving, Godard, Gorin and Marco drew up the “outline
of a Palestinian film commissioned by El Fatah” that summed up in several
slogans their still imprecise intentions: “What happened to the American Indians
can not happen to the Palestinians. The
armed struggle is not a military adventure; it is the struggle of the
people. Palestinian face and Arab heart. War of national liberation = social
struggle. First create unity (El
Fatah).” This preparatory document ends
with several verses from Mahmoud Darwish’s poem Identity Card, a veritable Palestinian hymn published in the
collection Leaves of Olives in 1964:
“Record!
I am
an Arab
You
have stolen the orchards of my ancestors
And
the land which I cultivated
Along
with my children
And
you left nothing for us
Except
for these rocks.
So
will the State take them
As
it has been said!?
Therefore!
Record
on the top of the first page:
I do
not hate people
Nor
do I encroach
But
if I become hungry
The
usurper's flesh will be my food
Beware…
Beware…
Of
my hunger
And
my anger!”
Next,
Godard and Gorin worked non-stop to put together a precise storyboard about
what they wished to film in Palestine.
This takes the shape of a big spiral-bound notebook where most of the
shots of the future film are drawn, often sequences of an allegorical kind or
short cautionary sketches, accompanied by slogans, words and emblematic
phrases, including notes about movements, colors, and references to certain
texts. The explicit goal of the film as
prepared in Paris consisted in “understanding the thought and working methods
of the Palestinian revolution”: “As Frenchmen, we have conceived the film as a
film on the Arabs that was never made during the Algerian War.” Godard seemed to want to make up for the time
lost ten years before when he made Le
Petit soldat instead of a film supporting the NLF.
The three Vertovians left for Jordan for the first time at
the end of November 1969, and made a total of six trips to the Middle East
until the following August, regularly punctuated by return trips to Paris or
trips to other parts of the world – especially for Godard who was often called
back to France, for example, to attempt to deal with the crisis that effected
his relationship with Anne Wiazemsky.
Elias Sanbar, a young intellectual and militant French-speaking
Palestinian called from Paris by the Fatah to serve as a guide and interpreter
recounted his visits and the shoot in a beautiful article published in Trafic.
The future editor-in-chief of the Revue
d’études palestiniennes returned to Amman, the capital of Jordan,
in the beginning of March 1970 at the request of Mahmoud Hamchari (the
Palestinian leader in Paris), and met the “three Frenchmen,” including Godard
who, during the first meeting at the Continental Hotel, arrived walking on his
hands to the amazement of the young Palestinian militants. Setting off on a location scout towards the
Jordan Rift Valley in a Land Rover, Sanbar quickly perceived the degree of the
film’s preparation in the two French filmmakers’ heads and notebook. The film was already partially done “on
paper”: “Throughout the trip,” writes Sanbar, “Godard did not cease to look at
his notes, to add comments to them, to eliminate passages with the help of
three different colored markers. This
manner of preparing the shoot was maintained for the length of time that work
on the film lasted. Godard wrote a lot,
with a certain jubilation that seemed to abandon him during the shooting to be
replaced by a certain detachment. The
scenes were thought out in the smallest details before being filmed. At the beginning, I had the feeling – with
everything being discussed, systematized, written and planned – that the film
was a kind of pre-established succession of empty cases that we had the task of
methodically refilling. […] So well that when something was happened and
we were saying to him, ‘Come film this,’ he would respond: ‘I don’t need it for
the film…’”
Thus, it was sometimes more a matter of confirming an established plan on location than going to discover a country and a people. According to the Dziga Vertov group, revolutionary cinema is done at this cost: structure and manufacturing precede the recording of reality. Marco attests to this: “We went there to confirm a plan, not to discover a situation that we didn’t know.” This obviously lead to some misunderstandings, like the time when, in a Fedayeen training camp in southern Jordan, Godard and Gorin asked Palestinian fighters to recite an extract from Mao’s Little Red Book that they didn’t know anything about, which they did while laughing wildly behind their keffiyehs. Another time, returning from a mission, Godard waited for the fedayeens to propose to them a “critique and self-critique” meeting, which the Palestinians did not understand, setting themselves to talking in Arab in the background while in the foreground an interpreter continued in English with conventional Fatah slogans. If they had a revolutionary manner – at this Godard started regularly wearing military fatigues, as reported by a journalist from L’Express who went to meet them in Amman in 1970 –, the two French filmmakers were sometimes a bit lost in an unknown territory.
Neither Godard, Gorin, or Marco spoke or understood Arabic,
and on both sides the incomprehension mounted.
Gorin recounted this often delicate dialogue: “It was a long difficult
gestation. We had drawings, outlines in
black and red, plans, interruptions. We
showed them to the Palestinians who didn’t understand. We didn’t understand any of the
language. The translators translated as
they wished, generally by slogans they knew by heart. This sometimes became comical, everything
that was said to us was summed up as “We will fight until victory,” so often that
we ended up laughing. In a pathetic way
it confirmed our title. For us, it
rather quickly became a silent film, or rather a musical.” But Elias Sanbar describes just as much the
opposite phenomenon, when the environment made the filmmakers rethink their
judgement and to “remake the film” in another way. Godard returned to his ultra-quick “thief”
and “disrupter” of reality reflexes, which greatly impressed his Palestinian
companion. “Often, from the moment of
return from meetings or filming, and the immediate viewing of the images that
we had just “brought back” thanks to heavy video equipment, a confrontation
began between the pre-existing text and the images that had just been
shot. It ended up most of the time with
re-writing and a new request to shoot the same scene, to the great astonishment
of the Palestinian representatives. Over
the course of days and weeks, Godard appeared to me more and more of a terrific
destabilizing force. […] There is something very playful about working with
him, but mixed with a form of permanent irritation, because hardly had things
been constructed with his meticulous care that he pressed himself to
deconstruct them with care to disrupt the gaze that you can bring to the
reality that surrounds you.”
The shoot, which actually began in March 1970, to continue with
breaks until August, was one of Godard’s longest, and he returned to Paris with
more than 40 hours of rushes. Certain things had been impossible to shoot
which the Frenchmen had not foreseen. “When the women were teaching
themselves to read and write in the Palestinian camps,” remembers Gorin, “the
presence of men bothered them, so they refused to be filmed and we didn’t
understand why.” Likewise, Jean-Pierre Gorin being Jewish, some other
doors were closed to them, notably in the Fatah training camps. Other
events fortunately jostled the foreseen plan, notably the meetings with the
combatants, animated and joyful in the middle of the dangers of the desert,
like in Ghawr al-Safi, in southern Jordan, coming back from which Godard
confided to Sanbar, “You know, every people, every revolution possesses a
particular characteristic, like an element of its own identity. For the
Vietnamese, it was hard labor; for the Cubans, it was dance, and for you, it’s
certainly laughter.”
Godard also wanted to meet and
film the Palestinian leader. He secured a meeting. The filmmaker
posed two questions to Yasser Arafat, the first about the concentration camps.
“I asked him if the origins of the Palestinians’ difficulties had
something to do with the concentration camps. He said to me, ‘No, that’s
their story, the Germans and the Jews.’ And I said, ‘Not exactly, you
know that in the camps, when a Jewish prisoner was very weak, close to death,
they called him Muslim.’ And he responded, ‘So?’ I said,
‘You know, they could have called them black or an entirely different
name, but no, they said Muslim, and that shows that there is a
relationship, a direct relationship between the Palestinians’ difficulties and
the concentration camps.” The second question was very short, “what is
the future of the Palestinian revolution?” And Arafat’s response was even
shorter, “I have to think about it, come back tomorrow.” Godard finished
the story, “He never came back. At least he was honest.” In
mid-July 1970, Armand Marco had to return to France after having badly sprained
his knee. The shoot neared its end, Gorin returned to Paris, leaving
Godard and Sanbar alone in Amman.
At the beginning of the month of
August 1970, Kamal Adwan, Fatah’s information manager, asked Godard to go film
Palestinian dancers. As Elias Sanbar recounts, “Kamal greeted us and, a
very unusual thing for Palestinians, went directly into the subject, ‘Tell your
friend that a Palestinian folklore troupe just arrived in Cairo and that I want
you to leave tomorrow to film the show.’ I transmitted the request,
smoothing out the angles with paraphrased bits, I didn’t wanted Godard to be
hurt. Godard immediately told me and with a stubborn tone, ‘Tell him that
his dance story is entirely stupid. I won’t go to Cairo.’ [...] Kamal
looked Godard straight in the eye and said, ‘And I think you have to go film
this troupe,’ to which Godard responded again, ‘I won’t go to Cairo...’ I was
allowed two or three repetitions of this exchange before Kamal got up and said,
‘Go to your hotel and wait for instructions.’...” Consigned and forgotten
in their rooms at the Amman Continental, Godard and Sanbar waited a good week
before discretely leaving for Tyre in south Lebanon, where the filmmaker left a
part of his video equipment with the local Fatah director, a movie fan and
amateur filmmaker. Then they stayed at the translator’s mother’s house in
a village in the Lebanese mountains, before going to Beirut where they met with
militant Palestinians from the information section. Godard returned to
Paris on August 21, 1970, not without leaving Elias Sanbar, who had become a
close friend, the ten volumes of Brecht’s complete poetry.
Gorin and Godard, upon their
return to Paris, put in a notebook the list of “filmed images,” notably:
“Fedayeen march. Darwish’s poem ‘I Resist’ in the ruins of Karameh.
Militia construction. Meeting in the south. Militia in the
cave. Two women at typewriters. Militia with machine guns.
Preparations, leaving, operation. Dispensary. Ashbal-Zaharat
training. Abou Hassan conference. Peasant militia text. Doctor
text. Women reading Abou Hassan text. Democratic Front school.
“Grassroots organisation” discussion and self-critique. Two AK-47s
firing. Safi song. Militia training, with flag. Crowd of
children. Fedayeen camouflage. Directors: Abou Latov, Abou Ayad, Abou
Daoud, Abou Hassan.” Or, an enormous amount of rushes to view and texts
to decipher and translate. The work appeared like it will be long, but
Godard and Gorin were happy about one thing: Armand Marco’s cinematography was
beautiful and rarely had the filmmaker found himself with material so dense and
of such a large quantity, in spite of the numerous misunderstandings of an
overly prepared shoot in an unknown land. It is no doubt that it is the quantity,
quality and cryptic character of this film material that explains in part the
difficulty of transforming it into a film.
Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre
Gorin – barricaded in their editing studio on Avenue du Maine, completely
closed off because they were afraid, at this moment of high tensions in the
Middle East, of being victims of agents from Mossad, militants from Betar, or
Jordanian secret service agents – will not manage to finish Until Victory.
Several reasons may explain the abandonment of the project. First,
the ambiguity between two irreconcilable positions - felt on location while
shooting - had not been resolved. Was it a propaganda film for the Fatah
or a political essay, and thus a critique, on the methods of the Palestinian
resistance? The Dziga Vertov group refused to create a militant film as
they had been commissioned. This paradox was not new and re-surged with Until
Victory as Jean-Henri Roger said, “It wasn’t a question of produce or not
producing propaganda images. Now, when you find yourself in front of
political apparatuses that is the only kind of request. The PLO
wanted Jean-Luc Godard, the great, world renowned filmmaker, to make a ‘progressive
and democratic’ film that told the world that the Palestinians were
suffering and that the PLO was right.”
Moreover, several weeks after
Gorin’s and then Godard’s departure from Jordan, a fair number of fighters,
militants, and Palestinian leaders who were in the film were killed during the
Black September massacres, when King Hussein decided to liquidate the
Palestinian resistance and send its remains to the refugee camps in Amman.
25,000 were counted dead. Gorin said he felt the tension
mounting, “the arming of the Jordanians by the Americans,” and the rivalry
sharpen between the Jordanian power and its two opponents which were the Fatah
and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Following these
massacres, the Palestinian situation changed completely. Decapitated and
decimated, the liberation movement no longer thought of “victory,” but thought
instead about rearming and regrouping. This explosion of internal violence
in the Arab camp began to frustrate the Until Victory project, as if the
armed struggle, that occupied the film, had been displaced to the very heart of
the Palestinian camp. Godard and Gorin were profoundly shaken by Black
September. Additionally, the idea of showing the rough cut of the film to
the Palestinian militants, dear to the filmmakers, that they had filmed became
impossible, since the majority of them had died and going back to the location
was problematic. Until victory
thus lost its first audience. Godard and Gorin, orphaned, conceived of
three or four different versions of the film, but none satisfied them.
The later recognized this in an interview with American critics, “There’s
still the Palestinian film, that changed a lot. It’s in its third or
fourth version and now it is going to have to be done in another way. We
can no longer make a film about Palestine because the situation there has
changed so radically that, as a result, it will be a film about how to film
history.” Until Victory was overtaken by the dramatic story of the
people of whom it wanted to offer a revolutionary portrait.