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...with the possible exception of Godard's masterly "Marxist

Western" WIND FROM THE EAST. Godard's onetime crony Jean-Pierre Gorin shot some 16mm footage of Palestinian

resistance fighters in 1970; shortly thereafter, almost all the

people Gorin recorded were dead. Godard's film--with some

pungent, questioning commentary by Anne-Marie Mieville--uses

the footage to ask questions about "the representation of the

other": the interesting part is that Godard includes "the politically

sympathetic representation of the other" into his mix. Just when

you start noticing that Gorin's images of cute Palestinian children

doing commando exercises smacks of the Riefenstahlian, Mieville

comes along to point that out more succinctly and poetically than

you ever could. As poetic and eggheadily insular as Godard's

dialectic is, he interrogates the political image more thoroughly

than anyone else in movies. He does it by way of a close reading

that will only fail to exasperate those used to old-school

deconstructors: Godard mines a tremendous amount of insight

through a searching examination of his own use of the word "and"!

In an age when our experience of World War Three is massively

mediated by MSNBC and Fox News (and, as Godard points out,

their images, not just their Limbaughian play-by-play), ICI ET

AILLEURS is a needed deprogramming device. For God's sake,

find some obscure video store and rent it.