Conversation: Elias Sanbar & Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard was born in Paris in 1930. A filmmaker, scriptwriter, producer and novelist, he is also a film critic and theoretician. In 1959 his first feature film, A Bout de souffle, opened the way for the Nouvelle Vague. He directed several films in the sixties including Le Petit soldat (1960), Le Mépris (1963), Alphaville (1965), Pierrot le fou (1965), La Chinoise (1967)… In the wake of the May 1968 protests, he and Jean-Pierre Gorin endeavoured to create political cinema, producing their films under the collective Groupe Dziga Vertov. In 1970, Godard visited Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon, to make a film. The film, titled Jusqu’à la victoire (Until Victory), remained unfinished until 1974 when Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville re-used the footage they had previously recorded in their film Ici and Ailleurs. 

Elias Sanbar was born in Haïfa in 1947, less than a year later, because of the Nakba, his family was forced into exile in Lebanon. Like thousands of his generational peers, he joined the ranks of the Palestinian resistance after the June 1967 Arab disaster. Writer, historian and peace activist, Elias Sanbar is an eminent Arab and francophone intellectual, who for the past forty years, has been tirelessly invested in spreading understanding of Palestine, both in the fields of political and cultural action. His publications are a repository of Palestinian collective memory, to cite a few, Palestine 1948, l’expulsion (1984), Le Bien des Absents (2001), Figures du Palestinien (2004), Dictionnaire amoureux de la Palestine (2010), La Palestine expliquée à tout le monde (2014). Sanbar translated to French the majesterial œuvre of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1942-2008), with whom he shared a close friendship. He has collaborated with distinguished intellectuals like Gilles Deleuze, and filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, and the publisher Jérôme Lindon who housed the Revue d’Etudes Palestiniennes in 1981, of which Sanbar was chief-editor for more than 25 years. Elias Sanbar is a member of the Palestinian National Council since 1988. He was a member of the Palestinian delegation at the peace negotiations in Madrid (1991), and in Washington (1992-1993), he also headed the Delegation for Refugees from 1993 to 1997. Since 2006, he has been Palestine’s Ambassador and Permanent Delegate at the UNESCO. He has led the campaign for Palestine’s admission to UNESCO and the registration of Bethlehem as World Heritage site.

Screening: Here and Elsewhere

France, 1974, Color, 53 minutes. In French

Written, Directed and Edited by: Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville.

By Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville (France, 1974, 53 min)

Here: a typical French family sitting in front of its television. Elsewhere: Palestinian combatants filmed through their everyday life, training and death. In 1974, Jean-Luc Godard used footing shot four years earlier in Jordan and reinterpreted it to reflect a multi-layered manipulation of reality.