Peter Grabher, a member of this year’s jury of the 16th Subversive Film Festival and historian, film scholar and professor based in Vienna, will hold a lecture entitled Micropolitics of a Cinematic Essay: HERE AND ELSEWHERE by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville.

In HERE AND ELSEWHERE images of a Palestinian ‘elsewhere’ collide with those from a French ‘here’. Originally comissioned as an agit-prop film, a self-critical change of perspective has taken place in this notorious cinematic essay. While the commitment to the ‘Palestinian cause’ increasingly receded into the background, the mediality of late capitalist society as an a priori for every perception came to the fore. The presentation will reconstruct the never completed first version of the film – ‘Jusqu’à la victoire’ (1969) – from the sources. It will furthermore show how Godard and Miéville destroyed their own premises of leftist militant cinema in a posture which Jacques Rancière then called “a somewhat suicidal aristocratism”. At the end of the ‘red decade’ HERE AND ELSEWHERE detected the transition from ‘Tricont’ to ‘Empire’ as frames of reference for action, the transition from a politics under the sign of liberation and revolution, to an ethics under the sign of alterity, difference and human rights.

Before the lecture, we will watch the film HERE AND ELSEWHERE by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville (1976, France, 53′).