About

My name’s Andrew and I live in Bellingham, WA, with plans to move to Seattle sometime around September ‘07. I’ve decided to start this blog to scratch an itch to share my thinking about all the shit I’m interested in – mostly radical politics, cinema, anarchy, anti-oppression, art, and all that. I write about this stuff elsewhere – namely Lucid Screening and my work’s blog – but needed someplace to strech my legs. This blog will only be on WordPress while I teach my self CSS/XHTML and also sorts of website stuff, which is probably among my more tangible goals in 2007.

The name of this blog is the English translation of the title of a film by French filmmakers Anne-Marie Mieville and Jean-Luc Godard called Ici et Auillers. On the simplest level, I just like the phrase. It’s a really, really simple way of outlining my politics. Between here and elsewhere lies solidarity. To struggle for a better world, I have to understand myself and my position in society – here - before I go thinking I’m gonna build a better society with others – elsewhere. And vice versa: I got to understand others’ positions in society – elsewhere – before I begin committing myself to my struggle at home – here. Really simple, maybe too simple. But things demand titles, don’t they?

I have to admit I haven’t actually seen the film. In his Histoire(s) du Cinema series, however, Godard says something about how the favorite films of the French New Wave generation were always the films they had never seen. By which I take to mean the films of their imagination were what mattered most, because these films fueled their Utopian ideals about the ability of the cinema to – more or less – save the world. That’s a good enough excuse for me; as an anarchist, that sort of Utopian approach is really appealing. I don’t want to save the world – and if anything, cinema sure as hell isn’t going to do it – but I love the sentiment. As they say, be realistic, demand the impossible.

Plus, Ici et Aulliers is partly a film about Godard’s experience making a “documentary” for the Palestinian Liberation Organization, a fascinating story on its own. He was commissioned to make the film in the early 1970s with his Maoist collective The Dziga Vertov Group. It was orginally to be called Until Victory and he completed most of the filming in Jordan documenting the training of Palestinian guerilla fights. During his editting in Paris, however, the Jordanian government cracked down on the Palestinian militants, killing thousands of people – many of whom were filmed by Godard – and making the planned “documentary” an impossible task. Years later, Godard returned to the footage with his partner Anne-Marie Mieville, and Until Victory became Ici et Aulliers. Instead of a commercial for the PLO, it became a filmed essay discussing the ethics of political documentaries and political images, and the issues that are raised when a French militant wants to make a film about another peoples’ struggle.

All sorts of things to learn from that story. And that’s what this blog shit is all about, I suppose – learnin’. So let’s get to it!