Prières pour Refusniks, 2004
Durée : 7' + 3'30'', couleur, son
In the early 2000s, young Israelis refused to do their military service, considering the Israeli army to be an occupying force. They were sentenced to serve time in prison. Upon their release, the parents of these “refusniks” organised an evening that was to reunite Israeli and Palestinian intellectuals and artists. Filmmaker Avi Mograbi contacted Jean-Luc Godard, who produced two short videos shown during this evening [1]. The first reuses a sequence from The Carabineers (1963), an antimilitarist film in which the filmmaker, who was himself very young at the time, denounced war crimes. We see a resistant get arrested and shot down by soldiers. The youth, beauty, freedom and courage of this woman, who cites Lenin and Mayakovsky and refuses to have her eyes covered at the moment of death, opposes the vulgarity, conceit and indifference of the soldiers. By superimposing this extract with a song by Léo Ferré, L’Oppression (1972), which sometimes covers the voices and sounds of the film, sometimes fades to let them be heard, Jean-Luc Godard exalts the act of resistance with a new sense of emotion and melancholy, born of the encounter between the images and the song, before expressing at last the absurdity of all wars by quoting a letter from a German soldier at the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943 [2]. The second video relates to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It opens on a hand tracing two triangles with a paintbrush, one blue, the other green, which, reuniting in a star of David, do not however manage to mix the colours of Judaism and Islam. Through a series of double exposures and cross dissolves, Jean-Luc Godard connects these symbols to photographs, paintings, etchings and to a song that speaks of oppression: two Palestinian women that an Israeli soldier holds in his sights, a wounded person with a Christ-like face, a man alone facing the tanks in Tiananmen Square… Jean-Luc Godard’s commitment to the Palestinian cause [3] causes him to risk making a daring parallel. Between the title and the word “refusnik” that returns towards the end, two texts are inlaid over the image. The first cites a poem by German writer Paul Zech, against the ravages of the First World War, which the second deforms slightly, comparing Israel today with Germany at that time [4].
Judith Revault d’Allonnes Translated by Anna Knight
[1] Cf. “Résistances”, by Ariel Schweitzer, Cahiers du cinéma, n° 611, April 2006.
[2] “There is no victory. There are only flags and men that fall.” An abridged citation from a letter published in France, along with thirty-eight others, at Buchet-Chastel, in Lettres de Stalingrad, 1997.
[3] In 1974, he had co-directed Here and Elsewhere with Anne-Marie Miéville, which reused images of a film that had remained unfinished – Jusqu’à la victoire – commissioned from Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin by the Fatah in 1970. They were at that time both members of the Dziga Vertov group.
[4] “Berlin, halt ein! Dein Tänzer ist der Tod” – the abridged final stanza of the poem Berlin, halt ein… composed by Paul Zech between 1914 and 1916, which may be translated as: “Berlin, stop yourself! You are dancing with death.” With the following image, this becomes: “Jerusalem, halt ein! Dein Tänzer ist der Tod.”
