Director Jean-Luc Godard, pioneer of experimental cinema and friend of the Palestinians

The director gives the go-ahead to the photographer by turning the camera while she speaks to him in French.

Silence falls for a few seconds, interrupted only by the sound of a journalist flipping her papers in preparation for a meeting with a character that we don't see who she is, just as we don't see the faces of the director or journalist.

Everyone looks like black ghosts using the silhouette technique.

We only see the street, cars and some trees in the background from behind clear glass.

Here the journalist utters: Mahmoud Darwish, and then proceeds to ask her questions in Hebrew.

Darwish answers in Arabic, his face darkened, talking about the Greek novel and the Trojan victim, then suddenly his face appears to us and says: "I am the son of a people that is not yet sufficiently recognized. I want to speak in the name of the absent. In the name of the Trojan poet. The poetic revelation and human feelings have It appears greater in defeat than in victory.

The camera moves between Darwish, the photographer and the journalist in an unfamiliar visual language, presented by the experimental film "Our Music" by French-Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard in 2004.

After the 1967 defeat, he began to take an interest in the Palestinian cause, and in 1969 he went to the refugee camps in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon in order to present the Palestinian revolution to the world. He directed his film in 1970 under the original title "Until Victory: Methods of Work and Thinking for the Palestinian Revolution."

The film was one of Godard's experimental cinematic works, who passed away a few days ago.

It is a model of Godard's style that jumps over cinematic divisions, and presents a film that is neither a documentary nor a novelist, nor a documentary drama or what is known as a docudrama.

The film, which was shown at the Cannes International Film Festival in the same year, consists of 3 main chapters: Hell, Purity and Heaven, in a clear metaphor for the Divine Comedy, the most prominent poetic epics in Italian literature.

In which the director mixes reality and fiction, history and philosophy, Godard appears himself as part of the film on a trip with his students to Sarajevo, and takes them to the famous Mostar bridge destroyed by war, and discusses in his film the issues of war, colonialism and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

The film expresses the vision of a director who is not only sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, but a person from within the cause, who explored its depths and knew its history and its strength and weakness.

And this is indeed, because after the defeat of 1967, he began to pay attention to the Palestinian cause, and in 1969 he went to the refugee camps in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon in order to present the Palestinian revolution to the world, and he directed his film in 1970 under the original title “Until Victory: Methods of Work and Thinking for the Palestinian Revolution.” Before it changes and becomes “from here and there”.

Although the film was funded by the Palestine Liberation Organization, Godard treated it as a combat mission rather than an ordinary job.

After his death at the age of 91, France remembers its compatriot Jean-Luc Godard, represented by its president, Emmanuel Macron, who praised his genius and being a professor of cinema in France.

Filmmakers remember him as a symbol of the French New Wave, which began in the late fifties.

Arabs and Palestinians have the right to remember him as a loyal friend of the Palestinian cause.

Godard is technically and politically rebellious

Jean-Luc Godard is considered a poet with the rank of director, and a fighter in the disguise of a musician who has lost his way to the cinema.

He deals with cinema as a composer deals with music, and his guitar is the camera.

Not only that, but he breaks the rules and invents others.

He was seduced by beauty, so he played solo.

He deals with cinema as aesthetic paintings that only montage distinguishes from those shown in museums.

Cinema, from his point of view, is the art of montage.

He predicts that the current generation will witness the end of cinema in its original form, and something else will replace it, and only montage will remain.

All the elements can be absent except for this moving visual pattern of the image called a montage.

When he presented Shakespeare's famous play "King Lear" in cinema in 1987, he seemed to be taking revenge on Shakespeare himself.

He insisted that the dialogue be in the original Shakespearean English, which contemporaries could not understand, and the story bearing the play's name seemed not to be borrowed from the original story.

The film, co-starring Woody Allen, also seemed incomprehensible to many US viewers accustomed to the Hollywood style of cinematography.

Then the film lost financially, the producers lost, and Godard won what he wanted to communicate visually.

Just as Godard was a violent revolutionary in terms of the form and content of his films, he is also a political revolutionary with a bright and clear left-wing political color that does not hide it and does not hide his biases, just like the blue color that smeared the face of the hero Pierre in his famous color film in 1965 "Pierre the Crazy", which became a poster image Main movie.

In her research on the role of Marxism cinematically in films, Dr. Maureen Kiernan believes that all films are necessarily political to some degree;

Because every film carries a set of ideas and values, and whether these ideas and values ​​are political or not, the film necessarily embodies an ideology.

Hence, you see that Godard's films were not only political films, in all they were swimming against the current and against the prevailing culture and reformulating the director's relationship with society and the film industry in general, because he always tried to be independent of the Hollywood style in production and distribution.

It is not possible to reduce an important historical cinematic figure such as Godard in his political stance, but we cannot deny that one of the pioneers of cinema in the world was a friend of the Arabs and the Palestinians, and presented them with his heart and cinematic art at a time when many hostile them - or at least ignore them - in which many.

The question raised by Godard's career is: Does the creator have the right to be politicized?

Godard's life and art answered this question in the affirmative, and here lies the problem with how to draw thin and clear lines between true creativity that expresses self-vision and the world, and cheap political propaganda or propaganda.