Manipulative content with the innovative method “Here and There” is certainly a tendentious tape designed to expose the mechanisms of imperialist propaganda, which, however, itself slides into ideological despotism that dominates artistic expression. This picture, despite its documentary character, is still an art object, so tangible is its formal innovation and experimental character. Godard again analyzes signs and images, drawing parallels between Hitler and Golda Meir, Brezhnev and Nixon, assessing world politics on the left, he sees the connection between expansion in Vietnam and aggression in Czechoslovakia.
Following Marcuse, he is looking for a third way between capitalism and Soviet bureaucracy, while soberly noticing what he calls “fascist tricks” in Palestinian image-making, though seemingly sympathetic to Palestine, he unreservedly perceives Israel’s position as imperialist, drawing dubious parallels between the Holocaust and the Israeli government’s “genocide” of the Palestinians. By contrasting “here” and “there,” France and Palestine, Godard is actually trying to bring them closer together, to show how the system of oppression exists, how it exploits the masses.
At the same time, for him it does not matter what clothes the exploiter, the American soldier-aggressor or the Soviet party functionary dresses up, the result is one – the destruction of dissent, the dictates of one image, the hierarchy of signifiers. In contrast to the critiqued semiotic system, Godard proposes a pluralistically organized network of images, declared anti-ideological, but in fact just as oppressive and intolerant of others’ opinions as what it criticizes. Godard in the 70s is a blind fanatic who believes in the ideology of Goshism and Maoism, criticizing his enemies rather monotonously, himself being in captivity of serious errors.
The artistic value of Here and There, as well as other paintings of this period, is, in our opinion, in the field of form, not content, in the Godrovsky method itself, in the work of the director’s thought, deconstructing social myths and attacking Western metaphysics, and not the ideologies he broadcasts. In Here and There, Derrida’s influence on the power of sound is palpable; Godard, consciously or not, criticizes phonocentrism, the power of word and meaning provided in the dictator’s scream and speech, a feature of Western metaphysics.
In one of the points of the manifesto of the Jiga Vertov Group, he speaks of “dialectics directed against metaphysics” as a property of “movies made politically.” Even Roland Barth, in his Mythologies, analyzing the bourgeois system of social coordinates, wrote that the bourgeoisie presents the perishable as the eternal, the transient as the unchanging, it represents the capitalist world as a system of relations that always exists, immutable and perfect, historically undeveloped. This is the essence of the bourgeois myth, and metaphysics is the doctrine of immutable first principles, respectively, metaphysics guards the bourgeois myth and justifies it.
In "Here and There" and a little earlier in the feature film "How are you?" Godard directs all his efforts to show that the very perception of reality, implanted in the media and cinema, and based on the New European perceptual optics with its idea of direct perspective, is deeply bourgeois and is not an anthropological constant characteristic of all people at all times, but only a historical stage in the development of culture, which must be overcome in the name of freedom and the construction of a new life.