Jean-Pierre Gorin's introduction to Ici et ailleurs and Letter to Jane was quite short and ended rather memorably: "If you survive the first one, the second one will kill you." Indeed, the essay films he presented - two of his collaborations with Jean-Luc Godard as part of the Dziga Vertov Group - offer a clear rebuttal to anyone who considers cinema a passive form of entertainment. One may consider these films an acquired taste; watching them is certainly an acquired skill.

Ici et ailleurs, originally to be entitled Jusqu'à la victoire, opened the double-bill. Paralleling at times rather graphic footage of the Palestinian resistance with scenes of a French family engaged in such activities as eating soup and watching television, the film's system of montage for images alone is highly provocative. The film's soundtrack, which features narration from Godard, adds yet another level of meaning to the piece. Perhaps it is fairer to say that meaning is not added but multiplied by the interaction of sound and image. As Erik Ulman writes in senses of cinema, the film's achieves "an extraordinary formal density [...] as well as a political lucidity that remains all too relevant today."

Equally dense and politically relevant, Letter to Jane takes an entirely different approach to the essay film. Gorin called it "the ultimate student film" - shot in a day and edited in an hour... and I may have those backwards.  The end result is a 52-minute meditation, guided by Godard and Gorin through alternating voice-overs, on the implications of an infamous photograph from L'Express of Jane Fonda in North Vietnam, 1972. The concept seems so absurdly basic that it's hard to believe they made the film for any other reason than to prove they could - or because somebody bet they couldn't. Yet, in my opinion, Godard and Gorin's self-conscious acknowledgement of their fundamentalism infuses what could be (and, many will argue, is) a very dry film with subtle humour and striking insight. One thing is certain: you will never look at any photograph quite the same after.

Taken on their own, these films are challenging, to say the least. Back-to-back, if anyone's mind can literally be blown, this would be the combination of films to do it. Each one has the density of a nuclear bomb. In some respects then, it is lucky that the medium resists being taken in all at once. Unlike the written essay, which you read (and reread) at your own leisure, the film essay has a temporal impetus. Following the next point requires leaving the last one behind - frequently not something the viewer does at the same pace as the film. For example, in Ici et ailleurs, the line "It is too simple and too easy to divide the world in two," distracted this viewer for a good fifteen minutes. While a slew of new ideas and compelling images paraded through my consciousness, I found my own thoughts competing with Godard's narration and my mind's eye privileging memories of the dichotomous images which had accompanied that line over the pictures currently on the screen. It quickly became apparent to me that these films are both exhausting and inexhaustible. They are like marathons - some combination of torture and exhilaration. So here's the good news: Ici et ailleurs and Letter to Jane can support an infinite number of viewings. The bad news, of course, is that the first one may kill you. 

Maureen Holland is currently a student at the University of Toronto.