Palestine and The Burning Archives

by Carla Italiano e Carol Almeida, 
forumdoc.bh.2024
28º Festival do Filme Documentário e Etnográfico, Brazil

21/11-1/12/2024

Look. More than that. Realize. Move. Be moved. Rewind, speed up, slow down, erase what's left so that the time of the archives becomes all time. More than that, so that the archives absorb time itself and fill the lungs of History with the grainy air of the debris and the ashes of fires. It is in this anarchic yet rigorously calculated spirit that images are assembled in the radical counter-archive production exercise of A Fidai Film (2024), Kamal Aljafari's tenth film. By deliberately refusing to offer us the official sources of the images he collects along the way, Aljafari once again produces a Palestine from within the density of the images that remain, but now in an even more daring way: by mixing the images recorded by the Zionist colonizers with those of the cameras that, for many years and to this day, have operated as weapons of resistance.

But that is not all: he manipulates those images to the point of establishing this different temporality of the archive which, instead of pointing to the past, is always whispering to us about the time that is being re-enacted every day. The matter of the archive, Derrida reminds us (2001, p. 50), is not a question of the past. “It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow”.

Manipulations of rhythm, of colour, of scribbling on the image in order to erase certain indices and reveal what lies behind them, of creating specific sounds for these soundless movements, of displacing the sound of the archive from its origins and making it inhabit other spaces in the image.

Foreword: the density of scratchy and grainy noises, traces of fires and explosions here and there. Aljafari produces many stories with the use of these noises in his films, in this case, with sound modulations created by artist Attila Faravelli. Following the noises is the false silence behind the voice of a child singing the refrain of a famous Arab children's game: Taq Taq Taqiyah. This information is not disclosed at the beginning of the film, but the game consists of a circle of children sitting down while one of them runs around with a small object in their hands. The child who sings Taq Taqiyah has to place the object behind one of the other children without being noticed. If they complete a full lap without the other child catching them, they can take their place. But if the other child notices that an object has been placed behind them, they can get up and catch the other child without them taking their place. It is a game of filling empty spaces and populating them using clever movements. Just like combining a sequence of women from the Palestinian armed resistance sitting in a circle with, at last, the image of girls playing Taq Taq Taqiyah in slow motion. In essence, that's how Aljafari's cinema intervenes in the world.

Two words resonate: manipulation and refusal. The decision not to provide contextual references for the footage, scrambling textures and divergent points of view regarding what is put on screen, goes hand in hand with the exercise of refusing the very erasure that is imposed as a dominant practice. It is an act of erasing erasure itself, in a manner of speaking, similar to the red lines that vigorously cover the official captions in the shots that begin the feature. The critical method of using handmade red strokes highlights the artisanal dimension of this struggle against the machines of power (be it a war apparatus or a motion picture camera), although the manual nature does not diminish its effectiveness, on the contrary.

The very fact that the color that crosses out and/or blurs the image is red tells us what kind of emphasis is being placed. Blood red, red alert, red as the unmistakable color of History. This gesture demands the invention of new strategies for dealing with such diverse material; it requires navigating through fragments to know them in depth, to delve into their instabilities. But merging footage from oppressors with the perspectives of the resistances is dangerous, since the resulting contaminations are not entirely predictable or controllable. One must be careful to allow oneself to drift between these images. The film invites us to embark on its ambiguous flow of immersion and inquiry, in which the desire for control and being open to the imponderable coexist in an unresolvable tension. By abandoning the anchor of an explanatory narration, spoken or written, Aljafari's film throws us into a place of active and uncomfortable spectatorship, without the rules of this peculiar dispositive actually being made explicit.This choice undermines the logic of binary oppositions - including those between victims and perpetrators - which have homogenized for so long the complexity of these stories, now being reclaimed on film.

Some important historic events: in 1968, Vladimir Tamari, who had been working as a photographer and filmmaker for UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) in the previous years, decided to take over the narrative of what he was shooting, which was being used in the service of “humanitarian” narratives. In the film Al-Quds, he collects these images and produces a voiceover on top of them in a way that reframes the sequences filmed in Jerusalem as something genuinely Palestinian. This is perhaps the first record of archival footage (under the control of colonial forces) being taken over to produce counter-archives. In 1975, Serge Le Perón (in SANTOS, 2024) wrote in Cahiers du Cinéma that Palestinian cinema is driven by the production of memories. And that this production manifests itself as follows: “A memory fragmented in time and space; in small pieces; fragments of films; images, sounds; in boxes that are barely identifiable, labeled by others; scattered all over the world: fragments of stories falling everywhere, in films that need to be collected-regrouped-reassembled, archived. A vital problem. Proof of past existence, mark of identity. History”.

In 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon precisely to try to dismantle the members of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), three rooms filled with film reels from the Palestinian Cinema Unit (UCP) disappeared. A building was set on fire, and there is a never confirmed legend that the films, as well as some of the documents stored in the building, were burned. What do the ashes of History tell us? The fact is that, with those films having disappeared from the UCP, Khadijeh Habashneh and Mustafa Abu Ali, members of the group and guardians of those archives, are unable to deal with the trauma. Much of Khadijeh and Mustafa's life afterwards was a constant frustration at the loss of an immense collection of images, a frustration that, on a personal level, ultimately led them to part ways a few years later, and on a collective level, forged an immeasurable rift in the production of Palestine's past, present and future. It is possible to say that a significant part of Palestinian cinema today is obsessed with this loss. A Fidai Film is just another evidence to this.

Faced with the impossibility of accessing the Palestinian archives stolen from the PLO headquarters, or with this constitutive absence, the film does not shy away from scrutinizing the images that actually exist: those created and disseminated by the genocidal ideology. Throughout A Fidai Film, pieces of fiction films of Israeli origin coexist with documentary records from other decades, attesting to the Palestinian existences in those spaces. A series of manipulations on the sounds and images destabilize their original assumptions, resorting to strategies that resist apprehension. The indexical nature of these fragments is put on hold since the reality to which they supposedly refer seems to be another kind of illusion. In an emblematic sequence of the film, a couple of Israeli actors stage a dialog by the seaside, they seem to be enjoying the view amidst the ruins of a Palestinian city: "I think more wonderful than this is impossible," says the woman, whose eyes and mouth are impregnated with huge red stains. The montage’s chromatic intervention dehumanizes the character, inverting the hierarchy of power between protagonist and background, in yet another disruptive gesture that will be modulated throughout the film.

The overlapping of footage of various kinds is also something that sews the film together with its literary support (Palestinian literature and cinema are intertwined, and they are constantly feeding off each other) that makes use of texts by the famous writer and revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani, whether they are read as a voice-over or just described in subtitles. In the strategy of confusing the enemy about its tactics, it is necessary to displace these texts from their source and make them populate the remaining images.

A Fidai Film can also be seen as a kind of catalyst for all the director's previous films, bringing together two decades of creation and aesthetic-political activism. From the outset, it emerges as the most recent contribution in his work of montage with pre-existing images - what has sometimes been called found footage - in the wake of two previous features: Recollection (2015) and An Unusual Summer (2020). With each new film, there is a remarkable sharpening of the same method whose vector of irradiation is the editing process, which undergoes different degrees of radicalism.

Recollection revisits Israeli and American fiction films made in the port city of Jaffa between the 1960s and 1990s. In Aljafari's editing, instead of focusing on the protagonists, his attention is actively turned to the edges of the images: Palestinian passers-by who functioned as extras, or the houses, walls and memories that made up that community. From the point of view of this narrative material, the Palestinians (and Palestine) never existed. But they somehow infiltrate the images. These fictional feature films serve as proof of a cinematic occupation, but, ironically, they provide precisely the material that will allow the cinematic reconstruction of that same territory. This movement of bringing out what was buried by radically redirecting the gaze - metaphorically and literally - is a strategy that is updated and expanded in A Fidai Film.

An Unusual Summer, on the other hand, goes back to the recordings of a surveillance camera installed by the director's father in front of his house in Ramle, which also ended up capturing the daily life of that community. By using his family’s recordings, Aljafari shreds the footage’s low-resolution pixels by taking them to the limits of abstraction, therefore manifesting what has historically and forcibly been rendered invisible. A certain phantasmatic dimension of An Unusual Summer will persist in this latest feature. Now, the spectre and the immaterial, no longer restricted to the limits of a city, a street corner or a precise time frame, expand to an entire idea of Palestine in the course of its history of images, turning A Fidai Film into another magnitude in terms of discursive, sensorial and political construction.

In these three films, as well as in other works by the director (let's remember his first feature, The Roof, from 2006), our gaze is summoned to scrutinize the details of these archives, to investigate what is not known yet. These are works that materialize a kind of "camera of the dispossessed", as suggested by the title of the video installation created by Aljafari in 2023 for the 35th São Paulo Biennial, as part of the process of making this latest feature. A set of fundamental questions, as Nicole Brenez (2013) suggests with what she calls "cinema of intervention", encourages us to investigate these images even further: "why make an image? With whom and for whom? With which other images does it conflict? (...) Or, to put it differently, which History do we want?".

One idea becomes central to this militant project of cinema and life: sabotage. More than an idea, it's a direct action in the world; a cleavage that, in itself, is an active stance against persistent injustices. To carry out an act of sabotage, it is necessary to know the logic of the system one wants to undermine, its maintenance strategies and its constitutive loopholes. Gaps that often lie in the expectation of totality in long-naturalized narratives of power. It would be necessary, then, to denaturalize the fallacy of authenticity in these discourses and images - to reframe, blur, suffocate, dye them blood red if necessary. This idea takes on other meanings when we understand, following the director’s statement, that "saboteur" was precisely the term used by the Israelis to refer to Palestinian freedom fighters in the 1970s before the notion of "terrorist" became popular.

Epilogue: Images of an occupied Palestinian city by the sea. On the roofs of a few buildings, children release birds into the air while an Israeli soldier aims his gun at everything that flies by. We soon realize that the interior spaces of the houses where these scenes take place are engulfed in fire. An artificial fire, placed there as a graphic intervention by the director. What burns when archives are burned? What burns when a people begin to be decimated in their own territory? What burns in cinema when film festivals deny the hypervisibility of an ongoing fire? In the history of this cinema, it is essential to "interrogate the ashes", writes Marcelo Ribeiro (in MAAN; GUERRA, 2024, p. 43-51) regarding the concept of archive, which "must be understood not only as the constellation of existing films and the variable bodies of documentary matter that orbit them, but as the nebula of non-existent films and the holes in documentary matter that make it possible to glimpse their traces".

The images disappear. What appears to be the end credits turns out to be something else. We are actually reading a dialogue between Kamal and a friend identified only as Yousef: “I’ve found an old archive and it disappeared. It was in an abandoned place and it disappeared. It was a lot, a huge amount of material.” Yousef seems desperate. Kamal asks what these files were. Yousef doesn't answer, the only thing he knows for sure is that the files have disappeared. Their content seems to be its own erasure. Kamal Aljafari works from these open cracks, never to fill them, but certainly to cunningly sabotage the Zionist narratives created on top of them. Taq Taq Taqiyah.  

References

BRENEZ, Nicole. Political Cinema Today - The New Exigencies: For a Republic of Images. Screening the past, Sept. 2013. Available at: https://bit.ly/3KhgIaz.

DERRIDA, Jacques. Archival evil: a Freudian impression. Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumará, 2001.

PERÓN, Serge. On Palestinian cinema. In: SANTOS, William Fernando de Oliveira. Mostra de Cinema Militante: Palestina anos 1970. (Final course work). Department of Social Communication - Federal University of Pernambuco, 2024, 75p.

RIBEIRO, Marcelo R. S. Cocoon, secretion, secret. In: MAAN, Gustavo; GUERRA, Nayla (org.). No Rastro dos Encontros Perdidos: a Mostra Novíssimo Cinema Brasileiro. São Paulo: Pró-Reitoria de Cultura e Extensão Universitária - USP, 2024.

Carla Italiano is a Brazilian film researcher and curator. She has a PhD in Social Communication from UFMG. She is part of the curatorial team of Olhar de Cinema - Curitiba IFF, FENDA - Experimental Festival of Film Arts, and Forumdoc.bh - Documentary and Ethnographic Film Festival. She has curated several shows, including Magical Women - Reinventions of the Witch in Film, and Helena Solberg Retrospective, among others.

Carol Almeida is a film researcher, teacher and curator. She has a PhD from PPGCOM-UFPE, with research focused on contemporary Brazilian cinema. She is part of the curatorial team of Olhar de Cinema Festival/Curitiba, Arab Women’s Film Festival in Brazil and Mostra que Desejo, the latter promoted by Mirante Cineclube. She runs workshops on Brazilian cinema, curating, film criticism and the representation of women in cinema.