July 25, 2024

The From Below Microcinema will be showing a collection of contemporary Palestinian short films this week on Thursday, July 25th, at 8 PM.

Here is the link to reserve a seat. Doors will be at 7:50 and we’re starting the movie(s) at 8:10!

Inspired by a reading of Robert G. White’s recent monograph* An Atonal Cinema: Resistance, Counterpoint and Dialogue in Transnational Palestine*, and in dialogue with last week’s screening of A German Youth, this week’s program showcases some recent works of avant-garde, hybrid filmmaking by Palestinian directors that confront questions of identity, representation, and home. Frequently, as discussed/depicted in White’s book, there is a struggle with characterizations of Palestinian identity and struggle being mediated through a standardized set of images: the kaffiyeh, the rock in hand ready to be thrown. Hence, the inversion: “not (just) images of resistance, but resistance to image.” What is gained by rejecting these signifiers and embracing unrepresentability in the struggle for decolonization?

These ideas will be examined through a few filmmakers’ works, framed loosely around different directions of temporality. PAST: In Elia Suleiman & Jayce Salloum’s Introduction to the End of an Argument (1990), we get a grand remix and cultural collision course, a splicing of film, news footage, cartoons, advertisements, and other media to provide a damning indictment of the representation of the Middle East in western culture. PRESENT: In Kamal Aljafari’s cinematic memoirs of place, the camera bears witness to Ramla and Jaffa through the specificities of architecture and destruction. FUTURE: In Larissa Sansour and Soren Lind’s In the Future They Ate From Finest Porcelain (2015), a piece of speculative anthropological portraiture presents a science-fiction view of the future of Palestine, and how it will be remembered (or not) by our descendants.