Reconfiguring Crisis and the Contemporaneity of (Moving) Images

Wonder Beirut (1997-2006). Copyright Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. Courtesy of the artists. Wonder Beirut (1997-2006). Copyright Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. Courtesy of the artists.

Reconfiguring Crisis and the Contemporaneity of (Moving) Images

By : Rania Gaafar

Contemporary media art and digital archives have submerged as (trans)media of a collective experience and intelligence that materialize the deep time of the present as much as the speculations of the future. The interrelation of (new) media art, digital archives in a space of timeless practices and forms, and assembled images are shaping mediations of affective, technological, and above all agential realities. Artistic research and user-generated forms of trans-subjective engagement constitute new medializations of the archive and foreground other relational realities of post-cinematic, digital images and their mediums in the contemporary art scenes and social media platforms of artistic collectives of the MENA region.  

The last few years have been characterized by a new formation of the archive of events, and archival images in interactive networks that have developed an intensely creative, dynamic, and experimental cine-media culture. The emergence of assemblages of contemporary media art, the novel interfaces of documentary film archives and their interconnectivities, and interactive methods of documentary juxtapositions have emerged as new digital processes of creating alternative collective memories whilst reconfiguring the visibilities of crisis.

Such superimpositions of new materialist media cultures and thinking have foregrounded an agential aesthetics of crisis in the aftermath of disaster politics and the dismembered body in combat zones. These aesthetic methods, interactive strategies and affective materializations of crisis and (physical) trauma are subjectivizing the very technical media of recording and displaying life on the ubiquitous screens of our post-digital lives, and it is the documentary image and its economy that has helped the digital become an imaginative filmic medium in its own right. 

The documentary image in film and beyond has become, over time and in digital circulation and alterations, the witness of political crises and consumer capitalism. It has displayed, witnessed, and generated a decisive reconfiguration with the digital advent and its networking aesthetics, post-production visibilities, and interactive dynamic in the realm of the Internet, and in contemporary media art. 

In recent years, specifically since the start of the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa eight years ago, the term “documentary” has become a name associated with the ubiquitous presence, online availability, and visibility of still and moving images that inhabit the region and are supposed to be shot, saved, recorded, witnessed, altered, and very much present in the nowness of the digital realm, and, accordingly, the instantaneity of geopolitical crisis. Looking at the networking structures of contemporary aesthetics in the visual arts, on the one hand, and their very “networked aesthetics” on the other, the boundary between there and here or here and there ceases to exist for an understanding of the documentary image that signifies a clearly hierarchical signification between the material “real” life in front of the camera and the animated lifelessness in front of the camera as a moving image. 

The documentary image in moving images has emerged as a subjectivized biopolitical force of a new artistic public sphere that has fundamentally shaped a post-digital becoming of life-worlds and post-cinematic realms. One such example is visual artist and media theorist Laila Shereen Sakr’s work in the aftermath of the 2011 standoffs in which she juxtaposes popular culture and encultured animations with images of street documentary quality and timeliness that capture the present moment of events in Cairo. We see the iconic figure of Um Kalthoum, technicolored and incorporated into the documentary files of mobile images, overlooking the events while performing, thus acting as the angelic projection of collective memory. Um Kalthoum, the national icon of the mid twentieth century in the Arabic-speaking Middle East appears amongst superimpositions of animated figures within the sheer texture of the image’s materiality.

Future imaginaries in the Middle East and North Africa, which are signified through sci-fi elements and animation methods, testify as a time of real-virtual simultaneity, a coincidental structural framework in contemporary media art and archival cultures that are emerging in and through the experience of crisis.  This impacts a political critique and aesthetic method, reconfiguring the landscape of the politics of aesthetics. 

Beyond the plethora of studies that emerged after 2010/2011 and the many references to what has been termed the “Arab Spring,” the “Arab revolutions,” “the Twitter and Facebook revolutions,” media art and archives shift the conversation to speculative modes of real techniques of the visual and data; they juxtapose vernacular pop cultures, the starkness of states of emergency, and artistic practices. This conceptual shift has been attended by the post-insurrection crisis, which unfolds ad infinitum and inevitably references the wounded, the fragmented human body in the materialized realms of media art. The digital body thus has never been restricted to the spheres of an allegedly immaterial data, on the contrary, yet the conceptual shift to the virtual sphere re-configures structural chances and notions of the public realm.

The signification of the documentary image that depended upon the hierarchical object/subject split, on the difference between the spectator and the screen, the outsourcing of the producing infrastructure, and the editing of this piece of the real, which the documentary image represents, has eventually been replaced with a new form of immanent enactment. The latter attempts to transcend the finitude that the image of death and ruin of people and cultures in times of war eventually shows and signifies beyond the movement and sound of the actual image: stillness, death, and the freezing of time in the instant of death. 

Narratives of new digitized archives that reconfigure questions of memory and performativity in terms of a collective intelligence of cultural memory have been disclosed in image collections and their harbouring institutions, which we have already witnessed through the establishment of organizations like Beirut’s Arab Image Foundation. A number of other artistic collectives have emerged in recent years in the Middle East and North Africa that employ the digitized archives of contemporary moments in time and the events of crisis (be it the crisis of migration to the north, the omnipresence of war throughout the region, or the political upheavals since 2011). The archive[1] has become a critical and astute medium of critiquing and visualizing a political control and sovereignty over life and death a “necropolitics”[2] that eventually becomes part of the very materiality of aesthetics. This is achieved by adopting a performatively co-optional role and function in the visual cultures of the region and its geopolitical enactment in the various technological alterations of the visible. 

Such alterations through technologically induced operations become archives in their own right, in the new public spheres that have been developing across the Middle East and North Africa, and their very being as others, as new documentary othersof the contemporary moment of crisis is surfacing. Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s Wonder Beirut (1997-2006) is one such example, in which the historical documentary image in the form of a postcard, iconic and “authentic” as it may seem, is digitally deconstructed and visually edited in order to make the memory of the war ultimately become part of the historicity of images. Hadjithomas and Joreige started taking images of the destruction of the civil war in Lebanon and found themselves confronted with solely nostalgic images / memories of pre-war Beirut that display the wholeness and well-preserved completeness of the pre-civil war years. Eventually, Hadjithomas and Joreige set off to alter the nostalgic found postcards and images and transform them into impure, flashy depictions. The postcard as an analogue medium of yearning journeys and news far away from home becoming the critical garish image embellished with pop art patterns. Thus, the animated, applicated destruction of the city becomes a material part of the nostalgic yearning for the past and the wholeness of the future. 

The archive as a medium of that very materialized alterity in the techno-spheres of political lives is disclosed and embodies, at the same time re-conceptualizes, what Hito Steyerl has called the “poor image,” the user-generated and network-affected, online debris of the vulnerable and violent present, for instance. Steyerl suggests that the poor image is, in analogy to Fanonian thought, the “wretched of the screen.” In the Egyptian collective Mosireen’s archive, which is found online and has gathered massive numbers of mobile documentary images, the interface of the website suggests a coordinate system of digital choices and selected viewings. 

However, its very existence in the deep time of the digital underbelly embodies a critique that is not just working on the same premises as the neoliberal commodification of culture it represents in its very “poverty” and accelerating quality. “The wretched of the screen,” is the circulating, latent, operational image that is radically present yet absent; it is the digital radical image that en-acts the events in their visibility. 

The “re-presence” of the archival image as an operative of a form of digital media archaeology in the context of crisis and trauma in the region reflects the post-revolutionary realm of media technologies and cultures. Then there is time, and the question of time in the form of melancholic remains and indicators of the long durée of crisis in the region. Whereas Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “here and now” seems to reflect the nowness of catastrophic events, the time of the digitized archives alters the connecting conjunction “and” to a disjunctive “or”–as in Mosireen’s networked archives of the real world–that foregrounds the synchronicity of diachronic events and affects.

Crises and their augmented digital lives become the filmic and aesthetic practices of the contemporary that ruminate over the Lacanian “sinthome” of time and history, a “disjunctively being in time.” Rania Stephan’s experimental film, The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni (2011), transforms the found footage assemblage of a national Middle Eastern actress icon, whose death is dealt with as suicide, into a materialization of traces and the becoming of symptoms without necessarily referencing the very sources and origins of the malaise of the subject. The speculation embedded in this timely disjunction encloses the spatial anonymity and networked origins and traces of the new images of the archive in cine-media cultures in the MENA. 

 

Rania Stephan Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni 2011

Rania Stephan Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni (2011). Copyright the artist. Courtesy of the artist and Marfa' gallery. 

It is no longer reproducibility that morphs the visual and time, or the visual and the aural, or the individual and the collective in times of crisis (the conjunction of Walter Benjamin’s “Jetztzeit”, the here and now) but rather an internally diffracted and diversified symptom signified through a “disjunctively being in time.” The speculation embedded in this timely disjunction encloses the spatial anonymity and networked origins and traces of the image and body space, archived traces that no longer signify an absence or loss, but rather a becoming of the very sinthome in Lacanian terms. Stephans’ work, which relies on footage from the Egyptian actress’s films, develops a kind of therapeutic quest for her life and death as a national icon on screen. Stephan configures the film persona and her appearance on screen as symptoms of a traumatic experience, national politics, and Hosni’s movement through the Egyptian cinematic history as a retracing of historical events and geopolitical crisis. 

The multitude of digital experiments with the documentary material constitutes the very individuation of the artwork and its “impure aesthetics.” The desire towards new modes of existence and cultural belonging through the visual material provided by technical devices is not new, yet the reconfiguration of crisis as a) a form of assembling the new through networks and b) as the onto-epistemology of the documentary seems vital for a new take on the genre of “the documentary” as much as on archives and documentary images in the wild. Iraqi artist and filmmaker Jananne al Ani, for one, has exhibited aerial images, satellite images, of the Iraqi desert after the 1991 Gulf war that display abstraction and lunar shapes yet remain devoid of the human body in landscapes of war and military violence. Al Ani’s documentary cartographic images show the vividness of the surface of images, their material and molded shape while transmitting the beauty of abstracted empty landscapes and their geological secrets and traces beneath layers of sand and earth.  

Considering the barrenness and omnipresence of the all-absorbing presence of images on personal devices, we might argue that our understanding of the documentary mode has been transformed from austere to unrestrained, and what becomes clear about the multiplicity and variety of artistic, primarily digital, productions is that there is a new desire for the modes of documentary existence and cultural belonging that are intrinsic to forms of engagement, embodiment, and future imaginings. In the age of wild media and rogue archives, we have moved on from an ethnographic “thick description” of other spaces and cultures as well as from the outsourced position of the participant observer to the desire in matter, the affective and excessive matter of the documentary image as the material subject and agent of crisis in its various medial convergences and interfaces. What we witness in the practices of documentary filmmakers is the recognition of distributed agency that is expanding, and it is the performativity of desire, the desire of the documentary image itself to finally become the “sinthome” of its geopolitical and capitalist economy. The documentary image and the artistic practices that work through documenting cultural narratives and histories create modes of existence and belonging that are imminent forms of complicity and enactment. 

The Desire (to become, to make, to show) that is very often disguised as an approach, but does represent a desire to become and belong at the same time, sheds light on the interconnectivity between human actors and technology, or in other words: non-human actors, whilst upholding an often existentialist dimension and concern for life in civil societies and the struggle to survive under the rule of law. 

The biopolitical implications that the documentary image engenders through the concomitancy of technology and human and environmental lives recall Giorgio Agamben’s approach to the interrelation of “subjective technologies and political techniques.” The filmic documentary radical image becomes an intrinsic figure of an alterity and heterogeneity-in-practice, a double-bind material economy of digital contemporaneity and disaster politics—the ambivalence and intricacies of not just being in time, but embodying a criticality through heterochronic features and immanent methods of becoming. 

Thus, the contemporaneity of crisis as/through documentary images sets out to expand the reach of theories of a filmic materialization of perceptual processes (affect and cognition), theories that have already been thoroughly discussed in the context of the cinematic apparatus. Crisis and its accelerating, often documentary, impact on the world expands the sensorial reciprocity of the cinematic as an aesthetic materiality of film in addition to the epistemological functionalization of the time-based knowledge of images. The affective turn in film and digital media theory has led to a stronger linkage of the image space and the affective body of the filmic and (extra-filmic) subject.  



 

[1] Cf. also for the discussion of archives in Middle Eastern film: Laura Marks, Hanan Al Cinema, 2015.


[2] Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, in: Public Culture 15, no.1 (2003), 11– 40; 11–12: “Hence, to kill or to allow to live constitute the limits of sovereignty, its fundamental attributes. To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power…under what practical conditions is the right to kill, to allow to live, or to expose to death exercised? Who is the subject of this right?” 

  • ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR

    • Image Fever: Arab Photography Now

      Image Fever: Arab Photography Now
      Rose Issa and Michket Krifa (eds.), Arab Photography Now. Kehrer: Heidelberg & Berlin, 2011.[This review is forthcoming in Goethe Institut`s publication Fikrun Wa Fann.]Rose Issa and Michket Krif

On Occupation, Power, and Privilege: An Interview with Palestinian Filmmaker Muayad Alayan

This interview was conducted following the screening of the film, The Reports of Sarah and Saleem, at the Boston Palestine Film Festival in October 2018.

Isis Nusair (IN): How did you start making movies?   

Muayad Alayan (MA): One of the most significant experiences in my life was a trip I took with my family to visit the ruins of my grandmother’s house. The house, where my mother was born, is located on a beautiful hilltop in Southern Jerusalem. It was destroyed in 1948. We took our first video camera with us and what we recorded was important for my family for years to come. We kept playing the tape over and over again. It captured an image, sound, piece of history, the land and life they once had at that house. This experience shaped my fascination with the power of the moving image. 

I grew up in Jerusalem at a time when any form of self-expression or representation of anything related to our Palestinian identity and culture was illegal. As a teenager at the beginning of the second intifada, there was a general feeling among my generation that if we documented our lives under occupation and shared it with the outside world, our reality would change for the better. I started learning about cameras, editing, and filmmaking as tools were becoming more available with advances in media technology. I made short films documenting mainly the oral history of my family, friends, and people in my village as well as what was going on in Jerusalem during the second intifada. I looked into pursuing film studies, but there were no programs in Palestine at the time. I applied to film schools abroad and ended up in San Francisco where my older brother Rami was living.

IN: What did your earlier work focus on?

MA: The ideas behind the films I made have always been inspired by incidents or issues I witnessed and experienced firsthand or ones that affected my life or the lives of people in my community. I felt a need to preserve these moments on film for future generations to see. It had to be something that shed light on our human experience and lived beyond me and my physical presence in the world.

[Adeeb Safadi and Sivane Kretchner in The Reports on Sarah and Saleem]

IN: The Reports on Sarah and Saleem (2018) is set in Jerusalem. Jerusalem is kind of a character in the movie.                                                                            

MA: Jerusalem is a city that is segregated by all kinds of barriers, not only by physical walls. You have the Israeli Western part of the city which is modern and privileged, and you have the Palestinian Eastern part which is impoverished and full of ghettoes. The walls in Jerusalem are physical, political, socio-economic, and juridical. Different housing policies, security practices, and educational systems shape this segregation that affects all aspects of life. You can sense that only if you live in the city and not by watching the news.

I wanted audiences to “feel something” about this place. Jerusalem is a character in the film in this sense. How does this city, in the story world, react to such social drama, and how do its systems of segregation and repression act on each individual? If you are a Palestinian Jerusalemite you will know that your life and the lives of people close to you can be jeopardized and turned upside down in a split of a second over the simplest of things. I am always inspired by stories of average human beings facing issues bigger than themselves. This provides a rich environment for examining the human condition. In Jerusalem, people face unbearable circumstances on a daily bases.

IN: The film starts with the every day, a simple love affair that cannot stand the weight of politics in a place like Jerusalem. 

MA: Everything is political in Jerusalem. An infidelity like the one portrayed in the film could happen anywhere in the world with personal and social consequences. Yet, only in Jerusalem could it have this kind of political ramification in the lives of the individuals involved and their families.

IN: The film crosses a number of boundaries especially in its focus on the relation between Sarah and Saleem. Although their relationship is supposed to be private and secret, it does not escape the surveillance and restrictions of the outside world.

MA: In Jerusalem, as in all of Palestine, there is an enormous amount of intrusion by the authorities into the private lives of individuals in the name, of course, of security and control. As a Palestinian teenager, and like the majority of Palestinians from Jerusalem, the first jobs I could find were in the Western part of the city. This was my first encounter with Israeli society beyond the regular encounters with the police and soldiers in the Eastern part. I started working in a hotel and at a café, and I witnessed then these relationships that were happening in the dark shadows of the city. The initial story development was triggered by these affairs, and by the Israeli military invasion into Palestinian Territories where a lot of data got, and every now and then continues to get, confiscated from official Palestinian institutions, security agencies, and civil society organizations.

[Adeeb Safadi in The Reports On Sarah and Saleem]

Numerous people get arrested as a result and their lives are ruined by such abuse of power due to the huge amount of data gathered about their private lives. This data is often interpreted selectively, out of context, without verification or due process. These were the starting points for the film. What if such an affair is no longer in the dark? What if information about such an affair ends up at the hands of the intelligence and military apparatus, and what will be at stake for everyone involved? How could the sequence of events, in this case, say something about the general everyday life in Jerusalem in comparison to other places in the world?

You cannot ignore what sets people apart in the first place, and the systems of power that sustain the divide and inequality between them. There is a system of haves and have nots, of privileges afforded to some but not to others, that is continuously reinforced.
Future imaginaries in the Middle East and North Africa, which are signified through sci-fi elements and animation methods, testify as a time of real-virtual simultaneity, a coincidental structural framework in contemporary media art and archival cultures that are emerging in and through the experience of crisis

IN: The film offers a certain intimacy considering the situation. The two lovers are so close, yet it is impossible for them to remain together. There is a certain fluidity between the characters and events and a certain rigidity and power imbalance between them. 

MA: I cannot stand romanticized narratives or ones that use the Romeo and Juliette structure when dealing with Palestinian-Israeli relations. You cannot ignore what sets people apart in the first place, and the systems of power that sustain the divide and inequality between them. There is a system of haves and have nots, of privileges afforded to some but not to others, that is continuously reinforced. If you come as a tourist and spend a few hours in Jerusalem you might think that there is a certain fluidity between people. But in a split of a second, the power imbalance could kick in, and only then you would encounter such inequality and segregation. People I met at work who had such affairs clearly knew that this was just a temporary affair. The power imbalance is clearly “in the room” or at the back of their minds all the time. It was still a convenient affair because they were having it with someone from “the other” side of town, so chances are people in their communities would not know about it. 

IN: The film provides a critique of different institutions like marriage, and the security-state apparatus. It also critiques particular conceptions of masculinity and heroism on the Israeli and Palestinian sides.

MA: When developing the story with my brother and script-writer, Rami Alayan, we wanted to create real life and believable characters that are not flat representations of “good” or “bad.” It is the systems they choose to represent or defy, and the values they decide to live by or contradict that are at question here. The questioning and critique of these systems and conceptions is sub-textually presented through the actions of the characters and the consequences they are faced with throughout the film.

IN: What is the significance of the particular representation of Bisan, Saleem's wife, in the movie and the strength of character, will, and grace with which she handles the situation?

[Maisa Abd Elhadi in The Reports on Sarah and Saleem]

MA: Bisan’s character undergoes major change. She starts out innocent and living in the protected environment of her family. As the film progresses, she is forced to go through a journey of confronting betrayal, grief, and the challenges that bring out her true strength. Most importantly, Bisan does not surrender to simply doing what is expected of her by her family and society. She handles the situation with the grace of the caring mother she becomes by the end of the film. 

[Maisa Abd Elhadi and Sivane Kretchner in The Reports on Sarah and Saleem]

IN: The film deals with women's agency and their alliance at the end to offer alternatives. Is your film trying to challenge the status quo and offer a different reality as part of creating alternative solutions?

MA: By the end of the film, the two women lead characters are the ones who make choices that they believe, according to their conscience, are right and just for themselves and those around them. They do not choose an easy way out that their privilege could offer them on the social, political, and juridical levels. There is often extra pressure on women to conform to the status quo, albeit differently, in both Palestinian and Israeli societies. Both Bisan and Sarah do not do what is expected of them, and they give up something in order to do what they consider is right. Bisan gains her independence but has to let go of her dependence on her family and with it her brother’s interference in the decisions that should be her own. In the case of Sarah, we wanted her to represent a specific type of Israeli who wants to be liberal, progressive, and do the right thing as long as it does not affect their comfort zone and privilege. The statement at the end is telling. Unless you are willing to get out of your comfort zone and compromise on your privileges, you will not be able to redeem yourself and will end up losing your soul and humanity.
                                                                                                                                                         
IN: Your earlier film, Love, Theft and Other Entanglements (2015), was filmed in long shots and in black and white. The title of the film alludes to the national struggle post-Oslo and to the theft of land, opportunity, and dignity.     

[Maya Abu Alhayyat in Love, Theft and Other Entanglements]

MA: I wanted the film to feel like a fairy-tale set in Palestine. I wanted it to move away from the visuals and images people are usually exposed to from the media. Filming in black and white also helped in the absurd/dark humor that was intended for the story, and that is also a real Palestinian survival mechanism amidst all the miseries we continue to face. A minimalist, less is more approach was the general guideline we applied throughout the process of writing the script and in the cinematography. We focused on the characters and eliminated unnecessary elements. The story world could be set anywhere and at any moment in time, the only time frame is the post-Oslo reality.

IN: The film critiques the peace process as well as the nationalist discourse of heroism. Mousa, the hero, reminded me of Emile Habibi's Saeed in the Pessoptimist

 

[Sami Metwasi in Love, Theft and Other Entanglements]

MA: The characters are facing real-life situations but ones that are so absurd that one wonders whether what is happening is real or fiction, which is true to the unfortunate times we are experiencing at the collective level. I consider myself part of the post-Oslo depressed generation, which Mousa, the main character in Love, Theft and other Entanglements is also part of. Growing up in the late 1980s and 1990s, there was a sense of hope that what was coming will be better. Unfortunately, the new reality turned out to be worse. We were not only faced with the ongoing occupation, but with political corruption, neoliberalism, foreign aid and development agendas, and the consequences of it all, as well as the old social taboos and dilemmas. All of these were elements standing in Mousa’s way, yet he eventually finds a way to move on, and redeem himself but not in a very happy ending kind of scenario. In Emile Habibi’s brilliant Pessomtimist, the main character also belongs to a generation of Palestinians that were faced with disappointment and defeat at different levels, yet they somehow found the means to persist and survive.

[Riyad Sliman in Love, Theft and Other Entanglements]

IN: There has been a major debate recently about funding sources for Palestinian cinema. Where did you get the funding to make this film?

MA: The film was made possible through funding from the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC), The Hubert Bals Fund (International Film Festival Rotterdam), The World Cinema Fund (Berlinale), FilmLab: Palestine, as well as several other Palestinian institutions. We also partnered with a Mexican production company that provided us with a high-end camera and cinematography equipment that are not available in Palestine, making The Reports of Sarah and Saleem the first Palestinian/Mexican co-production. I am aware of the challenges you are referring to regarding funding in Palestine and the Arab world more generally. This, unfortunately, continues to be a problem. For me, none of my films would have been possible without the generous support and contribution of friends, colleagues, and family members as well as the in-kind support of businesses such as hotels and restaurants within my community in Jerusalem and Bethlehem. It takes a village to make a film!

IN: Are you part of a younger generation of filmmakers who are shaping Palestinian cinema? Is there in your view a distinctive Palestinian cinema?  

MA: I think the next generation will be in a better position to judge how our generation is contributing to the making of Palestinian cinema. I think the first generation of filmmakers succeeded in getting Palestinian cinema out to the world, and confronted many challenges and efforts that were and continue to be invested in suppressing any voice or narrative from Palestine, or any kind of recognition for Palestinian art and culture. We are still living under occupation, but I believe that we are much more than just a nation under occupation. We have a lot to share with the world about the full spectrum of the human experience. There have been several works in the past few years that are moving in that direction in their storyline and form compared to what has been produced earlier.