Nadia Yaqub (ed.), Gaza on Screen (Duke University Press, 2023).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you edit this book?
Nadia Yaqub (NY): Gaza on Screen grew out of a film festival that I was invited to curate for Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies in 2019. The book developed from the extensive research I conducted for the festival. However, given how moving images circulate these days, with films rubbing shoulders with news reports, personal videos, and other visual materials online, especially through social media, I knew from the beginning that the book would not just be about film. That breadth, and the fact that I have never been to the Gaza Strip myself, made it imperative that it be an edited volume rather than a monograph.
Although my contributors and I began working on the volume earlier, the 2021 Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip also shaped the volume. When violence first erupted that spring in Sheikh Jarrah and al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, people began posting films and other images on social media such that looking from afar, not just at the violence occurring at that time, but at an entire catalog of Palestinian film and photography stretching back to the Mandate period, was construed as an urgent act of solidarity. That invitation to a particular type of viewership became central to the theoretical frame of the introduction.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
NY: Gaza on Screen addresses film, video, and television news media from and about the Gaza Strip. It includes a roundtable discussion by six Gazan filmmakers, moderated by Palestinian filmmaker Azza el-Hassan; essays about fictional, documentary, and experimental films; chapters on news media in Israel and Lebanon, on videos produced by the `Izz al-Din Qassam Brigades, on online videos of the 2018-19 Great March of Return, and on Mandate-era British newsreels. These chapters are framed by an introduction that critically engages scholarship on the humanitarian image and engagements with opacity and refusal to argue for an agential and relational understanding of Gazan image-making through the technology of the screen.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
NY: Gaza on Screen grew out of nearly twenty years of research and writing about Palestinian cinema. Since 2005, I have been curating film festivals and series, organizing conferences, panels, and roundtables, and, of course, writing about Palestinian film. My last monograph, Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution (University of Texas Press, 2018) focuses on Palestinian film of the long 1970s. Several articles and book chapters focus on more recent Palestinian film. Gaza on Screen differs from this earlier work both in its expanded focus on television and short videos that circulate primarily through social media, and its focus explicitly on the Gaza Strip.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
NY: My books are academic but I strive to write for an educated general audience. Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution has attracted interest from activists, artists, and curators, in addition to scholars of cinema and Palestine studies. Gaza on Screen was written for a similar audience, broadened, of course, to include those interested in media studies more generally. Towards that end I ensured that the book would be available open access from the start—anyone can read the entire book for free from the Duke University Press website.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
NY: My current major research project is a study of Arab cinema of the 1970s and 1980s, with a particular focus on emancipatory projects that rose, fell, transformed, and developed across the region during this time. I am interested in how individuals and small groups struggled under conditions of compromise and constraint to create films, publications, and gatherings related to film for the betterment of their communities and peoples. Cinema, especially from earlier decades and before the invention of digital technologies, is a particularly interesting lens through which to examine such impulses because it is almost always collaborative and requires considerable resources. These social and material aspects leave their imprints on both the people who make them and the films they create.
J: How has the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas and the genocide in the Gaza Strip affected your thinking about Gaza on Screen?
NY: Gaza on Screen came out in August 2023, just weeks before 7 October. The flood of images that filled our screens in the wake of the Hamas attacks on Israeli settlements in the Gaza Envelope, the unprecedented ferocity of Israel’s response, and the sharp differences between the images and stories that circulated through social media on one hand and most mainstream media outlets in the West on the other created a strong desire among viewers who were paying attention for a theorization of the act of viewing Gazan images. This is ironic, given how theory can only arise out of conditions of intellectual distance from events on the ground, and many of us, I think, have felt a desperate need to remain as close as possible to the ground as events have unfolded. That craving for a theory to understand our viewing anew arose, I think, because many of us outside the Gaza Strip have only been able to engage through images, because those images have been horrifying, and because we are intensely wary of consuming victimizing images.
Because the book was written in the wake of several unusually violent attacks on the Gaza Strip (2004, 2008-9, 2012, 2014, and 2021), and because all its authors have a keen awareness of Palestinian history and how the current genocidal violence operates as a natural progression of historical processes put in place more than one hundred years ago, its analyses have held up well in the face of recent events. Having said that, I did not anticipate the utter destruction of Gazan society and built environment that began after 7 October. In November 2023, I was invited by Diana Allan to participate in a discussion of films by Oraib Toukan and Rehab Nazzal at McGill University. I was struck, on seeing Nazzal’s short film Vibrations from Gaza (2023) for the first time, by how knowing that the community and institutions featured in this very recent film had been destroyed affected my viewing. Suddenly, the films, videos, and photographs from and about the Gaza Strip that I had been studying had turned into a visual archive of a place that had disappeared and would never be the same; regardless of the outcome of this war, the Gaza Strip will be a fundamentally different place when the violence abates. That changes the role that this material will play culturally and politically for both Palestinians and solidarity activists.
Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction, pp. 1-6)
In early May 2021, demonstrations by Palestinians protesting planned evictions from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem spread quickly to al-Aqsa Mosque and other parts of East Jerusalem where Israeli authorities had engaged in several provocative actions throughout the month of Ramadan, including disabling the loudspeakers that broadcast the call to prayer, preventing worshippers from entering the mosque compound, and banishing Palestinians from gathering at the plaza in front of the Damascus Gate. In each case, Palestinian protests against these actions were met with police brutality and hundreds of arrests. On May 10, Hamas demanded that Israeli police and military leave Sheikh Jarrah and the mosque compound and that evening began to fire rockets into Israel from Gaza when Israel failed to do so. Israel immediately responded with airstrikes, initiating its fourth major military attack on Gaza since 2008. By the time a ceasefire was called eleven days later, 266 Palestinians and 13 residents of Israel had been. Thousands of Palestinians were wounded and tens of thousands displaced due to the widespread destruction of homes and other infrastructure.
My social media newsfeeds quickly filled up with news reports, cell phone videos and photos, and solidarity statements. Among the material disseminated to distant spectators of events on the ground there appeared information on accessing dozens of Palestinian films. Established Palestine film festivals, Palestinian and other Middle Eastern arts organizations, nongovernmental organizations (ngos), and individuals made works available online for free or for a small fee. Others created and circulated lists of films that were already available on YouTube or various streaming services….In this moment of crisis, people were invited not just to sign statements, contact representatives, attend protests, send money, and follow the news but also to virtually immerse themselves in Palestine in all its diversity through the dozens of visual works created over the course of more than seventy years….
What are we to make of this media cacophony, to borrow a term from Shaira Valadaria’s chapter in this volume? The films and other creative material offered up at this moment of crisis were the product of decades of work by Palestinians and others, including filmmakers, cultural ngos, and the Palestine film festivals that have proliferated globally since 2000. Palestinian filmmaking has always been an activist enterprise, one helping to sustain communities and serving to document and archive not only narratives and events but also particular structures of feeling. As a communicative act, the circulation of Palestinian films through various networks…has been motivated in large part by the desire to build relations with others.…Deploying this media archive was not just about sharing information or providing opportunities to “witness” the traumas and injustices that Palestinians have experienced, but to announce belonging and invite others to deepen their ties to a community of conscience. It was a call for a deeper type of engagement with Palestine (however one defined it) and Palestinians in all their complexity through works of contemplation, humor, fantasy, disaster, resistance, escape, melodrama, and other themes, genres, and modes.
Gaza on Screen is a collection of essays exploring the practice, product, and impact of films and videos from and about Palestine. Contributors to the volume assume a political, cultural, or psychological efficacy to Palestinian moving images and ask what that efficacy might be, even as they recognize how other local, regional, and global forces shape the lived experiences of Palestinians and their political possibilities. Palestine has long been associated with both resistance and urgent humanitarian need, associations that have generated a surprisingly complex and ever-shifting range of visual material that includes not only surveillance and military footage, amateur videos, and documentaries but also fictional features, experimental videos, and a variety of social media material. Gaza on Screen examines this material and its global and local circulation as a visual ecosystem in which different types of representation interact and inform one another.
The book focuses on the Gaza Strip as a Palestinian space and society that has come to be defined in the global imaginary by catastrophe, impending collapse, and violence. Gaza tests theories of representations of trauma and the power of narrative and aesthetics to process that trauma. Gaza has been instrumentalized, ignored, and magnified by regional and global actors, and its film and media production has played a central role in solidarity activism and militantism. As the global context for Gazan images has changed over time, so, too, have the narratives and ideologies underpinning its images, particularly on questions of collective identity and individualism. Technological developments and new media have led to the proliferation of films/videos and image-makers, even as prevailing narratives and ideologies have constrained the types of stories that are told and how they circulate.
Gaza on Screen also explores the role of screens, both large and small, in the circulation of visual representations of Gaza. Screens serve as a point of convergence for technological competence (to deploy screen media is to participate in contemporary modernity), as well as for global, regional, and local circuits of culture and information that have been increasingly dominated by screens since the advent of television in the mid-twentieth century. They are also an increasingly popular site for artistic and political expression. As Helga Tawil-Souri argues in the afterword of this volume, screens are both materially significant and contradictorily evocative of showing and hiding from view. The screen invites questions about the material conditions that allow certain representations to circulate, mediation, and the relationship of the virtual to lived experiences within the Gaza Strip, as well as the nature of connections sustained to the Gaza Strip through the virtual.
However, these technologies have developed within structures of power that have always delimited Palestinian images and their circulation both by discursive frameworks that exclude marginalized political and cultural expression and by an explicit campaign by Israel to suppress Palestinian images. The social media circulation of Palestinian images in 2021 arose from long-standing Palestinian understandings of the importance of images for the development of agential selfhood and collective identity. In 1968, when a group of young Palestinian photographers and filmmakers first began creating and disseminating images shot from a Palestinian perspective, they understood their work as a revolutionary intervention into the circulation of images about the region. In particular, they believed that the indexicality of the screened filmic image shot from a Palestinian perspective could communicate a revolutionary truth that eluded other types of representations. This material also allowed Palestinians to see themselves and their own aspirations reflected in the emerging Palestinian revolutionary movement, hence encouraging feelings of belonging. Similar concerns have informed the work of Palestinian filmmakers and other image-makers ever since. Screens, then, must be understood as sites of struggle and contestation, structured by what Nicholas Mirzoeff calls visuality and Jacques Rancière calls the police, but where it is nonetheless possible to show and see the world differently. The visual ecosystem of Gazan images operates both within that visuality and against it. Sometimes its images confirm the authority of existing power structures, and sometimes they undermine it, but its existence as an archive of Palestinian presence is always a challenge to a visuality predicated on their disappearance.
Screens are a form of mediation and thus define and facilitate relationships between and among Gazans and distant spectators. Communities are created, defined, and sustained through viewing practices. Large screens, before which people gather to watch Palestinian material together, create the potential for political engagement. Palestinian films circulate through elite film festivals, art house cinemas, and museum, educational, and gallery spaces where they are viewed and critiqued for their aesthetic quality and intellectual or artistic interventions. They more often circulate in politicized spaces such as Palestine film festivals and screenings organized by solidarity groups where gathering together to view a film is an expression of political belonging. Large-screen screenings of Palestinian material are often accompanied by postscreening discussions and so constitute a practice of Third Cinema. Large screens encourage a thoughtful viewing practice in which films are viewed in one sitting and audience members do not multitask. Small screens, particularly handheld devices, encourage quick viewing and the sharing of materials, sometimes even before they are examined or evaluated, simply because they appear to confirm a preexisting worldview. These are networked images, valued more for their virality than their representational qualities, but this form of viewing is also a way of maintaining a sense of community and can be particularly important in moments of crisis.
Most important, screens are relational in that they connect people across time and space—thinking about Gazan film and video through the screen encourages us to consider them not as representations addressed to everyone but rather as speech acts inviting viewers into a relationship with the filmed or photographed subject. Considered thus, the act of filming, viewing, and sharing is always agential even if its impact is uncertain. Framing the volume around screens allows contributors to consider not just images but also sound and other senses that are communicated through film and video. It opens the door to considerations of the promise and limitations of the virtual to questions of political voice, including the role of circulated images, sound, and the haptic effects they might evoke in creating and sustaining an Arendtian space of appearance.