Azza El-Hassan, The Afterlife of Palestinian Images: Visual Remains and the Archive of Disappearance (Palgrave Studies in Arab Cinema, 2024).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Azza El-Hassan (AEH): The Afterlife of Palestinian Images is part of a series of acts I have engaged in since 2017, which together explore if something anew can emerge out of ruins. I am a filmmaker and also as a scholar, belonging to a culture and society whose photos, films, and media equipment are repeatedly subjected to destruction and looting; I wanted to see if the visual objects that do survive the violence can still be of use today—or whether the violence alters and changes them to such a degree that we are no longer able to relate to our own images. To do that, I first had to find photographs, films, and media equipment that have survived violence, and then tried to interact with them and put them to present use. I assembled; arranged and rearranged; created installations; restored films; exhibited films; curated an exhibition of visual remains of colonial plundering; and then appropriated these visual remains into a short film. The book is the final in this series of acts. It is the space where I narrate my journey and reflect on the process, in an attempt to make sense of loss and then find ways to a possible present and future.
There are still possibilities to recreate and reposition these objects and along with them we recreate and reposition ourselves within a new present Palestinian narrative.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
AEH: As I began working with photos, films, and media equipment that had survived violence I was told by many that I was performing media archology. The term troubled me as many of the images which do survive violence might not be objects of the past but are instead material of a plundered present. As such, in the book I negate the term “media archology” when dealing with visual remains of plunder and, in the process, I describe a methodology to approach these remains which I called “hands on visual remains”.
I also look at the “cultural reality” which the systematic looting of Palestinian visual archives creates—where Palestinian photos and films that become inaccessible to Palestinians are accessed and used by Israeli researchers and filmmakers. This means that many times Palestinians can only get to experience their own archives through narratives that have been constructed by Israeli filmmakers or academics using Palestinian archives. I discuss in the book how this affects Palestinians’ own knowledge of their visual own past and the impact of this on the creation of modern Palestinian visual narratives.
Most of the material that I work with belonged once to the Palestine Film Institute, which was plundered during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. In particular, I focus on objects that were made or used by Hani Jawherieh, a Palestinian photographer and cinematographer and one of the founders of the Palestine Film Institute. So Jawherieh’s personal and professional narrative comes across as I explore his objects. The narrative of the Palestine Film Institute also appears almost unintentionally in the book as the plunder of visual archives is retold. My personal and professional narrative is present too, especially because I use myself as a subject of work and I assess my own reactions and feelings as I handle visual remains of plunder.
In my attempt to comprehend the nature of Palestinian images that have emerged out of violence today, I reach a realization that these images have been changed by the act of plunder and are no longer what their creators intended. They have been changed and, in the process, we too have been changed. However, both us and our objects remain able to connect. There are still possibilities to recreate and reposition these objects and along with them we recreate and reposition ourselves within a new present Palestinian narrative.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
AEH: The Afterlife of Palestinian Images is completely connected to my previous and present work and I dedicate a full chapter of the book to looking at my previous work and how each film I made somehow opened a path that eventually led me to this project. I have always, whether in film or in writing, attempted to make sense of being a subject of war, occupation, and colonial violence. The book does exactly that, just as my previous works, such as News Time (2001), The Place (2000), Kings & Extras (2004), and The Unbearable Presence of Asmahan (2014).
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
AEH: I think the book is accessible to different kinds of readers. It could be read by someone who is not a specialist in the subject but also by film practitioners, researchers, and individuals who work on visual archives and the effects of settler colonialism on native communities and their construction of narratives.
In the book I discuss how a culture that has been subjected to visual archive plunder can relate to their own visual archives and I discuss the need for an ethical framework when handling these. I hope that the book will impact future uses of Palestinian visual archives and will encourage others to engage with them in an ethical manner.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
AEH: I have been working for years on a film which has been difficult to complete as it is about my mother who passed away some years ago. The reason it has been difficult to finish is not only because of the personal connection and my pain but also because I use this story of my mother to tell the story of Palestine and Palestinians from the ‘70s until today—and today has been difficult to comprehend with the daily attacks and killings in Gaza. Still, I am hoping that I can finish it in the coming months. I am also involved in several other writing projects.
J: Is there a healing process involved in this work?
AEH: I have always considered myself lucky as I could find mediums, such as film, video, and writing, to articulate, rationalize, and handle the effects of living under occupation—a very personal as well as collective experience. As I began working with visual remains of plunder, and through writing, I became increasingly aware that a cathartic act was being performed, a healing process was apparent, and I was personally experiencing it. Yet, what I found most interesting—and as I discuss in the book—was the effect on other people, such as spectators and performers, of engaging and interacting with visual remains of plunder. For example, I observed some screenings of the restored films attended by the same person several times; when I questioned this, they noted that they felt some kind of power through watching what a military power had tried to destroy or loot and deny access to. Another example is when I asked the daughter of Hani Jawherieh to assemble her father’s 16mm camera, only to find that the process unlocked her own personal trauma of loss and not only that of a cameraman who was killed while filming.
Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 1, pages 2-5)
I once imagined that inside a film there was another film where victims win and their image is transformed. They would not resemble their oppressors and they would not do to others what had been done to them. Instead, they would tour the world and change it into a better place in which there are no more victims.
Fig.1.1 Dream sequence, Kings and Extras, 2004; Fig.1.2 Dream sequence, Kings and Extras, 2004
I could imagine and construct my own narrative, because the film that was being projected in front of me had no actual images. There were only shadows, sounds and fading colours that filled the screen. It was a film reel that had survived the Israeli plunder of the Palestine Cinema Institute in 1982, salvaged by Mosa Mosa, a cameraman who worked at the Institute, along with his 16mm camera. Although Mosa Mosa did his best to preserve the reel as he moved from one refugee camp to another, eventually settling in Damascus, humidity and heat ate away at the film until eventually its images degenerated and decayed. Twenty years later, after the violent event—that is, when the film reel was separated from the institute that had preserved it and from the archive it once belonged to—I was able to watch it in Syria. It offered me little connection to the past. Yet, the traces of the images it contained opened up a space in the present for me to imagine. I was able to create a fictionalized narrative about a possible future, which I used to construct my ending sequence in Kings and Extras (2004).
My encounter with the visual remains of plunder, and what emerged from it, have never left me: the possibility of creating something anew out of ruins. As a filmmaker, through the years, I would encounter more photos and films that have survived the violence and find that not all of them that crossed paths with the plunderers have decayed or degenerated. Some have remained intact; but even these images have been altered by the violence, becoming constant reminders of what has been lost and a fragment of what was.
In this work, years after my encounter with the film reel in Damascus, I trace, find and put to use visual remains of plunder, that is, photos, films and recording equipment that continue to dwell in Palestinian spaces after looting and destruction. My aim is to understand what has become of these images, how violence changes visual objects, and how this process of change alters our relationship with our own images. I am interested in how a culture that experiences dispossession relates to its photos and films that have become remnants of plunder, and how violence affects society’s ability to connect with its own visual objects. I also search for new uses for these remains.
In A Dying Colonialism (1965), Frantz Fanon argued that the collision between the colonizer and the colonized produces a hybrid entity due to a coalescence of cultures and practices. For Fanon, hybridization means that returning to a precolonial state is impossible. Although I am not in the process of analysing whether a hybrid entity emerges due to plunder—a point of collision between the Israeli state and Palestinian society—I do want to understand what this collision does to Palestinian objects, Palestinian society and its individual members.
In postcolonial theories and as part of a decolonization process, remains, that is home remains, as proposed by Homi Bhabha first in The World and the Home (1992) and later in The Location of Culture (2004), have become a central concept in understanding the colonized postcolonial state. Bhabha bases his argument on Fanon’s concept of collision, where “home remains” is a space of ambivalence to and with the home that emerges as a postcolonial condition after collision with the colonizer has occurred and ended; it is where what was once familiar becomes unfamiliar, estranged, unhomely and uncanny.
In this work, I approach photos and films that survive plunder in the same manner in which Bhabha approaches the home as a space. This is because, just as we inhabit our homes, our images inhabit our photos and films; and just as we accumulate memories and connect our past with the homes we grew up in, we accumulate memories within the space of a film reel or a video that we make, on photographic paper, or in a digital photo space. Still and moving images are objects that can help us connect our past with our present.
Bhabha uses “home remains” to describe a postcolonial condition, whereas Palestine and the Palestinians are not facing a linear narrative of colonization in which colonization ends and a postcolonial condition emerges. In settler colonialism, “invasion is a structure and not an event” (Wolf, 2006). This structure is designed to achieve what Strakosh and Macoun call “the vanishing endpoint,” when the settler society will have fully replaced the indigenous society on their land and naturalized this replacement (Strakosh and Macoun, 2012). The vanishing end point, according to Strakosh and Macoun, is continuously pursued until the moment of colonial completion.
In relation to Palestinian archives, including audiovisual archives, this vanishing endpoint is pursued through a repetitive and systematic looting and destruction of these archives. Every time a Palestinian institution with an archive is attacked and plundered, a new institution is founded by Palestinians to house and preserve what, if anything, remains of the previous archive. Yet often the newly established archive centre becomes the subject of another plunder. For example, the Palestine Cinema Institute, founded in the 1970s, which housed Palestinian photos and films created by Palestinian photographers and filmmakers after the loss of Palestinian visual archives in 1948, was itself plundered in 1982. That same year, the archive of Voice of the Palestinian Revolution radio station was ransacked. And in 1998, the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank founded the Voice of Palestine Radio station, which was later pillaged in 2003.
To plunder Palestinian archives, Israel has crossed borders and invaded countries: in 1982 it invaded Lebanon and looted the Palestine Research Centre archive, the Palestine Studies Centre archive, the Cultural Art Archive and, of course, the Palestine Cinema Institute archive. In 2001, following the Oslo agreement, which provided for later negotiations on the status of East Jerusalem—and which is still at the time of writing considered occupied territory by the United Nations—Israel attacked the Orient House and plundered its archive, which contained documents about the Palestinian presence in Jerusalem. In 2003, Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank were invaded, and the archives of Palestine TV, the Voice of Palestine and the Ministry of Culture were all ravaged. In 2017, Al Aqsa Mosque, which is in Jerusalem and under Jordanian control, had its library plundered. The library held rare manuscripts and books dating back 900 years. Most recently, during the Israeli onslaught on Gaza which began in 2023 and which has resulted in unprecedented numbers of civilian deaths, Gaza Municipal Library, which housed thousands of books and documents recording the city’s history and development, was reduced to rubble along with Rahad Al-Shawa Cultural Centre, which likewise housed valuable photos, films and books.
While the plunder of Palestinian institutions is usually recorded and documented, the looting and destruction of the private archives of individuals during invasions and bombings are not. For example, in 2003, my own library of film footage and audio recordings was destroyed during an Israeli incursion into Ramallah. I documented the destruction in Three cm Less (2003) and I am documenting it again now by writing about it, but this is rare and is entirely due to me being a filmmaker and a researcher. The destruction and abduction of Palestinian individual archives typically remain undocumented and unaccounted for.
