Saturday -- 07.09.11 -- Excessively Palestine -- A Few Films, A Few Questions

Contents:
1. About Saturday
2. Between Two Things
3. Schedule & Details
4. Useful Readings

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1. About Saturday

When: 4:15pm
Who: Free and open to all
Where: 16 Beaver Street 4th floor
What: Screening / Responses / Discussion

This event comes out of an initial inquiry by Nasrin Himada and Vicky Moufawad-Paul (living in Toronto and Montreal respectively) to screen a series of films, videos that would attempt to activate a series of questions interweaving the political and cinematic histories of 'Marxism and Third World Internationalist Struggle' in relation to Palestine.

As the revolutionary processes in the Mediterranean, North Africa, and Middle East take hold, revisiting these histories, considerations, solidarities, and impasses is an important task in navigating our present. We felt this was a timely proposal and have attempted over the last weeks to finally bring this program to New York.

The 4 videos proposed were:

Red Army / PFLP : The Declaration of World War
Directed by Masao Adachi

Palestine in the Eye
Directed by Mustafa Abu Ali

Nervus Rerum*
Directed by The Otolith Group 2008

My Heart Beats Only for Her
Directed by Mohamed Soueid

We have managed to get copies of all of the films except the last.**

In addition to the screening program, we are happy to include some guests and discussants in between.

One of which will be Go Hirasawa. Go is a researcher in Japanese film and movement history particularly between the 60's and 70's. So it will be a nice way to evaluate some of the global and internationalist dimension of that particular historical conjuncture with someone familiar with the Japanese context. Go was also involved with the DVD release of the Red Army / PFLP film in Japan, and organized with Sabu Kohso, a symposium about Adachi 6 years ago at NYU.

As usual, we would like to invite and draw from the amazing community of thinkers, activists, and artists living in New York, so please circulate this among those who you believe could contribute to this discussion. Thus, we hope that the film screenings are not seen as an end in themselves, but rather an effort to activate a collective intelligence and imaginary around questions which remain central to political processes unfolding today.

The entire program will be followed by a dinner together, so people are encouraged to bring some beverages.

* We would like to thank Anjalika, Kodwo, Louise, and Adam (of Lux) for getting us the copy of this video in very short time. We would also like to use this footnote to announce that in late October, the Otolith Group will be here in New York and so this screening may serve as a nice introduction for those less familiar with their work.
** We would like to also thank Mohamed Soueid for his enthusiasm for the program and his efforts to get a copy of the video to us.

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2. Between Two Things

Between Two Things
by Nasrin Himada and Vicky Moufawad-Paul

This two-part screening investigates the Palestinian Film Archive that was lost in the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The Palestinian Film Archive contained over 100 films that documented the daily life and political struggle of the Palestinian people during the heightened revolution beginning in the 1960s in Lebanon and Jordan. Several of the films presented here illustrate the (recently misunderstood) connection of Palestinian political endeavors to Marxism and the third world internationalist struggle. These films and video -- Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War, Palestine in the Eye, and Nervus Rerum -- are culled from the archive and from contemporary image-makers’ mediations on the bits of archive available, as well as on the rumors of the images the archives contained. The works, dating from the 70s to the present, interrogate and often turn their backs on the pitfalls of representation, while questioning the kinds of representations that are possible.

In the Middle East and elsewhere in the third world, new documentary images that challenged conventional and bourgeois cinematic techniques were being produced. Palestinians filmed their own experiences, and documented their own struggles -- these images consist of the Fidae’en training camps and impoverished territorial landscapes that have become familiar to us. But how do we engage with them today? How do we contextualize the ways in which these images of the revolution were of a necessary politics that emerged out of the conditions of a particular historical moment? How do they stand alongside contemporary reified, sympathetic, and exhausted documentary images made by Palestinians and others? How do we think about the images of Palestine that challenge and resist the implementation of representation, and that take to task the failure of representation?

These two sets of images -- the archival footage that witness a people’s disappearance and the divergent contemporary strategies -- as they are screened in this context, conjoin to formulate a cinematic language that is of historical precedence. This program engages the problematic of representing Palestine and pushes us to ask how can one visually communicate what has become excessively represented.

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3. Schedule & Details

This is a rough draft of our schedule. We will try to follow it as closely as possible, while remaining attentive to the collective process.

4:15 PM
Introduction

4:30 PM
Screening & Discussion

Palestine in the Eye (1979, 27 min)
Directed by Mustafa Abu Ali

Red Army / PFLP : The Declaration of World War (1971, 71 min)
Directed by Masao Adachi

6:15 PM
Discussion 1 with Go Hirosawa and friends

7:15 PM
[Break}

7:30 PM
Nervus Rerum (2008, 32 min)
Directed by The Otolith Group

8:00 PM
Discussion 2 followed by dinner

Details:

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Red Army / PFLP : The Declaration of World War
Directed by Masao Adachi
1971, 71 minutes, color, 16mm
Co-produced by Wakamatsu Production
Co-edited by Red Army (Red Army Faction of Japan Revolutionary
Communist League) and PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine)

This film is a milestone of cinema as activism. Adachi and Wakayama went to Beirut on the way back from the Cannes Film Festival. There, in collaboration with the Red Army members and PFLP, they produced this newsreel film depicting the everyday activities of Arab guerrillas as a cinematic narrative on the world
revolution. The film is a fusion of intense agitation and the ‘landscape theory’ approach inherited from Adachi’s “Aka. Serial Killer,” aimed to move the emphasis of film from situations to landscapes as expression of political and economical power relations. The film was conceived as a new form of news report, and was discussed in synchronicity with the Dziga Vertov Group and the revolutionary films of Latin America, transcending geographical distances. The film embodies the collaboration between Japanese filmmakers and Palestinians in that era, and is also a historical document of Palestine at the height of the Third World internationalist revolution.

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Palestine in the Eye
Directed by Mustafa Abu Ali
1979, 27 minutes, B+W, 16 mm
Produced by the Palestinian Cinema Institution

Abu Ali is an important figure in the history of Palestinian cinema. He was one of the founders of the Palestine Film Unit, a cinema collective that emerged out of the revolutionary movements of the late 60s, based in Jordan, and that was made up of Palestinian filmmakers and artists. Palestine in the Eye is an homage to Hanni Jawhariah’s work. Jawhariah was one of the three founders of the Palestine Film Unit. He was born in 1939 in Jerusalem and died in 1976, while filming the battle of Ain Toura in the mountains of Lebanon. Jawhariah was the first to shoot and produce images of the Fidae’en (freedom fighters). All twelve of his films have disappeared and the only surviving work is the last five scenes he shot in Ain Toura as he died with his camera in hand. These last five shots have been included in this film. Jawhariah contributed immensely to the growing movement of revolutionary cinema of the late 1960s and through to the 70s until his death. This documentary film by Abu Ali marks a very important period in the history of Palestinian cinema, as it also pays tribute to one of the most important filmmakers of Palestinian revolutionary cinema.

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Go Hirosawa

He has written about and programmed many events centered on Japanese political cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. He is co-author of Eiga/kakumei (Film/Revolution) (Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2003), a series of interviews with radical filmmaker Adachi Masao, and editor of Underground Film Archives (Kawade, 2001), Fassbinder (Gendai Shicho Shinsha, 2005) , The Collected Work of Wakamatsu Koji (Kawade, 2010) and Culture Theory of 1968 (Mainichi Shinbunsha, 2010).

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Nervus Rerum
Directed by The Otolith Group
2008, 32 minutes

“Nervus Rerum uses sound, image and text to explore the scarred landscape of Jenin Refugee Camp in Palestine. In the film, various routes through the camp that lead to dead ends are explored and juxtaposed with spoken excerpts from the writings of Fernando Pessoa and Jean Genet. The film builds on the artists’remarkable Otolith trilogy of 2003–2008, for which its two members, Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar, exploited the critical potential of the “essay film”—a distinctive mixture of documentary and dramatic imagery accompanied by poetic, historical, and often autobiographical narration that, in the tradition of such diverse filmmakers and groups as Black Audio Film Collective, Harun Farocki, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, and Anand Patwardhan, works to disrupt the clear boundaries between fact and fiction, subjectivity and objectivity, the real and the imaginary. In the process, the Otolith Group has invented inspiring new political and creative possibilities for filmmaking as a critical and conceptual art. Nervus Rerum—its title borrowed from Cicero’s Latin, meaning “the nerve of things”—confronts the problem of the representability of a people confined to a geographical enclave by a longstanding military occupation.” –TJ Demos

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4. Useful Readings

Irmgard Emmelhainz and the Otolith Group, "A Trialogue on Nervus Rerum"
http://sduk.us/pdf/a_trialogue_on_nervus_rerum.pdf

T.J. Demos, "The Right to Opacity: On the Otolith Group’s Nervus Rerum"
http://sduk.us/pdf/the_right_to_opacity_otolith_group_nervus_rerum.pdf

Various texts on Masao Adachi.
http://www.bordersphere.com/events/adachi3.htm

Program from "Cinema & Revolution: A Screening of Masao Adachi's Work," NYU.
http://www.bordersphere.com/events/adachi1.htm

Interview with Masao Adachi on his film Prisoner/Terrorist (2007), made after his imprisonment, and return to Japan and to filmmaking.
http://www.midnighteye.com/interviews/masao_adachi.shtml

Information on the recent Wakamatsu retrospective at La Cinématheque Française.
http://www.cinematheque.fr/fr/dans-salles/hommages-retrospectives/fiche-cycle/koji-wakamatsu,306.html

Information on the recent Adachi retrospective at La Cinématheque Française.
http://www.cinematheque.fr/fr/dans-salles/rendez-vous-reguliers/fiche-cycle/masao-adachi,312.html