The Cinematic Image as Life, Death, and Inspiration: A Reflection on Palestinian Films at the Prismatic Ground Festival.
During each presentation at the fourth and latest edition of New York’s Prismatic Ground film festival, which focuses on experimental and documentary cinema, the founder and organiser, Inney Prakash, made it a point to note that the genocide of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli, British, and American governments was ongoing. It certainly pervaded as a dark cloud over our movie viewing but there was a sense that the movie viewing itself could serve as a balm to our souls. Art could be a source of healing and energy that we would need to continue to resist amidst the endless news of dismembered children and tortured men and starving women suffering from the policies and weaponry we pay for with our own tax dollars. Many of the films presented at Prismatic Ground, through a consciously curated assemblage by Prakash himself, were from Palestinian filmmakers and about Palestinian people, many of whom have been martyred, or if they were still alive, saw only the spectres of where they once lived. In a way, these films both healed and hurt. As David Cronenberg recently said in an interview, “I’m often watching films in order to see dead people. I want to see them again, I want to hear them.” How cinema connects life and death was constantly on my mind during this festival.
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The first sequence in Antoinetta Angelidi’s Idées Fixes/Dies Irae (1977), which played as part of a greater retrospective on the Greek experimental filmmaker’s work, is a nearly seven minute long still shot of a garden path. Halfway through, two ghost-like figures in full black garb suddenly appear side by side on the path and begin to walk, swinging their feet as they do so. For a while, it is unclear whether they are walking towards the screen or away from it. At some points, they seem to go nowhere. This is precisely the point. In the Q&A, Angelidi described the scene as a contemplation and examination of the geometry of the film plane. When we look at cinema, we assume a three-dimensional image, but in reality, as the image is projected onto a flat screen, it is in fact always two-dimensional. The way our brains interpret imagery in film fills the gaps between image and reality. We know the locations and places in films are three dimensional so we see the figures in a cinematic frame as moving in three dimensions.
Razan AlSalah, Palestinian visual artist, experiments with these concepts of 2-D vs 3-D movement by using flat pieces of imagery prominently and scans over them repeatedly in her stunning documentary A Stone’s Throw (2024). She focuses on her father Amine, who was separated from the family for nearly 30 years because he was working in a UAE work camp called Zirku Island. AlSalah did not have any access to this secretive camp, instead utilising a flattened aerial image of it on Google Maps. As the digital eye zooms in and across the brown rectangular structures and grey block sites, there is a lifelessness in the image. Overlaid is a script that reads over rather preposterous 4 and 5 star reviews of the island. Do these people exist, are their comments sincere, coerced, or sarcastic? How many of them are still alive?
In a later scene, a photograph of a group of Palestinian men gathered around the Mediterranean coastal endpoint of the Kirkuk-Haifa Oil Pipeline with the intention of blowing it up is examined. The pipeline was built by the Iraq Petroleum Company, co-owned by various entities with headquarters in London, England. As one of the first groundworks of the West to establish a foothold in the Middle East, it helped to usher in the expulsion of Palestinians in the 1948 Nakba, the same which forced Amine to flee to Lebanon. AlSalah’s camera moves up and down the series of pixelated black and white squares that make up the photograph, turning Angelidi’s geometric theorem of the planar cinematic image into one that gives it dimension — the depth of inspiration, hope and revolution.
A Stone’s Throw also includes 16mm footage of Haifa, near the border of Israel and Lebanon, along with Google images of the same. In the post-screening Q&A, AlSalah mentioned how difficult it was to get access to that area to film because of the various restrictions the Israeli government has placed on crossing the borders between Lebanon and Israel. The sequence of AlSalah’s father, carrying two bags, is replayed, both forward and reversed, and dissolves into a shot of the Haifa coast. On the audio is the voice of AlSalah and several other narrators including the famed Palestinian author and martyr Ghassan Kanafani who was assassinated in Beirut in 1972 along with his 17-year-old daughter by a Mossad car-bombing operation. Over a camera that pans through illustrations of martyrs on walls, Kanafani describes how the resistance of Palestinians must be defined through “Something more powerful than arms. Something bigger than material force, we need to unleash the imaginary, we need something irresistible, something that nuclear weapons cannot change. Something like a Palestinian child throwing a stone.” It boils down to the image. Weapons are only a path to death, but the cinematic image is a channel between life and death, one that can be traversed up and down on the plane itself but can inspire the forward or backward trajectory of people.
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Kamal Aljafari’s cinema is imbued with the minute experience of Palestinians. He uses the camera in radically invasive ways that both obscure and reveal terrifying details of seemingly monotonous day-to-day lives under occupation. When I first saw An Unusual Summer (2020), it stunned me in its ability to turn surveillance camera footage into an odyssey of crime and prejudice sans the sensationalism of news coverage. It was a Israel-Palestine conflict film turned noir. UNDR (2024) is much more direct. Here, surveillance is by air, the camera almost always floating from above, observing the terrain and people of Palestine performing daily chores. The landscape panoramas are stunning, showing lush greenery of olive groves and majestic steppes of Palestinian homes on the hillsides. It’s a great moral shame that these ethereal images and the tranquillity they depict are immediately rendered tragic and melancholic in the context of history. The shadows of the helicopters on the hills and valleys and even on the Temple Mount harken a dark allegorical religious reference to angels of death — Mal’akh ha-Maveth in Judaism, Azrael in Islam and Christianity.
When we consider death or the deceased on screen, we lend ourselves to make declaratively detached statements on Palestinians and their home. These are rendered moot by Carol Mansour’s Aida Returns (2023). In this film, her mother, born and raised in Jaffa in what is now occupied as south Tel-Aviv and expelled during the 1948 Nakba, returns there as ashes. A hopeful documentary that tosses away the metaphorical speculation of ghosts and spirits in favour of the real, tangible experience of a last act, it documents a story that is so familiar and told over and over by many other Palestinians. Mansour’s mother says “we thought we would get to go back.” The lies told and the promises broken render this connection and longing to home similar to the longing a soul has to return to its creator. “They can fight us with everything except memory,” a friend of Carol’s remarks.
In Michel Khleifi’s Ma’loul Celebrates its Destruction (1985), several Palestinians gather near Haifa once a year to remember the homes they once had. The stories told and paintings featured in the film come from memory. Several Palestinians who were expelled from their homes point to a painting remembering who’s house is whose and what their daily lives were like. So much of Palestinian history is of things erased, people left behind, homes destroyed. But so much of it is also about collective love and joy and companionship of a people and their allies. These memories, of ghosts and time, of the journeys from life to death, are celebrated as much as they are mourned. The term martyr is very special to Palestinians and Muslims in general as it connotes the existence of life and ability to affect our world even from the afterlife. It operates much deeper than our casual definitions and understandings of it in the West. Ghassan Kanafani speaks in related terms in A Stone’s Throw, relaying that “life is not all material, there are such things as imagination, thought, principles, values, emotions, sensations, impressions, and we experience these all collectively.” Seeing the works of brilliant artists, along with others at Prismatic Ground, proved Inney’s comment about cinema being a balm and energizer to be true.
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