Tag: PSYCHOPOMP

VOLUME 17: PSYCHOPOMP

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Credit: Homegreen Films

Kirsty Asher

“Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there.”

“It is not life but its shadow. It is not motion but its soundless spectre.”

So wrote Maxim Gorky in his eyewitness account of the Lumière brothers’ cinématographe screening (1895-96), the first commercial film screenings open to the paying public. This early example of projected film, devoid of sound and colour, did not resonate with life for Gorky. Rather than witnessing the living form immortalised, he saw only its death in its technologic iteration. The very idea of seeing ghosts has, in the age of motion picture, been described in terms of televisual projection. Archaeologist and parapsychologist T.C. Lethbridge, whose paranormal projection theory attributed hauntings to traumatic events imprinted onto stone and other matter, described an experience of ghostly hauntings in 1922 in a manner uncannily similar to Gorky’s retrospective: 

The whole production…was exactly comparable to a television scene. There was the same curious lack of atmosphere and the same general gray [sic] drabness … The figures were pictures projected by somebody other than myself and I was nothing more than the receiving set.

The method of cinema invokes the ghost of reality rather than reanimating it, the technology itself the vessel through which the ghost is projected to the seeing eye. The camera can be Charon, but what if cinema requires its own ferryman? There is a term for such a form of transportation, echoing throughout history and through many different cultures. A psychopomp (derived from the Greek word meaning ‘guide for the souls’) is a mythological being charged with ushering the dead on their onward journey. Its role is not to judge, to weigh a soul against a feather, only to steer spirits on their onward journey to the afterlife.  Cinema is an art form still in its infancy in the grand scale of human existence, and yet because of its widespread commercialisation, cinema appears constantly on the brink of death. Every new innovation represents a threat to what contemporary audiences come to know as cinema, and the act of cinema-going. The introduction of sound, the rise of Big Telly, blockbusters, the spike in streaming both before and through the pandemic and the collapse of release windows. All have seen hand-wringing over what will become of the Tenth Muse. Like Carlotta’s Crawford-esque tough old bird dismissing showbiz uncertainty in Follies (1971), cinema is just about Still Here, a collection of neuroses that amount to diminished habituation by audiences. Cinema in its commercial form becomes the ever-dying spirit, being transported from one life to the next by consumption trends and changing taste. 

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Dr Patrick Glen’s academic observations of the ‘freak scene’ in 1960s Britain, at a time when cinemas were rapidly closing and home media was on the rise, provide a fascinating insight into how one of cinema’s many deaths was transformed into its own cinematic trend. In the shadow of transitory demise, the ‘freaks’, a loose group composed mainly of students and older teenagers, were showing up in cinemas on the brink of closing, but also “in improvised settings such as basements or university halls in towns and cities across Britain.” Heading to late night screenings, wide-eyed as they watched Italian horror and arthouse on acid, these counterculture heads weren’t birthing new cinema habits so much as undertaking the dying of the old way. 

This seance of cinematic experience finds itself a home in Tsai Ming-Liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003), where a grand old cinema facing imminent closure plays its final film, the eponymous wuxia epic Dragon Inn (1967) directed by King Hu. There is clever serendipity in the mise-en-scene with promotional posters for The Eye (2002) dotted through the atrium and hallways, the film about a corneal transplant allowing a woman to see ghosts. Tsai’s camera is the ghost’s eye, the film itself a means for the viewer to transfer the departed onwards beyond death. The first spoken lines of the film from the projectionist (Lee Kang-sheng), 45 minutes into the runtime, declare the cinema to be haunted, though it is clear at this point that it’s the cinema’s final congregation who are doing the haunting, and Tsai’s structural approach to slow cinema lends itself beautifully to this. The Japanese tourist played by Mitamura Kiyonobu operates as a restless spirit, wandering through the building, attempting connections and fulfilling his desires but never quite doing so. The clunking footsteps of the ticket woman (Chen Shiang-chyi) echo through the empty stairwell long before we see her ascending the stairwell to the projection room, hidden in the upper catacombs of the old theatre, to give the projectionist a steam bun. Like a vagabond spirit she keeps returning to the room, always empty, staring at the offering she has left for him which remains untouched. The recent imprints of human activity remain in the overstuffed ashtray which she fixates on as the audio of the wuxia film rumbles on, a final cigarette still burning on the table top, billowing its ectoplasmic fumes. 

Yet all are inevitably fulfilling their role of seeing this dying cinema through to its end. The most important visitation is from Chun Shih, tearfully watching his past self onscreen in the final minutes of Dragon Inn before warmly reuniting with fellow castmate Miao Tien outside. Shih, a regular lead in Hu’s films on account of his timelessly heroic stature, had made his screen debut as swordsman Xiao Shao-zi in the 1967 film. Miao, a veteran whose career received new life through his work with Tsai Ming-Liang, had played the antagonistic eunuch Pi Shao-tang. Onscreen their younger selves battled in the final showdown. Now, their old forms quietly grieve their lack of remembrance, the loss of cinemagoing. The audience’s role is not just in their shared experience, but in their utilisation of its architecture: the toilets, the seats, the ticket booth, the hallways, the dilapidated upper levels. The projectionist even takes a moment at closing time to have a go at the fortune-telling machine in the foyer. And though the film is humorously punctuated with the usual bêtes noires of cinema-going — noisy eaters, bare feet on seats, the rummaging through bags, someone sitting unbearably close in an otherwise empty theatre — won’t it be so much worse when it’s all gone? The frustratingly human experience of shared interaction diminished by the loss of the cinema. Where else could we go ghosthunting together? 

In the Online Era, the Internet itself has become a vessel for the echoes of the cinematic dead. Film fanatics make use of the digital archives to bring long-forgotten texts to modern audiences. Online auctions for the belongings of stars and icons throw up peculiar trinkets and possessions. Elvis’s personal 16mm copy of Deep Throat (1972) was up for auction at Rockhurst back in 2021. And those from past cinematic eras who are yet living can become unexpected messengers from beyond. The blonde bombshell and cult figure Mamie Van Doren is having an unexpected new lease of life via Twitter, where she regularly posts stories from the Golden Age, including wild, previously unheard “truths” about the real cause of Jean Harlow’s death (herself a ghost of cinema’s past). Though it is constantly dying little deaths, there are always messengers guiding phases of film into the afterlife. 

Our seventeenth issue, PSYCHOPOMP, puts its ear to the ground for murmurs of the cinematic dead, and their guides. Our contributors, having analysed the mortality of this immortalising medium, have produced pieces which find ghostly hands outstretched to steer souls through the cinematic veil.

Theo Rollason analyses the ghoulishness of digital necromancy in Minority Report and A.I. Artificial Intelligence as it pertains to memory, grief and morality.

Soham Gadre sheds vital light on the Palestinian films shown at this year’s Prismatic Ground Festival, which brought the constancy of death in the nation, both past and present, to the foreground.

Owen Vince presents the films of the late Stom Sogo as a ferryman for their creator, whose epilepsy was a driving force in pushing against the barrier of the watchable.

Alex Mooney shows how wrangling with the half-finished posthumous performances of River Phoenix and Heath Ledger manoeuvred the directors’ visions for Dark Blood and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. 

Ben Flanagan re-evaluates the lifespan of Super Mario Bros. in the distribution and home video market, asking in the performance studies tradition when exactly is a film ‘alive’? 

Kenny Nixon discusses how an umbrella term like ‘late style’ can be applied to a filmmaker like Clint Eastwood.

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MINORITY REPORT

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Credit: Dreamworks

Theo Rollason

A new invention, certainly one of the most curious of our fertile era, was produced last night at 14 Boulevard des Capucines … We have already collected and reproduced the spoken word; now we are collecting and reproducing life itself. One will, for example, be able to see our loved ones move about again, long after we have lost them. (Le radical, 30 December 1895). 

You married the most, most, most, most, most genius man in the whole world, Kanye West. (Robert Kardashian, 2020) 

Detective John Anderton spends his days in the future, solving murders that haven’t happened yet. By night, he sinks into the past. In his cluttered apartment, where cereal boxes talk to him and neuroin inhalers litter the floor, John makes his way over to his computer desk. His hand wavers over a set of clear disks: “Sean at home playing with toys,” “Sean 5th birthday,” “Sean at the beach.” He takes this last one and inserts it into the machine. Projectors fizz to life, coloured light fills the room, and Sean appears. “Hi daddy,” waves the holographic image of John’s son, and steps out of the two-dimensional wall-screen projection, into the room itself. Sean wants to show off his running skills. “Keep your knees up like that,” grins John encouragingly. “Keep your knees up like that,” echoes the recording of John playing from his speakers. He knows this one by heart. 

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John takes another hit of neuroin and selects another disk: “Lara and John.” He closes his eyes as the high washes over him. When he opens them, a woman in a ghostly white dress has appeared. “John, put the camera down,” she mock-scolds, but she’s smiling. John gets up and walks towards her, so close he could touch her. “Sweetie, why don’t you put the camera down,” she repeats, “and come and watch the rain with me?” Now John’s smiling too. He physically flinches as the image is abruptly replaced by a text notice: END OF FILE. Lara has left him, Sean is missing, presumed dead, and John is alone. 

This scene, from Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film Minority Report, is a remarkable demonstration of the spectral nature of the moving image in the digital age. Then again, the cinema has always been haunted, even since before it was the cinema. At the end of the 18th century in Europe, for instance, the magic lantern — an early image projection device, and precursor to the motion picture — was put to use in the phantasmagoria, the so-called ghost shows, public entertainments in which spectres were conjured to terrify audiences. The early shows resembled séances, where showmen would promise to bring back the spirits of audience members’ dead loved ones. 

This kind of morbid marketing stuck around into the early years of cinema and beyond. In Georges Méliès’ trick films, devils, skeletons and ghouls dash about the screen, and people materialise out of thin air. But the presence of the undead could be felt in even the most mundane movies. The first press reviews of the Lumière Cinématographe in 1895 already picked up on the challenge to mortality posed by the medium itself. “When this apparatus is on sale to the public,” read the verdict from La poste, “death will cease to be absolute.” 

Cinema’s promise of resurrection is uncanny, but it can also be cathartic. Spielberg had already self-reflexively approached this theme in 2001’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence. The narrative similarly concerns the loss of a son, Martin, who has contracted a rare disease and now lies in suspended animation, much like Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (1959) — or perhaps like the apocryphal tale that Walt Disney himself is cryogenically frozen in time, awaiting sufficient developments in medicine so as to be brought back to life. Martin’s place is taken by David, an android boy who struggles to earn his adopted parents’ love. When Martin unexpectedly awakes, David is cast out on a journey to become a real boy. This is Pinocchio for the age of mechanical reproduction — indeed, in one of the film’s most horrifying scenes David is confronted with a stockroom of mass-produced, Disneyfied Davids. He was, we discover, a simulacrum of another missing son, that of his tortured creator. David throws himself into the sea. 

Two millennia pass, and David is discovered by his mechanical descendants, now evolved beyond human comprehension. They read David’s memories, which flash across their faces as moving images. Finally, they watch on some sort of screen as David is reunited with his mother — or, at least, a reproduction of her — and at last finds peace. Artifice, virtuality, cinema — whatever you want to call it, Spielberg understands that this is a space to play out desire and loss. But in Minority Report, which likewise imagines a film-as-memory interface as means of posthumously reuniting parent with child, Tom Cruise’s John finds no catharsis in this possibility. Quite the opposite: John’s virtual resurrection of his son is his repetition compulsion, the lonely and painful reliving of his trauma. His screen watching becomes synonymous with his drug usage; he’s addicted to both. 

We like to imagine early film audiences as poorly adjusted to the rapid-fire image of the cinema, as gullible Victorians fooled into thinking the train might really crash through the screen and into the auditorium. Except — whisper it — we ourselves want so very badly for our images to come to life. From John Anderton’s position in front of the hologram, his wife and child appear in three dimensions, strikingly lifelike. But Spielberg positions us at an angle; unlike John’s front-on perspective, we see the trick for what it is. Light melts off the image, uncannily warping Sean’s figure. As John approaches Lara, the camera circles around him, and the holographic image becomes a convex surface, literally hollowed out of the human presence John desperately craves. We see it’s an illusion, he knows it’s an illusion. And yet, all the same, John mimes along to his conversation with Sean, and he approaches Lara as if to take her in his arms. John knows the train isn’t coming towards him, but he can’t help but hope it might. Film’s promise of life after death is too important for him. Anything to bring his son back, even just for a moment. 

Maybe it’s no surprise that John treats moving images like they’re in the room with him. His job, after all, is all about accepting films for the real thing. Minority Report’s plot concerns the existence of the precogs, three psychic mutants whose powers of prophecy allow the Washington, D.C. “Precrime” unit in the year 2054 to prevent future murders. In the Philip K. Dick story Spielberg’s film is based on, precognition comprises of the precogs “babbling” to one another. In the film version, precognition goes from the linguistic to the visual — the precogs’ forecasts manifest as moving images, projected onto a giant screen. 

Metacinematic motifs abound at Precrime HQ. John Anderton’s job comprises of “scrubbing the image,” analysing the precogs’ visions to determine the perpetrator of the crime. He is a director, instructing his team to “capture” images, before arranging them into a coherent narrative. The lights dim as he begins his work. The precogs function as both his screenwriters and fleshy projectors. He has producer figures who appear via video link and who must give him the go-ahead to start a given project. He even accompanies his work with a score: Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. (Anderton waves his hands about to control the images by gesture; for Spielberg, the job of the director is somewhere between conductor and surgeon.) In the film’s opening scene, he is essentially tasked with making a trailer for the murder his team is about to prevent. The ethical dilemma of Minority Report concerns the virtual image and its relation to the real — is the film that Anderton constructs representative of reality? 

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Minority Report is a film about screens and eyes, about what we see and how we see it. Its world is saturated with moving images: video calls, self-updating newspapers, cereal boxes with animated cartoons. In a VR arcade, citizens indulge their deepest, darkest fantasies: sex, success, murder. “Actual” murders appear on all manner of surfaces; precog Agatha’s recorded vision of the drowning of one Anne Lively — who turns out to have been her mother — travels from screen to screen throughout the film. And, most memorably, public advertisements use iris scanners to invasively personalise their content to viewers; “John Anderton,” calls an affable voice in a shopping mall, “you could use a Guinness right about now!” (All of this feels decidedly less sci-fi than it did in 2002.) 

As with the ghostly projections in John’s home and the haptic images he manipulates in his office, what’s stressed here is digital moving-image culture’s increasing immateriality. The screens in Minority Report are transparent, their content seamlessly transferable from one empty surface to another. In the case of the holographic advertisements there is no screen — or rather, the screen is the world entire, anticipating the screen-bodies of the advanced Mechas in A.I. But perhaps just as important is that, Anderton’s small workplace audience notwithstanding, these are all profoundly solitary modes of consuming moving images. From nostalgic home movies to targeted advertising, the collective viewing of the cinema gives way to the individualised and individualistic viewing of modern life. 

The most chilling manifestation of this is glimpsed in Precrime’s version of mass incarceration. Those arrested by the project, to prevent the homicides they did not yet commit, are “haloed,” placed in suspended animation, sent to a panoptic containment facility where they are interred indefinitely. To the outside viewer, screens wrapped around their faces play their alleged crimes on demand. On the inside, as the creepy warden explains, “It’s actually a kind of rush. They say you have visions. That your life flashes before your eyes. That all your dreams come true.” In short, the experience simulates the central aspects of popular cinema at present: spectacle, nostalgia, wish-fulfilment. Purgatory is reimagined as an eternal movie played to an audience of one. It’s here that John Anderton finds himself when he is inevitably accused of murder, and it’s here that numerous critics have speculated that he stays for the remainder of the film; John’s happy ending — in which Precrime ends and he finally gets to watch the rain with Lara, now pregnant again — may be no more than his haloed fantasy. 

We’ve been surrounded by ghosts since the invention of machines for capturing and displaying movement photographically, with each development potentially deepening our imagined connection to the departed. In 2016, Jang Ji-sung lost her daughter Nayeon to cancer. In 2019, Jang was reunited with Nayeon; using a VR headset, she was able to see, talk to and even touch a reanimated rendering of her daughter in real time — a private moment captured as public spectacle for the South Korean TV documentary Meeting You. A year later, Kanye West shared his birthday present to his then-wife Kim Kardashian online: a hologram of her deceased father, celebrity lawyer Robert Kardashian. Zombie Rob was lambasted for the ways in which it blatantly manipulated Kardashian’s voice and image to suit West’s own agenda. 

Such digital necromancy — or perhaps just ghoulish kitsch — is moving into the private sphere, too. 2021 saw the popular genealogy site MyHeritage introduce its DeepNostalgia feature, which allows users to animate photographs of their dead relatives using machine learning technology. In 2022, they added the feature Deepstory, which additionally enables users to create a video in which these animations speak a script submitted by the user. There’s now a whole growing field of grief tech, or thanatechnology, that helps people build avatars of themselves or loved ones that can be called upon after their deaths to stage encounters that never happened in life. 

We’re clearly well beyond Minority Report and back into the realm of A.I., in which David settles for an artificial declaration of love, an elaborate reconstruction of his mother designed to provide comfort in the face of loss. How would John Anderton react to such an offer? Can these staged interactions provide a space for healing, or are they merely modern phantasmagoria, masking the rawness of grief beneath layers of technological showmanship? And what happens when the photographic image is supplanted by animation and our memories become malleable, subject to the whims of algorithms? 

In Minority Report, the moving image is a cursed thing, a tool of the surveillance state and the profit-hungry corporation, and a reminder and harbinger of death. Film traps John Anderton in the past, in the trauma of Sean’s disappearance, and possibly in a fantasy of redemption too. And it traps the precogs in the past and future, in memories of murders long-ago and soon-to-come. In the film’s final shot, the camera slowly weaves its way through a scene of nostalgic, pastoral bliss: the three precogs, released from their enslavement to the Precrime operation, sit in a sunlight-dappled cottage reading books — paper books, I should say, to match their woollen jumpers and wooden floors. This is, a voiceover by Cruise confirms, “a place where they could live out their lives in peace.” 

Saccharine, critics called it. Schmaltzy. Typical Spielberg. But look closer, scrub the image, and you’ll notice that Agatha, sitting apart from the other precogs, holds in her hand a small, clear disk — a screen — on which plays the vision-memory of her mother’s drowning. Spielberg keeps things ambiguous: does this offer catharsis, or is Agatha doomed to virtually relive the loss again and again? The moving image might help heal us of our ghosts, but it won’t let us forget them. 

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A STONE’S THROW

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Credit: Razan AlSalah

The Cinematic Image as Life, Death, and Inspiration: A Reflection on Palestinian Films at the Prismatic Ground Festival.


Soham Gadre

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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