The release, in mid-January, of Palestine 36 (by Annemarie Jacir) helped to highlight several phenomena of which the film by Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari helps clarify the issues and effects. The first concerns the importance of putting into historical perspective the violence of what happened on October 7, 2023 and the genocide perpetrated by Israel subsequently, against the storytelling which seeks to make this date a beginning, an irruption without cause or history of brutality.
The second phenomenon concerns the strength of archive images showing Palestinian daily life before the Nakba (1948), the cruelty and destruction of the expropriation of the inhabitants of Palestine under the British mandate and during the establishment of the Jewish state. In Annemarie Jacir’s film, these period images vibrated with a presence that the fictional scenes reconstituting other episodes of the Palestinians’ fight against the British occupation failed to find.
The third phenomenon concerns the proliferation on our big screens of films evoking in various ways the endless and multiple forms of suffering inflicted on the Palestinians. The question here is that of the capacity of cinema to participate in what is playing out in a long-term conflict, with multiple aspects and globalized echoes.
The first part of A Fidai Film is solely composed of archives, almost all in black and white, without a word of explanation, but with sound elements which reinforce the hallucinatory side. These are sensitive translations of a nightmare, which is the history of the Palestinians. Among these visions emerges here a nursery rhyme sung by a child’s voice, there a poem written in Arabic on the screen.
Kamal Aljafari, filmmaker and visual artist, adds an artifact of his own, the use of blood-red “virtual ink,” which redacts information written on certain images to give them a more general dimension. The same red transforms certain silhouettes into ghosts, specters who haunt the landscapes with their presence, both bloody and abstract, or particular situations, situations of suffering for the vanquished, of frolic for the victors.
Among the sequences shown in this first part are images of a building fire, with civilians trapped on the floors, bodies evacuated in a disaster, dead and injured. This sequence returns in the second part, this time with the sound that corresponds to it. These are images of the car bomb attack organized by the Israelis against the Palestinian Research Center, during their occupation of Beirut (Lebanon) in 1982.
This deadly attack then gave rise to the looting of the archives of this center by the IDF and in particular to the appropriation of an immense quantity of images constituting an important part of Palestinian memory, memory whose eradication is one of the aspects of Israeli genocidal policy.
On its modest scale, A Fidai Film is intended as a response to this pillaging, to this attempt at erasure. Affirming the hypothesis of an asymmetrical strategy of a people faced with the takeover of its past and its images by its enemies, it composes gestures of fragmentary reconstruction, summoning an explicitly cobbled together and tattered memory. Despair and irony, poetry and anger circulate there in the sequence of surreal visions and the most explicit documents.
Thus, Kamal Aljafari takes charge of the first two issues mentioned above, the reinscription in a long history of the current tragedy, still ongoing in the Gaza Strip, in the West Bank and in Lebanon, and the mobilization of the powers of evocation of images often recorded for another purpose.
And his film, a song of mourning and resistance developed in the crucible of formal research which also gave rise to an installation in several contemporary arts venues (Camera of the Dispossessed), also responds to the third issue. It is one of the possible responses to the need to continue to invent multiple forms, in cinema as elsewhere, so as not to let the crimes of the past and present fall back into the shadows.
