Today at 16Beaver - Excessively Palestine: A Few Films, A Few Questions

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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


_____________________________
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.

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, 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.



_____________________________
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.



_____________________________
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:

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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.


- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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.


- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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).


- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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




_____________________________
4. Useful Readings

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

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



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