Rediscovering Radical Palestinian Cinema As Hope For Today And The Future

My review of a remarkable monograph by an extraordinary scholar

FILMS OF ARAB LOUTFI AND HEINY SROUR: STUDIES IN PALESTINE SOLIDARITY CINEMA, TERRI GINSBERG (2021) Cham: Palgrave Pivot

The title of Terri Ginsberg’s monograph Films of Arab Loutfi and Heiny Srour hardly hints at the theoretical breadth and depth of the work which is incredibly prescient in these perilous times as the world is once more on the brink of world war because of the unresolved issues in this area. This is also a densely layered piece that makes an important contribution not only to Arab film studies but, through its material and particular attention to Palestinian cinema, to film studies as a whole.

The monograph begins by asking the question of whether Palestine is still a critical issue. Ginsberg’s answer, anticipating the events of October 2023, is a resounding ‘Yes’. It is her forthrightness and fidelity to the cause of Palestinian Cinema that enables her to anticipate events and makes this monograph so important as a primer for those who are frantically scram bling to ‘catch up’ on the critical and theoretical issues behind Palestinian sovereignty and dispossession and Zionist incursions. These include, for example, contemporary work on a more expansive and transhistorical view of settler-colonialism that links Israeli invasions of Palestinian territory with US ‘Manifest Destiny’ and European subjugation of Asia and Africa. Important also are the ways the activism of the two filmmakers featured in the monograph highlight, through Ginsberg’s interpretation, longstanding issues in film and cultural studies around authorship, aura and memory and trauma theory.

Ginsberg is an activist scholar and this work functions as a palimpsest, a layered and sedimented condensation of her work and concerns over the years in the following areas: materialist feminist theory; experimental cinema; the ideological uses of Holocaust studies: German philosophy and theory; a championing of genuine liberation and revolutionary cinema; a critique of an idealistic turn in cinema studies away from an originary materialist basis; and an emphasis on the patriarchal aspects of Italian Neo-realism (the efficacy of the last of which I disagree). The over lay of these elements results in a dense work that continually keeps its eye pointed in the direction of not only Palestinian but global liberation from the now stiflingly predatory menace of late-stage western and particularly US capitalism.

Palestinian female freedom fighter in Arab Loufti’s Jamila’s Mirror

Walter Benjamin’s characterization of aura as nineteenth-century presence, widespread in twentieth-century media, is here first critiqued as partially idealist and then turned on its head or re-envisioned in a detournement as ‘imminent practice grounded in a social ontos’ (32). This redefinition features, as figured in Palestinian Cinema, ‘a layering of disparate temporalities’ that allows for, in this case, the simultaneous existence of not only pre- and post-Nakba sensi bilities but also for comparisons, as Palestinians in the films recount, of the Nakba destruction of the Palestinian port of Tantura and European Judeocide under both the Nazis and Tsarist Russia. This layering also allows Ginsberg, through the work of the filmmakers, to question the delegitimization of Palestinian oral history as primitive, with that history of eyewitness accounts now supported by written accounts unearthed in the archives by Israeli schol ars. This more materialist repositioning of aura then, in the Palestinian–Israeli context, is a counter to a nostalgic and fetishized past and to the ‘value free’ positivist assessment of the colonial conquerors.

Ginsberg equally does a superb job of deconstructing ‘trauma studies’ in the ever-expanding field of questions of memory as applied and corrected in the Palestinian instance. She notes the way some Israeli scholars have repo sitioned Palestinian reportage as re-narrations of the originary trauma of the Nakba, the catastrophe. These memories are then mystified as psycho logical effects that can ‘neither by understood nor recreated’ (54–55), the (Westernized) solution to which is not to change the situation but to thera pize away the buried trauma of this ‘one-time event endlessly recalled’. In contrast, through the filmmakers’ examination of the materiality of these memories and the testimonies of continual colonial invasion and ethnic cleansing, the Nakba is represented not as a single instance but as an ongoing event and process that has been occurring persistently for over 75 years and one that necessitates a legitimate and legal resistance in the form of an anti-colonial struggle.

Heiny Srour’s Leila and the Wolves

Finally, the concept of authorship, as highlighted in the Palestinian context, also comes in for revision. The monograph does indeed focus on the work of two female directors but not as abstracted ‘auteurs’ but rather as part of ‘the social collective of political filmmakers’ (14). Palestinian subjec tivity itself, as defined in the films, is not so much individual but rather is social with the subjects of both these documentaries and fictions portrayed as ‘complex embodiments of a history they have lived and are still help ing to shape collectively’. Ginsberg’s reinterpretation of authorship utilizes Fredric Jameson’s figuration of ‘the author in discourse’, an extension of Marx’s men (and women) make history but not of their own making. The addition here is that Ginsberg allows for the way that the intervention of revolutionary fervor itself helps to fashion that discourse and the creative response to it.

This reinsertion of the timelessness of the Palestinian struggle could not arrive at a more perilous but also potentially progressive moment. Not only, per Francis Fukuyama, has history not ended with western capitalism dominant and triumphant, but rather we are in a moment where for the majority of peoples in the world a new history, in the sense of their claims to an equal share of the world’s material abundance and the end of the long colonial nightmare, is just beginning. This monograph, in its recalling of a revolutionary past that is still present, is an extraordinary intervention in and furthering of that moment.