The act of watching films is already spectral in that the images on screen are indexically anchored in the past. The faces, places and frames belong to distinct moments in time. Their appearance on screen gestures to an essential veracity while implying an evolving trajectory outside the immediate diegesis.
But what happens when the act of watching these images is accompanied by the knowledge that the index has been irrevocably erased? What future is the image denied?
During the run of the short, non-fiction films as part of ‘Shasha Movies: Films from Palestine’ at the ICA at LSFF 2024, I couldn’t help but wonder if I was belatedly watching absent-ed landscapes on screen.
Notwithstanding the selective dissemination of news, social media has been inundated with images of a flattened Gaza for almost a year now, with expanses of destructive greyscale marked with the acute red of human blood. But in one of the circulating videos from March 2024 (the month of Ramadan), an elderly couple, after having survived a bombing, is seen sitting on plastic chairs in the middle of concrete rubble that used to be their home. Between them, a small stool holds some fruits to be had during iftar as they prepare to break the day’s fast—at the same spot where their living room previously was.
The tableau struck me in how it upheld the human impulse to persist with the familiar. The couple continues their routine among the detritus of their erstwhile habitus in a quotidian deference to life; for a moment, the violence is less than spectacular. In particularly two documentary essays as part of the film programme, Gaza is not probed, dissected, or actively empathised with, but looked at. This act of simply looking at Gaza as if it were any other place with fleeting historical import registers as a defiant act—it challenges our assumption about what war may look like on a daily basis.
Basma al-Sharif’s Home Movies Gaza (2013) is, as the title suggests, a collection of home movies made by people living in Gaza, capturing micro-events in the city as they unfold through private lenses. The film whimsically sutures impressions, colours, textures and sounds to create a pulsating picture of a place otherwise consistently imperilled. When I watched the film in January, it dawned on me that most of these places and people no longer exist—not because of the natural passage of time, but because of a catastrophic assault on life.
The film pays attention to images of the mundane—those that would be deemed bereft of journalistic potency by the Western media in how they chase the spectacle of the injured body. (I refer here to 2013, when broadcasting the injured body through social media had not yet acquired the communicative urgency and intensity that it has today.) In their narration of hyperlocal intimacies, these seemingly banal images are already embedded in the ecology of war—as evidence of a life that continues to evolve along the twin vines of exhaustion and idealism despite being threatened with illegibility.
In Electrical Gaza (2015), Rosalind Nashashibi travels around Gaza while recording life as it accumulates around military checkpoints as well as markets, living rooms, and other communal spaces. Nashashibi’s lens often rests on the ocean, the horses stationed in the waters, and the people bathing in them. (I think of how, over the last few months, the same ocean has been swallowing up humanitarian aid, and the tired, desperate bodies looking for it in its depths.) There seems to be a lull over life; one could almost mistake it for a vignette of an idyllic Gaza if not for the knowledge that the airspace in the city is controlled by Israel, which is attested by the unrelenting hum of drones in the film.
