This text is published as part of Mizna 24.2: The Cinema Issue, guest-edited by Saeed Taji Farouky

On September 30, 2022, my research, archival, and curatorial platform, Maqam.tv¹, was invited to host an evening at Tashweesh Festival, held in the Brussels-based arts center Beursschouwburg. I chose to screen Algerian novelist and filmmaker Assia Djebar’s La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua² (The Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoua, 1977) and to give a lecture-performance as an introduction to the film. My current research revolves around ways of investigating, producing, disseminating and receiving knowledge, techniques and gestures, and the lecture-performance is a part of this work.  

The set-up is as follows: The stage is that of a film theater and I am sitting at a desk in front of a computer, facing the audience. The computer’s screen is split into two halves: the left half contains the text I am reading to an audience; and the right contains the desktop version of Instagram, from which I’ll be soon playing short clips. The screen behind me (the same screen onto which the film will be later projected) shows the entirety of my computer screen.  

Below is a modified version of the lecture-performance. 

—Sophia Attigui

Assia Djebar has been continuously engaged in redressing the representation of the experiences of women during and after the war for liberation through her writings and her films. She has bound herself to listening and has been careful not to speak for her subjects. Even the very act of stealing the camera is part of this redressing.

—Sophia Attigui

Editorial note: the video lecture performance has been organized into Instagram carousel posts via Maqam.tv. The screenshots below link directly to specific video and image clips within the carousel posts that are being discussed in each section.

various stages of unheard

Part I. Obsessing 

i.

From 1915 to 1920, French psychiatrist Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault studied and compulsively photographed Tunisian and Moroccan women wearing haik, a garment common to both women and men at the time.

He became obsessed—took eight-hundred-plus photographs, kept countless notebooks with sketches and notes, and returned to France where he presented the result of his research on what he called “living draperies,” first to a conference held at the Sorbonne and then at the 1922 Colonial Exhibition held in Marseille, which earned him a gold medal. He then was solicited to teach courses on the subject of Arab draperies at the Académie des Beaux Arts in Paris, where his lectures were met with great success. He was later dismissed due to his alleged fetishist inclination for drapery.

ii.

Years later, between 1960 and 1962, Marc Garanger, an unofficial regimental photographer, was ordered to force Algerian women from Bordj Okhriss to take off their veils in order to be photographed. This was part of a broader visual and geographic control of the population. The women of Bordj Okhriss faced not only a lens but also a line of armed soldiers. They were not given a choice but they gave the camera defiant looks—their whole bodies in protest. 

iii.

Between 1919 and 1929, the Soviet Union, under authority of Stalin, enacted large “civilizing” operations on the indigenous populations of Tajiks, Tatars, and Uzbeks. This series of actions was referred to as ھجوم (storming, assault) and was inscribed in the Soviet Union’s greater project of (a) according to some, erasure of nonaligned identities and (b) according to others, erasure of manifestations of gender inequality. The most notable event to take place during these years was the parade on March 8, 1927, when women, encircled by soldiers, removed their veils and burned them. 

The French, while not exactly inexperienced in this political maneuvering, closely studied the Soviet operations. Eugene Daumas, who was at the head of the Arab Bureaus in the 1830s, had already grown an obsession for Algerian women and insisted on the necessity of unveiling them as part of a “civilizing mission.” By the end of May 1958, many regions of Algeria had seen burning and unveiling ceremonies that were highly theatrical and later proven to be staged.  

iv.

In 1952, Franz Fanon was partaking in efforts for counter-representation. In a chapter of A Dying Colonialism (1959) titled, “Algeria Unveiled,” he spoke of the veil as a battleground for colonial and anticolonial strategies. He argued the following:

1. (a) The veil gives women the power to look at the colonizer without being looked at. The latter is put in a position of nonreciprocity, which frustrates him. He insists on uncovering the women as a means of destructuring and “penetrating” the Algerian society. The Algerian man is compelled to defend the veil in a reactionary fashion.  
2. (b) The veil defines patterns of the visibility and corporeality of women in public space. As such, veiled women engage in schemes and dichotomies of in/out, veiled/unveiled, visible/invisible, carrier/noncarrier. The veil becomes instrument, medium, and after having been set aside for long, the bodies of Algerian women become stages for resistance and for fighting.

Although Fanon portrayed women as having an equal posture to men in the struggle for liberation, as the National Liberation Front claimed that liberation from colonialism would automatically create the conditions for the emancipation of women, decades later, Algerian women would not be liberated after independence.

v.

 Iran, 1936. In efforts toward modern nation-building and westernization, Reza Shah launched a campaign called کشف الحجاب, unveiling, which consisted of forbidding Iranian women from wearing veils and chadors and forcing the adoption of European-style garments. Those who opposed the decision were violently repressed.

In 1943, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini published a book called کشف الأسرار (Unveiling of the Secrets), in which he condemned the ban on veils and, more generally, the Shah’s allegedly antireligious governance.

In 1979, a few months after the Iranian Revolution, Khomeini announced that women were required to adopt the veil. A day later, on International Women’s Day, women took the streets to protest the decision. The protests, which lasted six days, were met with violent interventions and a later-dismissed government statement that veiling was only a recommendation. In 1983, the veil officially became mandatory for all women. Again, as during the Shah’s reign, those who opposed the decision were and are still violently repressed. 

Part II. Obsessing, another take  

1959. Fairuz has dedicated a song to Algerian  مجاهدة, fighter, Djamila Bouhired, titled “رسالة إلى جميلة بوحيرد” (“Letter to Djamila Bouhired”). This is a year after director Youssef Chahine dedicated a film to her life. He called it “جميلة”, Djamila.

A year before that, Djamila Bouhired was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death by guillotine by the French after having been tortured for several days. They called her a terrorist. Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, Ahmed Abdel Muti Hijazi, Nazik al-Malaika, Nizar Qabbani, Rashid Hussein, Hassan Abdullah Qureshi, and Mohammed El Fitory, among hundreds of others, wrote poems about her. Nizar Qabbani finishes his poem by writing, “ما أصغر جون دارك فرنسا بجانب جون دارك في بلادي” (“How small is the French Joan of Arc in comparison with my country’s Joan of Arc”). Warda Al-Jazairia sang “كلنا جميلة” (“We are all Djamila”).

Djamila Bouhired is extremely popular, and she has been progressively elevated to the status of icon. Most often, and especially in Iraq, Egypt, and Syria, she is used as a pretext for the elevation of nationalist and socialist ideas. 

Today, two mistakes keep recurring when referring to her: 

1. (a) A shot from Youssef Chahine’s movie showing the actress in a glorious and much flattering position is continuously mistaken for the real Djamila. 
2. (b) She is sometimes thought to have died a martyr. She is still very much alive now.

In 1971, Bouhired was interviewed by Walid Awad for the magazine الحوادث (The Events). Reacting to Awad’s repetitive glorifications of her story, she replied, “They all moved, like me, from the Casbah to the French quarter. Carrying bombs in their handbags and throwing them into cafés. I’m not really sure why all the publicity ended up centering on me. For there were many women in the prison with me, subjected to the worst kinds of torture, and they didn’t betray their comrades either. Each of them deserves pages and pages from the poets. All of us, all of us Djamilas were parts of the whole. Individuals don’t make a cause.” Awad is tone-deaf to her revision. She adds, “I simply played a small part in one period of the Algerian struggle.”

The history of Algerian women fighting for the liberation of their country has been carried, most times  almost accidentally, by Djamila Bouhired and a few others such as Zohra Drif and Djamila Boupacha. The latter actually had her portrait painted by Picasso and was the subject of an eponymous solo for soprano composed by Luigi Nono in his 1962 composition, Canti di Vita e d’Amore. 

Oddly enough, despite their positions as icons, these مجاهدات, fighters, are poorly represented on Algerian screens. They do not speak.

At the time, such bursts of iconization fell quite dissonantly upon some ears, in light of the quasi-absent portrayal of the other thousands of women who were involved in the struggle for independence in equally important but less spectacular ways. These never were voiceless, but they have been muted. 

Assia Djebar has been continuously engaged in redressing the representation of the experiences of women during and after the war for liberation through her writings and her films. She has bound herself to listening and has been careful not to speak for her subjects. Even the very act of stealing the camera is part of this redressing. In her 1995 novel, Vaste est la Prison (So Vast the Prison), she writes about her filmmaking: “This artificial gaze that they have left you, smaller, a hundred, a thousand times more restricted that the one given you by Allah at birth, this strange slit that the tourists photograph because they think it is picturesque to have a little black triangle where the eye should be, this miniature gaze will henceforth be my camera. All of us from the world of the shadow women, reversing the process: we are finally the ones who are looking, who are beginning.”

Index of Instagram media references (@maqam.tv): 

Part I, Post 1

1, 2 Le Cri de la Soie (The Cry of the Silk, 1996) by Yvon Marciano, a dramatized account of Clérambault’s life. 

3 Images of the World and the Inscription of War by Harun Farocki (1989). 

4 Women burning their veils in Andijan, Uzbekistan, on International Women’s Day in 1927. 

5 Episode 17 of the TV series, Ognennye dorogi, (Fiery Roads), produced by the USSR (1977—19845). 

6 Soviet propaganda document (silent)—Her Right (Fracture) featuring a formerly veiled woman that escaped the conservatism of her family (1931). 

7 French propaganda document—“Algérie, dix millions de français” (1958). 

Part I, Post 2 

1 Femmes d’Alger (Women of Algiers) by Kamel Dehane (1992). 

2, 3 Elles (Them) by Ahmed Lallem (1966). 

4, 5 Fadéla M’Rabet interviewed on French television (1968). 

6, Military commanders of the Iranian armed forces, government officials and their wives commemorating the abolition of the veil (1936). 

7 Unveiling ceremony in Iran in the 30s (might be staged); source and date unknown 

8, 9 Mouvement de libération des femmes iraniennes année zéro (Iranian Women’s Liberation Movement, Year Zero, 1979) by Iranian women and French MLF members.

Part II, Post 1 

1 “Letter to Djamila Bouhired” by Fairuz, written by the Rahbani brothers (1959) against images of Djamila by Youssef Chahine (1958), YouTube user edit.  

2 “Djamila” read by an actor playing the poet in the biopic series Nizar Qabbani (2005). 

3 “We are all Djamila” sung a capella by Warda Al-Jazairia on Qatari television (1974).

4 Film still from Djamila (1958) by Youssef Chahine.

5 Picasso portrait of Djamila Boupacha, Djamila Boupacha (1962) by Gisèle Halimi, prefaced by Simone de Beauvoir.  

6 Barbara Hannigan performing “Djamila Boupacha” in 2013, from Luigi Nono’s Canti di Vita e d’Amore (1962). 

7 La Bataille d’Alger (The Battle of Algiers, 1966) by Gillo Pontecorvo, based on the memoir of Yacef Saâdi. 

Sophia Attigui is an artist, cultural practitioner, educator and graphic designer based in Casablanca, Morocco. She holds degrees in philosophy of art, fine arts and curatorial studies and regularly collaborates with organizations and artists on projects relating to film, discourse and the arts.

1. 1. Maqam.tv (@maqam.tv on Instagram, www.maqamtv.com) is an itinerant broadcasting channel airing video content from mainly North to Central Africa and South to Central Asia. It is a research, archival, and curatorial platform that draws on a plethora of cultural knowledge and art practices to tell stories—; sometimes to tell them for the first time, sometimes to re-narrate them, sometimes to put them back into circulation. ︎
2. 2. La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua (1977) is an essay film in which Assia Djebar recounts songs, stories, and memories of Algerian women engaged in the resistance against colonial forces. The nouba is a traditional Andalusian musical form of five movements which inspired the disjointed structure of the film. Within each movement, Djebar uses a variety of regional music, blended with excerpts of Béla Bartók’s compositions inspired by time spent in Algeria. These fragments are tied together by Lila, who returns to her native town and travels around Mount Chenoua, where she drives from house to house to visit women who recall memories of war, grief, and suffering. Assia Djebar is one of the most important figures in francophone Maghrebian literature. She is the author of more than a dozen books, including Les Impatients (The Impatients, 1958), Ombre sultane (A Sister to Scheherazade, 1987), and Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, 1980). Djebar directed two films during a decade-long hiatus from writing, the first one being La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua, and the second, La Zerda ou les chants de l’oubli (The Zerda and the Songs of Forgetting, 1983). ︎

This text was published as a multidisciplinary extension of our special print journal Mizna: Cinema Issue, guest-edited by Saeed Taji Farouky. Inside the print journal, the essay is represented by a movie ticket designed by artist Lamia Abukhadra.

The post various stages of unheard appeared first on Mizna.

This text is presented as part of the Mizna Film Series, a monthly selection which expands our regular film programming to include screenings, critical essays, filmmaker interviews, and discussions exploring revolutionary forms of cinema from the SWANA region and beyond.

Life Must be Disrupted in Order to be Revealed: The Recording as Record and the Hyper-Surveilled Entity Not Meant to Exist in An Unusual Summer

On two separate occasions in Kamal Aljafari’s An Unusual Summer, a child’s voice, the only audible one in the film, says, “منشفش ولا شي، اه و كتير أشياء” which is subtitled as “we cannot see anything, and a lot of things.” Though seemingly insignificant, this phrase captures the formal and narrative interventions Aljafari employs to surveillance footage that his father took of their neighborhood, inserting nuance and emotion to “plotless acts”¹ and subverting the images and perceptions produced by surveillance technologies. The surveillance image is static, detached and matter-of-fact. In purporting to offer a totalizing view, it makes the bodies captured by its infrastructures anonymous and inhuman: a group of moving pixels or the signals sent to magnetic particles on a video tape. The utterance also alludes to the sociopolitical context of surveillance in Occupied Palestine and its paradoxical consequences towards the Palestinian body. Those who are racialized by the occupying state, Palestinians, are surveilled, controlled, and suppressed in order to erase them physically and imaginally and to further the settler colonial project, creating a paradox of the hyper-surveilled body that is not meant to exist.

An Unusual Summer is a film based on found footage. In 2006, Abdeljalil Aljafari, Kamal’s father, decided to install a surveillance camera outside of his house to figure out who kept breaking his car window. Years later, after Abdeljalil had passed away, Kamal’s sister found the tapes. The material was like a treasure trove, allowing the filmmaker to share in the quotidian life of Al Ramle once again.² Considered by Kamal Aljafari to be a collaboration with his late father, the film consists of surveillance footage fixed on the alleyway behind their house. On the left side of the frame is a busy road, near the top right is a grassy area with a tree, and in the center of the frame sit the family cars. Neighbors walk by. The Aljafari family members go to work or to the bakery. Daily life passes, all recorded by the camera.

When watching the film, one quickly forgets about the “plot,” finding the culprit behind the broken car window. This is not because the culprit is unimportant but because the editorial and narrative elements Aljafari implements make each figure equally important. Slowly, through Aljafari’s interventions, we are introduced to the figures who cross the frame as “characters,” and we learn them through their movements. Abu Rizeq trips because he had an accident when he was young; George Sousou is always wearing a blue shirt; the Imses sisters are dressmakers and are never seen apart; a man is in love with Aljafari’s sister and brings a bouquet to the house; Abou Ghazaleh is always on his bike, whistling––he is never seen on foot; a white cat; the tree; children playing with a kite; the kite itself.

The way each character appears is choreographed and repetitive; the frame becomes a stage. The footage from the found tapes was silent, but Aljafari has added sound, much of which he recorded from the same position where the surveillance camera had been installed. The effect is the creation of atmosphere, intimacy, and humor. A nylon bag dances across the gravel lot, crinkling, and the camera follows it. A gust of wind, caught on camera as a swirl of dust moving from right to left. Aljafari zooms in and follows the swirl, repeating the gesture a few times. Every day, at 5:13 am, a man in a checkered shirt walks across the lot to catch a bus. Aljafari layers multiple instances of the man’s routine on top of one another so that he is walking with his many selves, over and over. Ah Law Abeltak Men Zaman (اه لو أبلتك من زمان) by Warda plays, and the superimpositions become dancers in the early morning light. When Abdeljalil Aljafari coughs on camera, we actually hear Kamal coughing; a son filling in the familiar utterances of his deceased father. An old man always touches the trunks of the cars he passes, gravel crunching beneath his feet. Around minute twenty-six, we see him do it again, but this time a title card says, “He is tired.” Something so intimate: to be so familiar with the body language of your neighbor so that you know that he is experiencing fatigue even through the surveillance footage. Such attention to detail, such care, is not possible within apparatuses of state surveillance.

There are two forms of narration present in Aljafari’s film: the title card, which are sourced from the diary Aljafari kept as he rewatched his father’s surveillance tapes and which function similarly to title cards used in silent film, and the voice of his niece. While the title cards are often anecdotal or reflective, the narrative voice of the child is immediate, as if Aljafari’s niece is responding to the things she sees for the first time. When she sees her grandfather, Abdeljalil, get out of his car she exclaims, “هاي سيدو عبد! الله يرحمو” subtitled as “my grandfather Abed! God bless him,” a tender and emotional comment that immediately humanizes what takes place in the grainy footage.

The ongoing occupation and its ripple effects are experienced as apparition. Police lights flash; a military vehicle whizzes by; the Aljafari’s family’s neighborhood is referred to as “the Ghetto”; a man passing by drinking a soda—the title card relaying that he has been imprisoned many times; the shadow cast by the second floor of the house, which remains unfinished since and due to the Nakba,³ is like a ghost; a burning dumpster; the mention of shootings in the area. They fade away as the attention of the viewer is drawn again to the mundane, to life.

Though the passage of time is measured by the camera’s timestamp on the lower left side of the frame, time does not function linearly. It passes in shadows, as cars move backwards, and as the day can suddenly shift to night. Often, the timestamp is erased or cropped out of the frame. Aljafari intentionally rearranges time to emphasize life. In a letter describing his approach, he writes, “the single angle somehow eliminated time as we know it in cinema, this wasn’t made for a film, it was made for life. Everything and every time existed.”⁴

The transformation of the footage from linear, silent, and stationary to choreographed and anecdotal “iterative and accumulating one movement sequences,”⁵ creates a relational space, rather than a surveilled one, in which the lived experiences of the minor figures⁶ from Al Ramle are perceived as novel, as significant, as historically situated⁷ and timeless. Nothing happens, and everything happens.

One can draw connections between Aljafari’s film and Only The Beloved Keeps Our Secrets⁸ by Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Basel Abbas, a video piece structured around footage taken from an Israeli military surveillance camera in 2014. The grainy footage depicts Israeli forces ambushing a group of three boys and shooting dead Yusuf Shawamreh, a fourteen year-old boy who crossed a “separation fence” near Al Khalil (Hebron) to forage for aqoub. However cruel and irrational the murder of Yusuf may be, the hyper-surveillance and criminalization of the Palestinian body is an ongoing aspect of the settler-colonial project. Earlier this month, five Palestinian children who ranged in age from  eight to twelve were harassed by Israeli settlers before the military was called to arrest them for picking the same wild plant near an illegal settlement. The eldest boys of the group will face charges.⁹ These tactics make the body hyper-visible in order to erase it, in death and in narrative, establishing the settler colonial imaginary and perceptions as hegemonic truths, as positive––so that all other lived experiences happen in the negative.

In the work of Abou-Rahme and Abbas, the surveillance image is not static; the camera jerks back and forth, tracking the three boys as faceless black figures walking and bending down in grey and white fields. The camera jolts as the soldiers, seen as large armed black figures, ambush the boys; an armored car speeds to the area; the dying boy’s body is put in the vehicle by the soldiers. The footage, which was only released after a court injunction, is layered with text and moving images, both found and recorded, from Palestine. We see videos of protests, dances, folk songs, home demolition, people foraging, landscapes, wild plants, and abandoned developments—creating a sense of density and fragmentation. The text and images redact each other while interacting with one another, while the sound pulses through two speakers and a subwoofer.¹⁰ The accumulation and relation of these elements are felt, bodily, and they manifest an affective space between appearance and disappearance in which “uncounted bodies counter their own erasures, appearing on a street, on a link, on a feed. Words from their songs are broken up and reformed.”¹¹ In this case, the minor figures, whose lived experiences are perceived by the settler colonial imaginary as background noise, treated as a threat or as a ghost, appear anew in mutation.

Aljafari is intimately familiar with the paradoxical position of the Palestinian body. In a master class at Festival Ciné-Palestine, Aljafari spoke about the making of his film Recollection in which he altered over fifty Israeli films shot in Jaffa from the ’60s to the ’80s to erase all traces of foregrounded Israeli characters or sets. Only the structures and figures originally mediated as background, the Palestinian residents of Jaffa, many of whom the filmmaker knows personally, are left as main characters. “In Jaffa and also in Jerusalem, [as a Palestinian] you know, you’re an outsider, you’re an outcast. You’re a ghost in your own country. That’s why I identify myself with the characters, with people I find in the background. I am one of them, in fact, and I grew up as one of them.”¹² It is because Aljafari is familiar with this paradox, to be hyper-surveilled yet meant to be invisible, that he is effectively able to expose it, intuit its subversion, and negotiate the boundaries of visibility and invisibility.

The effects of such a paradox are embodied in An Unusual Summer, as people are often seen experiencing paranoia. Aljafari’s neighbor Yousef, for example, is constantly looking over his shoulder. The title cards say that he mutters to himself, “They have taken everything,” over and over. The paradox is especially intimated the short anecdote which roll before the credits: Aljafari’s father is arrested on his wedding night because the band played a song for Palestine; Aljafari himself must perform a logistical gymnastics every time he wants to drive from his neighborhood to the airport, or vice versa, so that he is not racialized by Israeli taxi drivers, and his family is not stopped for hours at a checkpoint. This is the experience of being seen as a threat, or not at all.

Near the end of the film, a title card reads, “Life must be disrupted in order to be revealed.” This is the intuitive force that drives An Unusual Summer, to reveal life. Aljafari’s film also reveals something else: in recording oneself within a surveillance state that is determined to erase you, in altering such a recording to emphasize affect and the significance of minor moments, the recording becomes a record.

¹  André Elias Mazawi, “Vancouver, BC, Wednesday, April 15, 2020, 7:51PM & January 28, 2021, 8:45AM,” Received by Kamal Aljafari, Kamal Aljafari Research & Letters, 15 Apr. 2020, kamalaljafari.art/Research-Letters.
² Kamal Aljafari, “An Unusual Summer,” Received by Ra’anan Alexandrowicz, Film Text: An Unusual Summer Film Text: An Unusual Summer, Woche Der Kritik, 24 Feb. 2021, wochederkritik.de/de_DE/magazine/film-text-an-unusual-summer-alexandrowicz-aljafari/.
³ Ibid.
⁴ Ibid.
⁵ André Elias Mazawi, “Vancouver, BC, Wednesday, April 15, 2020, 7:51PM & January 28, 2021, 8:45AM,” Received by Kamal Aljafari, Kamal Aljafari Research & Letters, 15 Apr. 2020, kamalaljafari.art/Research-Letters.
⁶ When thinking through Palestinian conditions of erasure, historiography, and mundanity, I am always in conversation with Saidiya Hartman’s use of minor figures, which she defines as the young black women who led revolutionary lives but were considered insignificant in historical records: “They have been credited with nothing: they remain surplus women of no significance, girls deemed unfit for history and destined to be minor figures.” Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2020), xiv.
⁷ André Elias Mazawi, “Vancouver, BC, Wednesday, April 15, 2020, 7:51PM & January 28, 2021, 8:45AM,” Received by Kamal Aljafari, Kamal Aljafari Research & Letters, 15 Apr. 2020, kamalaljafari.art/Research-Letters.
⁸ An excerpt of the video piece is available here. Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Basel Abbas, directors. Only The Beloved Keeps Our Secrets (Extract). Vimeo, 2016, vimeo.com/161970557.
⁹ Al Jazeera “Video Shows Israeli Troops Detaining Palestinian Children,” Occupied West Bank News | Al Jazeera, Al Jazeera, 11 Mar. 2021, www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/11/video-shows-israeli-troops-detaining-palestinian-children.
¹⁰ Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Basel Abbas, “Only The Beloved Keeps Our Secrets,” Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, 2016, baselandruanne.com/Only-The-Beloved-Keeps-Our-Secrets.
¹¹ Ibid.
¹² Kamal Aljafari, “Masterclass Kamal Aljafari: (Re)Collection: Shifting Borders between Visibility and Invisibility.” Festival Ciné-Palestine. Festival Ciné-Palestine, 27 May 2018, Paris, www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiXqn4kqBOg.

Lamia Abukhadra is an artist and writer based in Minneapolis and Beirut. Her practice studies and confronts the irrational truths present within settler colonial power structures, derived from imaginaries, ethoses, and ontological tools, and their extractive repercussions. Using Palestine as a microcosm of urgency and resistance, she embeds speculative frameworks, intuited from practices present long before the settler colonial project. Her works bring to light intimate and historical connections, poetic occurrences, and generative possibilities of survival, mutation, and self-determination. Lamia graduated from the University of Minnesota with a BFA in interdisciplinary studio art in 2018 and is a 2019–2020 Home Workspace Program Fellow at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut. Her work has been exhibited at Waiting Room, the Quarter Gallery, Soo Visual Arts Center, Yeah Maybe, and the Katherine E. Nash Gallery in Minneapolis and in Chicago at Unpacked Mobile Gallery. Her writing has been self-published and featured in Jadaliyya and MnArtists. Lamia is a 2018–2019 Jerome Emerging Printmaking Resident at Highpoint Center for Printmaking, a 2019 resident at ACRE and the University of Michigan’s Daring Dances initiative, and a recipient of a 2017 Soap Factory Rethinking Public Spaces grant. This fall, she will be a 2021–22 Jan Van Eyck Academie Resident in Maastricht, Netherlands. Lamia is the Communications Coordinator at Mizna.

The post Life Must be Disrupted in Order to be Revealed: The Recording as Record and the Hyper-Surveilled Entity Not Meant to Exist in An Unusual Summer appeared first on Mizna.

This text is presented as part of the Mizna Film Series, a monthly selection which expands our regular film programming to include screenings, critical essays, filmmaker interviews, and discussions exploring revolutionary forms of cinema from the SWANA region and beyond.

Soleil Ô and a Transnational Third Cinema

In the wake of a tricontinental wave of revolutions and independence movements in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, the theoretical and ideological framework of Third Cinema came to life through a series of militant manifestos by Latin American filmmakers Fernando Solanas, Octavio Getino, and Julio García Espinosa in the late 1960s. Solanas and Getino’s essay “Towards a Third Cinema,” published  in 1969, coined the term “Third Cinema” in the journal Tricontinental by the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAAL). While concerned with the national process of decolonization in Third Cinema, Solanas and Getino left out the transnational question when it comes to the political. The work of Teshome Gabriel around the rethinking of Third Cinema, and especially in his book Third Cinema in The Third World: The Aesthetics of Liberation, expands Third Cinema theory into the transnational. Gabriel highlights that Third Cinema is not a cinema defined by geography; it is a cinema primarily defined by its socialist, and therefore transnational, politics.² At large, Third Cinema theory and practice offered a move against and away from consumer capitalism and Hollywood’s First Cinema. Med Hondo’s Soleil Ô (1970) in particular embodies this Third Cinema rejection of Eurocentrism and First and Second Cinema conventions both thematically and stylistically, and through a transnational lens, the film moves beyond the national question of liberation.

Early Third Cinema theory and practice were powerfully marked by the larger critical paradigms of dependency theory and notions around cultural imperialism dominant in the 1960s and 1970s.³ The journal Tricontinental expressed the aspirations of peoples from three continents struggling against the criminal policies of intervention, plunder, and aggression employed by the world-wide imperialist system and particularly by US Imperialism against the Afro-Asian-Latin American peoples. The first issue of the journal included articles by Franz Fanon, Kim Il Sung, and Fidel Castro.⁴ Similarly, Third Cinema aimed to immerse itself in the lives and struggles of the peoples of the Third World. Since the Third World should not continue to dissipate its culture and national identity, Third Cinema tries to conserve what is left.⁵ The ideology of Third Cinema thus adheres to investigating the traumatic cultural shifts that engulf the peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America as a result of colonization.

Focused on an unnamed Black African migrant with an unclear nationality, Soleil Ô narrates the migration of Africans to France during the 1950s and 1960s, a period derogatorily termed the “black invasion” by the French. At that point in history, the mass migration of immigrants from a colonial empire in the process of dissolution was replacing the European migrant labor force France depended upon. Thus, tensions arose as the influx of new migrants and influences from African colonies was transforming the structure of the French society. Paradoxically, this transformation in French society simultaneously resulted in an entrenchment of colonial power disparities, which reinforced patterns of systemic oppression initiated under colonial rule in a neocolonial light. These attitudes were reflected through the exploitation of Black African migrants who, regardless of education and skill levels, were relegated to the lowest ranks of employment as laborers. Denied adequate housing and subjected to extreme racism, these migrants found themselves trapped between a Parisian bureaucracy that resented their presence and dysfunctional post-independence African governments who regarded their situation as a French problem. Soleil Ô‘s depiction of the Black migrant as persona non grata in both France and a (post-)colonial Africa creates a dislocation that allows Hondo to advocate the evolution of revolutionary ideology and its potential role in transforming both Africa and the situation for Black migrants in Paris.⁶

Third Cinema filmmakers see film as a weapon with the camera as an “inexhaustible expropriator of image-weapons and the projector, a gun that can shoot 24 frames per second.”⁷ The act of filming then becomes more than a political act. Third Cinema films do not aim to re-aestheticize traditional cinematic modes, but to rather politicize cinema to the extent where a new cinematic code appropriate to its needs is established.⁸ While mainstream First Cinema entertains, it retains a huge emphasis on individual psychology, personal achievement, and wealth accumulation. Set against an often hostile world, Third Cinema emphasizes social problems and collective actions, confronting issues such as social justice, racial and gender equality, and the spreading of wealth and power. Third Cinema has a direct political function in that it attacks the hegemonic culture. Just as Hollywood cinema is political and one-sided, so is Third Cinema, except that its political ideology is opposed to the political views implicit in Hollywood cinema.⁹ Third Cinema includes an infinite variety of subjects and forms, as varied as the lives of the people it portrays, identifying the masses as the true hero and the only existing force capable of defeating class enemies in their home fronts.¹⁰ The production and praxis of Third Cinema, i.e. the call to action of these films, leads us to view the aesthetic of Third Cinema as a form of ideology; that is, the films point toward a confrontational cinema and an aesthetics of liberation.¹¹ It can even be argued that a film’s validity as a revolutionary film resides in its cultural intonations, historical context, and ideological dimensions.¹²

Stylistically, Third Cinema achieves this confrontational effect by relying on several cinematic choices that challenge the conventional choices of First Cinema. Most notably, Third Cinema films often combine the fictional and the documentary to deliver a confrontational ideology rooted in reality. For Third Cinema, style, form, and ideology all become inseparable. The essence of Third Cinema is found in its rejection of First Cinema and cultural imperialism. Thus, the ideology and form of Third Cinema is to deconstruct the colonial culture permeating Third World nations. Third Cinema counters the images of Third World peoples portrayed as uncivilized, violent, and primitive and confronts the true violence and incivility practiced by the colonial First World.¹³ Throughout Soleil Ô, Hondo violently attacks the mirages and effects of colonialism on humans within a Marxist framework. In one scene, the unnamed African migrant enters an open apartment to ask for assistance in finding a job. He finds a man and a woman each staring at a different television, their eyes glued to variety shows playing on screen, taking no notice of their surroundings nor the nameless protagonist asking for help. This scene portrays the white French couple as brainwashed slaves to on-screen capitalism. The couple suddenly starts having an intense fight about money, and their uncivil screams grow louder and louder. Their screams sound almost like animals howling at each other and the camera moves violently between their faces as they exchange yells. The couple is portrayed in a way similar to how First World cultural products portray Third World peoples as loud, violent, and uncivilized. In a comic change of events, the couple’s fight comes to an abrupt end as soon as a Christian sermon comes up on their TV screens. With satire, Hondo attacks common First World stereotypes, humorously presenting a White-passing West Indian who has “transmitted Blackness” to his baby. In another scene, Hondo shows a disappointed White French woman unimpressed with the sexual performance of her Black African date, addressing the hypersexualized stereotype of Black men that still pervades many White minds.¹⁴

The point of view in Third Cinema is not a reflection of the consciousness or subjectivity of a single subject (a protagonist/hero); rather, the central figure in Third Cinema serves to develop a historical perspective on radical social change. The protagonist/hero might cast the glance, but in actuality it is the masses or the people who give substance to the gaze.¹⁵ The individual hero in Third Cinema is a collective subject; they are not endowed with individuality—the legitimizing function of conventional cinema.¹⁶ Correspondingly, the unnamed protagonist in Soleil Ô represents African immigrants in Europe in large, his bag has the flags of several African states on it and it is never clear where he is from. Gabriel highlights that where a central character is used, the viewpoint goes beyond that of the individual to develop a sense of the relationship between the individual and the community, of the collective, and of history.¹⁷ The lack of name or nationality of the protagonist works to adhere to a transnational framework in critiquing neo-colonial European exploitation of Black African migrant workers.

Additionally, Third Cinema films often contain critiques of religion functioning as a vital aid in the destruction of identity of colonized African peoples. The opening prologue of the film documents the breakdown of individual African nations by the denial of their languages, religions, and cultures. Hondo presents this denial through the visual metaphor of a Christian baptism conducted by a White priest and attended by a culturally diverse group of African men. As each man approaches the priest, he asks him in French to be forgiven for speaking his indigenous language: Peul, Bambara, Lingala, Creole, and several others. In effect, all of these individual cultures become reduced to one by the acceptance of the colonizer’s language and the rejection of their own. Thus as the priest exhorts the spirit of evil to “leave these children,” the African men become dislocated from a multiplicity of indigenous origins and begin a process of assimilation that falsely promises to lead them to cultural union with the colonizer.¹⁸ As each man is baptized, they assume a new Christian name given by the priest. Their individual identities and nations are erased through the enforcement of a new identity on them by the colonizer, here represented by the priest.

The last sequence of Soleil Ô shows the nameless protagonist in a forest. He is invited to eat with a French family vacationing at their country house, but is shocked by their waste, which the film extends to represent the waste of the First World. In a very uncivil manner, the children are allowed, or rather encouraged, by their parents to step on all the food on the lunch table. Disgusted by such insensitive and vile acts so strongly opposed to his own ideals, the nameless protagonist walks away, leaving the family, and  quickly starts running back into the forest. Breathless, he falls at the trunk of a tree and has visions of Third World revolutionaries such as Patrice Lumumba, Che Guevara, Mehdi Ben Barka, and Malcolm X. Such an ending reflects the ideological progress which has taken place in the nameless protagonist’s mind. It symbolizes his new awareness, which parallels his own escape. He is surrounded by images of prominent transnational figures fighting against colonialism, a fight that has existed since the very beginning of White imperialism in Africa and that is seldom mentioned by mainstream First World media and cultural products.¹⁹ His fight for liberation is in line with the fight of the revolutionary figures he sees in the forest; his fight is not individual, it is a collective fight against colonialism, exploitation, and the erasure of the multiplicity of identity.

Third Cinema is a cinema of subversion. It aims to simultaneously destroy and  construct: there is a destruction of the images of colonial or neo-colonial cinema, and a construction of another cinema that captures the transnational revolutionary impulse of the peoples of the Third World.²⁰ The transnational visions of Africa created by diaspora, such as Soleil Ô, challenge depictions of Africa as a monolithic site of origin and authenticity. In The Archeology of Origin: Transnational Visions of Africa in a Borderless Cinema, Sheila Petty outlines Avtar Brah’s concept of diaspora as a delineation of a field of identifications, where imagined communities are forged within and outside  a confluence of narratives from annals of collective memory and rememory.²¹ This idea suggests that diaspora, as both an abstraction and a reality, defies borders of nation and is a space where multiple subject positions are juxtaposed, contested, proclaimed, or disavowed. Thus, histories and cultures intercross freely, creating transnational layers of identity and of origin. As a diasporic film, Med Hondo’s Soleil Ô provides a transnational confrontation to neo-colonial exploitation of Black African migrant workers in France in line with the style and ideology of Third Cinema.

¹ Solanas, Fernando, and Octavio Getino. “TOWARD A THIRD CINEMA.” Cinéaste, vol. 4, no. 3, 1970, pp. 1–10. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41685716, 3.
² Wayne, Mike. Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema. Pluto Press, 2001, 1.
³ Stam, Robert. “Eurocentrism, Afrocentrism, Polycentrism: Theories of Third Cinema.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, vol. 13, no. 1-3, Jan. 1991, pp. 217–237., doi:10.1080/10509209109361378, 219.
⁴ Buchsbaum, Jonathan. “A Closer Look at Third Cinema.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 21, no. 2, June 2001, pp. 153–166., doi:10.1080/01439680120051497, 155.
⁵ Gabriel, Teshome H. Third Cinema in the Third World: the Aesthetics of Liberation. UMI Research Press, 1982, xi.
⁶ Petty, Sheila. “The Metropolitan Myth: Assimilation, Racism and Cultural Devaluation in Soleil O and Pièces D’Identités.” L’Esprit Créateur, vol. 41, no. 3, 2001, pp. 163–171., doi:10.1353/esp.2010.0154, 164.
⁷ Solanas, Fernando, and Octavio Getino. “TOWARD A THIRD CINEMA.” Cinéaste, vol. 4, no. 3, 1970, pp. 1–10. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41685716, 8.
⁸ Gabriel, Teshome H. Third Cinema in the Third World: the Aesthetics of Liberation. UMI Research Press, 1982, xi.
⁹ Ibid, 3.
¹⁰ Ibid.
¹¹ Ibid, 6.
¹² Ibid, 38.
¹³ Stam, Robert. “Beyond Third Cinema: The Aesthetics of Hybridity.” Rethinking Third Cinema, edited by Anthony R. Guneratne and Wimal Dissanayake, Routledge, 2003, pp. 31–48, 35.
¹⁴ Sanogo, Aboubakar. “The Indocile Image: Cinema and History in Med Hondo’s Soleil O and Les Bicots-Nègres, Vos Voisins.” Rethinking History, vol. 19, no. 4, 2015, pp. 548–568., doi:10.1080/13642529.2015.1063236, 554.
¹⁵ Gabriel, Teshome H. Third Cinema in the Third World: the Aesthetics of Liberation. UMI Research Press, 1982, 7.
¹⁶ Ibid, 8.
¹⁷ Ibid, 24.
¹⁸ Petty, Sheila. “The Archeology of Origin: Transnational Visions of Africa in a Borderless Cinema.” African Studies Review, vol. 42, no. 2, Sept. 1999, pp. 73–86., doi:10.2307/525365, 77.
¹⁹ Pfaff, Françoise. “The Films of Med Hondo An African Filmmaker in Paris.” Jump Cut, vol. 31, Mar. 1986, pp. 44–46., www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC31folder/HondoFilms.html.
²⁰ Gabriel, Teshome H. Third Cinema in the Third World: the Aesthetics of Liberation. UMI Research Press, 1982, 94.
²¹ Ibid, 74.

Ahmed AbdulMageed is an Egyptian-Palestinian aspiring film & media scholar. He graduated from St. Olaf College in 2020 with a BA, double-majoring in Film & Media Studies and Russian Area Studies. At St. Olaf, Ahmed studied and researched various cinema industries and movements, including US, Egyptian, Russian, and Third cinema, as well as coordinated film screenings for the Russian department and the Political Awareness Committee.

In the summer of 2019, he joined Mizna as a Film Festival Intern and returned in the fall of 2020 as the Film Programming Coordinator.

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