This text was commissioned by and is published jointly with Fantômas, the Belgian film quarterly, which hosts the Dutch-language version.
Perpetual Recurrences (Reem Shilleh, 2016).
This meeting takes place on shaking ground. Since October 7, words have different meanings. Caring about the ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza today is very different for Reem Shilleh, a Palestinian researcher and filmmaker, than it is for Gawan Fagard, a Belgian writer and scholar. How do we respond to this unfathomable reality from our respective backgrounds, and from our work in the field of the moving image?
We are both spectators, physically outside of Palestine, vulnerable to a feeling of powerlessness amid the flood of information from the war zone to the safe side of the world. Our conduit to the pain of others is the screen. This pain makes it difficult to write. And still there is a necessity to do so.
The occasion to meet is Shilleh’s archival film project Perpetual Recurrences (2016), in which she compiles a selection of scenes from militant films from the period 1968 through 1982 and juxtaposes them with video fragments from the early years of this century. In the wake of the recent events in Gaza, the platform United Screens for Palestine has screened the film in Brussels and elsewhere. Together with many internationally displaced Palestinian filmmakers, Shilleh is actively involved in the discourse around political cinema from Palestine. Today, responding to the emergency situation, it is as crucial as it is difficult not to fall into a passive position of inertia. Many cultural workers and grassroots organizations are finding ways to take a stance and speak up.
When it comes to militant cinema, the central question is: how can the moving image be in solidarity with a resistance to the ongoing atrocities? What is the relationship between militant cinema of the long ‘70s and today’s activist videos circulating on social media? What are the ethics of the political image? Where do we find the militant image today, and what does it want to achieve beyond the image, as Palestinians engage in an existential struggle for survival, both as a people and as a country?
Perpetual Recurrences (Reem Shilleh, 2016).
The perpetual recurrences of militant cinema
Even though it is shown as a film, according to Shilleh, Perpetual Recurrences is essentially “an exercise in film programming,” leading the gaze of the spectator through various fragments of political films from the period between the Israeli-Arab war in 1968 to the invasion of Lebanon by Israel in 1982. These films were created by both Palestinian filmmakers and international filmmakers in solidarity with the Palestinian cause. In 1967, the Palestinian Film Unit (PFU) was founded by Mustafa Abu Ali, Hani Jawharieh, and Sulafa Jadallah, three filmmakers in exile in Jordan. As the official photography unit of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), they produced films explicitly in reaction to the events of the Arab-Israeli war, intending to bring the Palestinian cause to worldwide attention and provide a vocabulary to talk about it. The presumptive objectivity of the cinema lens was used as a weapon in the struggle. Both in content and style, the films have a clear mission to inform, to enlighten, and to convince—often based on documentary footage underscored by a compelling soundtrack and a voice-over that clearly states what one should think and how one should react as a viewer. Education was seen as a permanent act of remembering, of giving meaning, and of passing the continuous struggle down to the younger generations.
At the basis of Perpetual Recurrences lies the observation that there are certain motifs in these films that come to form a pattern: the classrooms where teachers are educating children on Palestinian history, the soldiers sitting in a circle around a campfire, the narrow alleyways of the refugee camps, and the ghost rides filmed from cars driving through the landscape. Throughout, the films bear witness to an era in which the struggle was fueled by a hope for a just society, built on freedom and equality. A certain sense of utopia was always lurking.
In the early aughts, hardly anyone was speaking about these films, which had become rather obscure. Recently, more research has been done, exemplified by Khadijeh Habasheh’s book Knights of Cinema: The Story of the Palestinian Film Unit (2023), Nadia Yaqub’s Palestinian Cinema in the Days of the Revolution (2018), and the volume Dreams of a Nation (2020), edited by Hamid Dabashi. A new generation of researchers and filmmakers has taken an interest in these films out of a desire to understand how previous generations have dealt with the struggle, what cinematic language they have developed in their attempt to make the liberation movement visible to the world.
R21 aka Restoring Solidarity (Mohanad Yaqubi, 2022).
Perpetual Recurrences is part of a larger ongoing practice of the collective Subversive Film, mainly consisting of Shilleh and Mohanad Yaqubi, both based in Brussels and Ramallah. Since 2011, they have been studying, preserving, subtitling, and showing 16mm films from the militant era. The relative affordability of digitization techniques, as well as the availability of the internet as a means of storage and distribution, has made the archive practice accessible to individuals needing only a minimum of institutional support. Recently, they have released another archive film, R21 aka Restoring Solidarity (2022), based on a collection called “Tokyo Reels,”which contains 16mm films safeguarded in Tokyo, some of which were produced by Japanese activists in solidarity with Palestine.
The practices of preservation, distribution, and programming resist the erasure of memory by the settler colonial power. Since the Nakba of 1948, when Israeli settlers dispossessed and displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, they have strategically targeted and destroyed universities, museums, and archives, killing a nation’s history as they annex its territory. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, its soldiers looted the Palestinian Film Unit archives in Beirut. Later, proof emerged that many of those films had ended up in Israeli military archives. More recently, on November 29, 2023, the Gaza municipality announced that Israel had attacked the city’s Central Archives, destroying irreplaceable historical materials. A perpetual recurrence of any colonial project is to eliminate the cultural memory of the colonized and replace it with the oppressor’s own historical narration.
And so archivists of the militant image must not only preserve but protect, not only analyze but amplify these urgent messages that might otherwise be willed out of existence.
They Do Not Exist (Mustafa Abu Ali, 1974).
Images such as those in Mustafa Abu Ali’s They Do Not Exist (1974) help to remember, to mourn, and to affirm that the opposite of the film’s title is true.There’s nothing nostalgic about this in the context of Palestinian memory: instead, there is a hope for historical restoration in the most generous and all-encompassing sense of the word.
Included in the project are not only Palestinian films made by Palestinian filmmakers, but also films about Palestine, mostly by Western filmmakers such as An Oppressed People Is Always Right by Nils Vest (1976) or The Palestinians by Johan van der Keuken (1975). Filmmakers from Italy, the Soviet Union, Lebanon, Japan, and Serbia flocked to the battlefields and refugee camps of Palestine and Lebanon to depict the struggle, producing counter-information, militant bulletins, and ideological essays. At best, they call for empathy with the Palestinian people and explain the historical circumstances that gave rise to their plight, but they don’t seem to offer a way out of it.
Palestinian-made films, on the contrary, tend to go beyond mere compassion and resignation to a direct engagement with and commitment to the struggle. There is a big divide between those inside of the struggle and those who come from elsewhere with advanced means and an intellectual agenda. The risk of orientalism remains to this day, and it may even be exacerbated, since the political opposition to Israeli occupation is less unified than it was in the ’70s, when its underlying ideology was more clearly defined. Although the ongoing genocide makes the two sides of the Palestinian question starker than ever, there will always be an inside and an outside of the struggle.
The Palestinians (Johan van der Keuken, 1975).
Several scenes in Perpetual Recurrences demonstrate that, in the 1970s, militants were mainly informed by socialist and Marxist ideologies, and their activism was premised upon education, emancipation, and self-determination. Today, the Soviet bloc has since long collapsed and the ideological orientation of the Palestinian struggle is scattered. Western forces have successfully fragmented the struggle into many factions: there is the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza, and in between them many groups with different worldviews. And then there are all the Palestinians in exile in neighboring countries and all over the world, finding support from far-left groups in the West. But in the end, a resistance movement is obliged to find international support depending on the global economic and political dynamics, sometimes assembling strange political bedfellows. In the ’70s, the PLO was a representative body for the Palestinian people, but in the years since the 1993 Oslo agreements the diplomatic influence of the Palestinian Authorities has gradually declined due to a lack of central leadership and international credibility. Still, a multi-front and multifarious propaganda effort remains essential for getting the message across to potential allies and to organizing the struggle within and without. Slogans chanted in the street and printed on banners amplify the muffled voice of the oppressed and put pressure on political leaders toward the liberation of Palestine.
In this context, Perpetual Recurrences is an observation, sharp as a knife. It is an exercise in looking at the militant films from the past in order to better understand the potential of the moving image in the present. As a filmmaker/archivist, Shilleh takes a certain distance from the material in order to analyze the underlying structures and ideologies of the scenes she juxtaposes. Her project is a perpetual oscillation between remembering and actualizing, preserving and restoring. Above all, she ensures that the image does not become a mere illustration of the perpetuation of history, void of any call for action.
These political films from the Palestinian resistance movement are as relevant today as they were at the time of their making because, after 75 years, the struggle against Israeli occupation is ongoing. Even when the black-and-white, digitized 16mm images install a historical distance, it is apparent that the same issues are still at stake—recurring perpetually. Historicizing these films would undo their urgent call to end apartheid. Standing by and observing is no longer an option, especially now. The sense in which showing and discussing films contributes to the resistance effort at all is not always clear, since the impact of cinema can be slow and its makers may not be able to respond in real time to an emergency. Meanwhile, the image regimes of resistance and solidarity are shifting rapidly, and the influence of militant cinema from the revolutionary era is still inspiring them.
An Oppressed People Is Always Right (Nils Vest, 1976).
Where is the militant image located today?
While the Palestinian armed resistance movement still produces propaganda films today, they are made in a different way than was the cinema of the militant era. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) is maintaining an archive of films, photographs, and audiovisual content and raising funds in the West to help Palestinian refugees. However, their approach condemns Palestinians to be the object of humanitarianism; it fails to contribute to the struggle for political self-determination.
Among Palestinian image-makers throughout the diaspora, an interesting dynamic can be found. On the one hand, filmmakers and artists show their work in film festivals and art institutions. On the other hand, activist-filmmakers and journalists circulate short videos, images, and texts on social media, like shouts, coming from a distinct motivation. Digital filmmaking and distribution is now accessible to anyone with a smartphone and an internet connection. The complicated, multi-stage process of 16mm filmmaking is replaced by direct reporting, creating a generation of what one could call “emancipated filmmakers”; ‘emancipated’ from certain technical restrictions as well as from institutionalized styles and the ideologies that accompany them, searching for ways to express their own reality, mastering their own means.
Still, there is an understandable reluctance to call this militant cinema. These moving images are certainly not as clear and direct as the ‘classical’ militant cinema, given that they often rely on observation and suggestion instead of explanation and education. Outside of the realm of the news media, outside of the realm of the arts, it seems that a space is opening up and that the independent use of the image is gaining ground, creating a connection between those condemned to be victims and those destined to be spectators without the involvement of an intermediary gaze. In this hybrid zone, the militant image might be lurking.
As the moving image is so ubiquitous today, the task of curation becomes ever more important. Images can be easily weaponized, and the same image can be used as both a witness to a historical event and a denial of the same event. A subtitle, a voiceover, or a caption, can change the whole interpretation of the image. Social media provides information, but it also manipulates, distorts, and filters content through algorithms. Curators and researchers can provide context and focus the eye for the raw material on tiny screens that otherwise leaves the layman puzzled in front of the unspeakable and the ungraspable.
Perpetual Recurrences (Reem Shilleh, 2016).
Images from Gaza: looking or looking away?
For many months now, the world has been confronted with the massive flow of audiovisual media emerging out of the war on Gaza. Professional journalists and civilians in the Gaza strip upload videos to the same platforms, where they might appear side by side. Traditional media outlets might repost these images on their own channels or play them in a loop during their broadcasts. The question for those on the outside is: do you look, or do you look away? Is the obligation to witness the suffering, or to avert your eyes out of respect for the victims? In between, there are many gray zones: sometimes we look, sometimes not, for various reasons. In public discourse in the West, there have been many attempts to develop a prescription for moral behavior in reaction to images of such incomprehensible atrocities, but at the point of consumption everybody finds their own private way to deal with it.
Underlying the ethical dilemma of looking or not looking is the question of what knowledge one can extract from these images. To know, meaning to have seen, may be a bulwark against passivity. Though, instead of activating their viewer, the pain received vicariously in these images might trigger only a heavyhearted inertia. The Palestinian struggle may seem a lost cause and the Palestinian people helpless victims, while viewers around the globe retreat to a safe haven of empathic but disengaged spectatorship. The contents of these images are on the verge of unbelievable, and their atrocities can appear impossible to stop. The quantity, frequency, and venue for such images can result in empathy-fatigue and finally cynicism.
Even when actively looking, it is very difficult to imagine the reality of war for people who have not been in it. It can even be hard to imagine why people are making these images when the basic necessities of survival press most urgently for their attention. We might ask: what do these images want? One can’t speak on behalf of these images, the same way as one can’t speak on behalf of the victims these images portray. The images are cries for help, urgent calls to not only bear witness but above all to do something to stop the next image like this from coming to be.
In her essay Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Susan Sontag famously describes how the world is divided between those who are in pain and those who have sufficient safety and security that they can be spectators to the pain of others. The latter have the privilege to practice empathy or compassion; an emotional involvement which might make them feel involved in an act of caring without actually doing anything to prevent the pain or to stop that which causes pain. Palestinians both inside and outside of Palestine have always partaken of this pain, which emerges from the struggle for their occupied land, even unconsciously. Today, there is such an excess of pain that we are all sharing bits and pieces of it, some more and some less, and a strong sense of necessity is connected to it.
In the European cultural sector, one can observe a commitment to take a position and speak out about the war on Gaza. The examples are many and the implications for the ideological divides in Europe are vast. The most recent Berlinale was tasked with navigating the nearly impossible path between its so-called “universal” values based on international human rights and the historical climate of post-Holocaust collective guilt that has led many German institutions to parrot pro-Israeli propaganda. The cognitive dissonance particular to Germany has resulted in deep divisions and the censure of hundreds of artists, activists, and public figures. This dynamic is also a perpetual recurrence, identified by Sontag in the case of the Vietnam War and in nearly any war between unevenly matched combatants: the risk of empathy is that it has a tendency to corrupt into partiality and a perpetual inversion of the victim-and-perpetrator dynamic, obscuring the objective measures of inequality and violence.
While raising empathy and awareness can be the start of something, it is not enough. Most crucial today is to bend the empathic response of spectators into a field of knowledge, followed by engagement in meaningful action that puts pressure on political leaders to end the cycle of violence. The images from the war might end up in the whirlwind of spectacle, amplified by television and other media. Decontextualized, misused, and misinterpreted, such images are in need of constant unmasking in order to lay bare their relationship to reality.
“The revolution will not be televised.” So goes Gil Scott-Heron's famous song. The resistance movement seeks to observe, to analyze, and to take responsible action. Resistance from outside of the battlefield can consist of simple actions, such as boycotting; raising a voice; supporting local organizations, victims, or their families; documenting and doing research; as well as by organizing screenings and gatherings. Essentially, it is about understanding oneself and one’s allies as an active political body instead of a passive object of history.
‘No Traces of Life’: Israel’s Ecocide in Gaza, 2023–2024 (Forensic Architecture, 2024). Left: map of orchards (gray) and croplands (white) in Gaza from October 6, 2023 (baed on land use and land cover mapping of 10m Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 imagery by Dr. He Yin of Kent State University). Right: map of the Israeli ground invasion of Gaza as of February 19, 2024.
The image as evidence
We should be careful not to overestimate the image. Filmmakers and image theorists tend to think of the image as something almost mystical, with secret powers. Maybe the image is simply what it is and nothing more: evidence of something that has happened. Harun Farocki wrote of the “operating image,” which does nothing other than play its role in a system of information. In Farocki’s spirit, the collective of artists, activists and researchers of Forensic Architecture are attempting to reconstruct the circumstances of historical events. They gather, identify, and correlate audiovisual data of war crimes—be it amateur footage, media coverage, military images, or any other image—and attempt to reconstruct what actually happened. It is their task to reveal the truth that lies hidden within the image, no matter how various parties are trying to manipulate it. Such a practice avoids overestimating or mystifying the image, because mystification places it in a realm beyond the scope of our actions, where one “can’t do anything about it” and where “everything is a lie anyway.” The mystification of suffering has excused many from acting to prevent the pain of others.
In the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the South African government has used a massive number of images by people in Gaza as well as by the Israeli army to prosecute its case against Israel, which it accuses of genocide. Each photograph and each frame of video bears in itself the hope to become evidence. The aesthetic value of an image crumbles to nothing compared to its immense restorative potential. The difficulty is interpreting them, contextualizing them, deconstructing their ideological frame if you will. That is why a certain degree of observational distance is needed to give these images a sustained urgency. The noble commitment of Subversive Film and other filmmakers to preserve, restore, curate, and discuss these images is part of a collective effort aimed at a future restoration of the Palestinian lives in a moral as well as a juridical sense. The power that remains in the hands of the people is witnessing, remembering, and testifying, hoping that one day there will be sufficient ground for thorough investigations, a legal process, and consequently, historical reparations.
Palestine itself has been the site of occupation and displacement already for 76 years. In that sense, the ultimate “perpetual recurrence” is that of violence. Palestinians fear more than anything else that moment when their suffering and oppression becomes invisible, when the attention of the world is drawn to other places. This explains their strong, nearly existential attachment to the image, their last lifeline to freedom. But one cannot put absolute faith in the image; exploring the possibility of concrete action despite or beyond it.
Sadly enough, what is happening today in Gaza is not unprecedented. Instead, it is the tragic recurrence of ethnic cleansings and genocides of numerous oppressed peoples and communities in the world. Simultaneous conflicts in Yemen, Sudan, and the Eastern Congo are happening in a realm far away from global visibility. Is this a reason to become cynical, throw up our hands hopelessly? On the contrary: it’s impossible to stop hoping. Palestinian people have shown a unique ability for resilience, for dealing with hardship, for treating their wounds, for continuing the struggle. New generations find new sources for optimism, despite everything. We do not see images from Gaza only of murder and destruction; we also see doctors tirelessly caring for patients, teachers continuing to educate children in the camps, psychologists helping people to cope with the trauma, artists continuing to make music and write poetry. Through countless social media accounts reporting from within the bleakness of the situation, we even see the indestructible force of humor and irony.
In this context, resilience is only meaningful when thought together with resistance. For generations, Palestinian lives have been unthinkable outside of this struggle, outside of this position of being dispossessed and oppressed. The need for militant cinema, that bears witness, gives an image to resistance, and calls for solidarity, remains crucial today and will not become outdated until the struggle has been settled by a stable political order granting life with dignity to all.