Studio Visit: Subversive Film
Not collecting films, but connecting films
On a sunny February morning in Brussels, I meet with Subversive Film (SF) in the multifunctional space of home-work, where their dining table turns to desk as we convene with laptops and notebooks, and the desk back to a dining table as we share a fresh pot of coffee and pieces of succulent, honey-soaked, pistachio-filled pastries — sweet remnants of Ottoman cuisine that I found on my path to our meeting.
This isn’t the first time we connect. I know SF to be filmmakers, researchers, peers, partners and parents. What I didn’t know is that they prefer to remain anonymous so as not to undermine their project with a focus on their individual identities, and to evade possible politically motivated threats to their family structure. Therefore, I will continue to refer to them in the third-person plural or through their chosen alias, SF.
I ask them to start at the beginning: Who and what is SF? In their own words, SF is ‘a non-defined collective’, or better yet, ‘it is a practice, a collective practice.’ Some 15 years ago, SF was founded by a Palestinian filmmaking and researching duo with the ambition to find, connect, translate, restore and distribute Palestinian films of the militant genre, dating from roughly 1968 to 1982 — that is, from the period immediately after the Six Day War to the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982, a decade or so prior to the Oslo Accords. Over the years, and with each new project, commission and screening programme, the network of people SF has collaborated with has grown to include all the filmmakers they introduce to audiences, as well as all the archivists and activists, writers and translators, post-production specialists and projectionists who make their work possible. Relationships are the intangible results of these past years.
SF began in Ramallah and London in 2011 and is now based between Brussels and occupied Palestine, a trajectory that mirrors the migration path of the founders themselves. Initially, they conceived SF as a distribution platform, but quickly realised that the work of distributing films — acquiring the rights and gaining profit from their circulation — wasn’t in line with their cause. Both ethically and practically, distribution alone didn’t align with the efforts of militant cinema. Their aim is rather to generate and circulate knowledge of the militant films as a testimony to the ongoing struggle of the Palestinian peoples under Israeli occupation and apartheid.
Following the strategies of militant cinema distribution in its own time, when films were disseminated through networks of transnational solidarity, SF have taken up this effort of transnational circulation, choosing to contribute to the political struggle through artistic means. SF see themselves as re-distributors who re-circulate the films, networks and histories of Palestine; in doing so, they seek to create a generative practice, one that goes beyond them as individuals. Arts institutions, cinemas and cultural centres are the starting points for expanding this circulation of knowledge. Beyond these temporary forms of presentation, printed matter — publications, leaflets, catalogues and press kits — is the other tangible trace of their practice.
Of course, they themselves have hard disks full of film files, but they do not own the rights to these films. Per screening, the rights are cleared with their holders and the screening fees allocated accordingly. SF work with archival material, but they are not archivists. They emphasise: ‘it’s not about collecting films, but about connecting films.’
The body remembers
‘Our archive is our studio,’ they say. An archive, as one imagines it, is a physical space that hosts the sum of many acts of accumulation over time. It is an expression of the impulse to collect and preserve things, in better or worse conditions. Yet I wonder, this archive of militant films they describe — where are its physical remains?
Although SF discuss a body of work made from the late sixties to early eighties, the physical collection is in fact dispersed, dismembered. There is no ‘body’ of films. When Israel invaded Beirut in 1982, the archive of films collected by militant filmmakers and film units of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) disappeared, along with more than 100 films showing the daily life and struggle of the Palestinian peoples. Yet these films didn’t necessarily vanish without a trace. During the revolutionary period, before digitalisation and internet file sharing, these films were copied in their celluloid form and travelled to comrades and allies all over the world. The task SF has undertaken is to seek out such remains in archives or with individuals who stand in solidarity with Palestine and reconnect them with audiences. Their main work consists in cataloguing, inventorying, restoring and disseminating their findings — an act of remembering. In essence, this is the subversive element in in their practice. They remind me that ‘these films were produced during a political context that no longer exists. As a result, the centre of memory is not there.’ These films challenge the concept of individual authorship, certainly in terms of who created or owns them. They are part of a collective struggle, a collective memory. Recirculation is therefore an act of preservation, in defiance of the systematic silencing of their images and their memories by the Israeli state and military, among others.
Time will tell
At the turn of the twentieth century, progress in Europe was marked by the fruits of the industrial revolution, the building of machines and laying of railway networks; in Palestine, the newly arrived technology of the film camera captured the dehumanisation and demise of the native peoples through the gaze of foreigners coming from imperialist powers such as Britain and France. The camera was wielded as a weapon of elimination — eliminating the cultures, knowledges, languages and traditions outside of the frame, while Palestinians inside the frame were reduced to objects. A line can be drawn from this Orientalist perspective to the so-called humanitarian perspective, evident in the post-Nakba films in which Palestinians are observed as victims without voices.
Essentially, due to the Nakba and the difficulties in carrying out any cinematic endeavours at the time or in the decades that followed, most films made before 1968 were captured by others who othered the Indigenous peoples of Palestine. During the ensuing Palestinian revolutionary period, the Palestinians reclaimed the apparatus that had been used to serve the aims of genocide — the camera — and took up the task of self-representation. For the first time, we could see images of refugees talking to a camera, rather than merely being observed. We could see images of self-organisation: children being educated in makeshift classrooms or civilians training to become commandos. The militant image was an interruption of the humanitarian image, an interruption of the victim narrative. It was made for the world to witness their plight and their uprising.
In this period of global uprisings (think of France’s May ’68 cultural revolution, the civil rights movements in the US, the global mass opposition to the Vietnam war, the beginning of the Troubles in Northern Ireland), allies and neighbours from Lebanon or Jordan and from countries as distant as the Soviet Union and Japan also documented the anti-colonial, anti-imperialist struggles of the Palestinians. Each in solidarity, but each also with their own political agendas, using the image as a political tool to mobilise audiences to reflect on both the Palestinian struggle and their own struggles for land, sovereignty, civil rights, workers’ rights and so on.
The past is in the present, the present is in the past
Turning to their archive, SF guide me to Arab Loutfi’s documentary Tell Your Tale, Little Bird (2007), which approaches the militant act and image through a feminist lens. In the film, we hear the testimonies of seven women who formed part of the armed struggle for national liberation in the sixties and seventies. Still living in exile at the time of the film’s production in 1993, they recall their experiences of the aftermath of the Six Day War, their acts of resistance and their imprisonment. They recall the occupation of 1967, when Israel forcefully redrew its boundaries, illegally seizing the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Jerusalem, and expelled hundreds of thousands of native peoples from their lands. For those who remained, all concepts of life and order suddenly changed. They were now living under martial law, with a curfew; their movements were restricted and monitored. Around them, people were being dispossessed of their homes and lands, threatened, assaulted and murdered, while members of their families and communities were being arrested without trial.
These women — mothers, daughters, sisters and teachers — were compelled to revolt and fight for their lawful rights to their homes and existence. Interwoven with their accounts are historical black-and-white images from refugee camps, showing children being housed in tents, fed at campfires and educated in open air, as well as press images of the women themselves engaged in acts of resistance or after they had been captured. In her book On Photography (1977), Susan Sontag writes: ‘Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality… One can’t possess reality, one can possess images — one can’t possess the present, but one can possess the past.’ For eyes that have never seen war, these images of imprisoned realities are images of an alienated reality. But these women, dispossessed of their homeland, may still possess the images of their past and look back on their struggle for an unrealised dream with pride and just political conviction.
For SF, returning to images of the past is a political act. These images serve as evidence that the Nakba is not in the past. They are proof of ongoing systematic, colonial violence and genocide. Holding on to images of this struggle is a way for them to make this continuity tangible and apparent. SF highlight that we’re not discussing film as an ‘aesthetic vessel, but as a cinematic history, a record of time and experiences.’ It’s not only a record of struggle, but of existence itself. At the heart of SF’s artistic and militant engagement is the screening and contextualisation of these films, and the solidarity, community and conversations such acts generate. SF invite us to mobilise our political imaginations, to continue witnessing, listening and speaking up, and to interrupt and subvert the present with lessons from the past.
