Jawharieh worked for the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s Palestinian Film Unit. The prologue to Via Dolorosa shows the frames Jawharieh shot right before he was killed in 1976, while he was filming a guerilla operation by Fedayeen across the undulant landscape of red earth and scarce vegetation that characterize the Levantine heights in Aintoura, Lebanon. “He might have filmed his death but the film was spoiled,” we hear in the voiceover of the original film, while we watch the last unedited five shots filmed by Jawharieh and hear gunshots. Toukan’s video is haunted by Jawharieh himself as are the images that make up the archive, the layers of accumulated images that constitute the history of the image of Palestine and Palestinians.

 

According to the masterful commentary of Palestinian cultural studies scholar Nadia Yaqub in the film’s voice over, Jawharieh’s politics of filming implied bringing the camera as close to the event as possible, seeking the truth by conflating truth and revolution. In the 1960s, she argues, cinema was considered a utopian site to bring about something wholly new and different, as a vehicle for expressing dissatisfaction with the state of the world. For Yaqub, this means encounters with violence. We know that images, especially images of violence, are opaque, which hinders our capacity to read beyond the violence depicted by them. This raises several questions: Can meaning be created out of the ghosts haunting cruel images? How can we mobilize our eye, our capacity to see beyond and through the violence? How to bring in the out-of-field of the image?

 

In Via Dolorosa, Oraib provides us with a tour of at least a portion of Jawharieh’s archive of cruel images as if it were an archeological ruin, liberated from the weight of history[1] and from the weight of their signifier as militant and humanitarian images. Toukan takes reels shot by Jawharieh that once belonged to Soviet cultural centers in Jordan, a found collection that included international Communist solidarity films, propaganda for children as well as early Palestinian films produced by the Jordan Ministry of Information and Culture. In this manner, she brings forth a shared sensible regime comprised of solidarity militant films that also functions as abstract and ludic interventions and that liberates cruel images from being read by the colonial gaze. In other words, Toukan freely intervenes in the Soviet cultural center’s footage, associating colors, sounds, and forms, which are woven into images of a wounded woman and debris, a colorful sequence of a bronze bird standing on an egg, a fish in a porcelain vase dying and coming to life again, men in hospital beds with severe burns, Jawharieh’s invisible dead body, the sequence of a funeral procession in Jerusalem’s Via Dolorosa that Jawharieh, too, has filmed. The Via Dolorosa is one of the most sacred sites for Christians, leading to the Holy Sepulcher. Historically, the Via Dolorosa was the road through which Christ carried the cross on his way to crucifixion; the road bore witness to the pain Christ underwent before his death. The Via Dolorosa as the quintessential image of suffering contains and bears traces of mourning and dead bodies and, most importantly, also bears witnesses to the plurality of Palestine.

 

The procession as an aesthetic and allegorical device was taken up by Jean-Luc Godard in films such as Ici et ailleurs (1974) about the Palestinian revolution, Grandeur et décadence d’un petite commerce du cinema (1986), and in his Girbaud short videos. In these works, processions of bodies before the camera allegorize the projection of photograms in the cinematic apparatus. By using this device, Godard is highlighting the becoming visible, the utterable of the visible, and the sayable of bodies. What can be seen in, or said in and about Jawharieh’s footage of the procession at the Via Dolorosa? It is the literal passage of anguish and pain before the camera—is this something that can neither be seen nor said? In another short video by Godard, Changer d’image (1982), Anne-Marie Miéville posits that all images as well as images of human affection are like the shell of an egg: You can see its surface, but you cannot make legible or visible what is going on “inside” the eggshell. Bearing this in mind, according to Toukan, images need to be approached beyond the illusion of the transparency that came with the alleged emancipatory power of the image. Rather, they need to be approached with an awareness of their opaqueness, with humility, and in acknowledgment of the images’ status as an Other.

 

With this in mind, Toukan edits shots of children playing barefoot on the mud into this chain of images and sets them against Nadia Yaqub’s voice, reminding us that early Palestinian images were filmed for fund-raising purposes, including for the promotion of the work of UNRWA itself. The meaning of such images, she argues, was crystallized through the humanitarian gaze: They are thus seen as depictions of the misery refugees must endure living in indefensible conditions. This transparent, depoliticized reading, she adds, hinders us from mobilizing the image’s meaning beyond the humanitarian signifier and also from seeing that the children are indeed having a blast chasing a chicken, probably quite unaware that they are barefoot. Evidently, Jawharieh’s documentation of these goings-on of daily life go beyond the humanitarian gaze.

 

As such, Toukan mobilizes Jawharieh’s images beyond the discourses that are crystallized in them as fixed, unmovable signifiers and moves them toward the possibility of creating collective meaning in dialogue. Toukan’s practice of including interlocutors in her films as well as dissecting images by enlarging them, reframing them, showing us their details, blurring or pixelating them is very much in the tradition of Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miévilles’s Sonimage work from the 1970s and early 1980s. It could be argued that Toukan, by weaving different “regimes of the sensible” together—archives, juxtaposing layers of meaning, evoking the ghosts haunting the archive, together with different interlocutors in the voice overs, and Oraib’s montage/gaze—she actualizes the Sonimage project in this era of digital images, which are scrolled, hurried through, skipped, and shared on social media. With digital media, the viewing experience has radically changed:

 

What is this place that goes through THIS ➵ (this is my index finger scrolling down from Berlin, at this never-ever-ending parade of images of total anguish and loss, of bodies lifted and wheeled, mouths open, frozen in time, with smoke that obscures this tiny Mediterranean city all the more). These are not pictures of war. It is an onslaught on a dignified hero of the Palestinian Catastrophe called: Gaza.[2]

 

Toukan thus asks what it means to think and work with images that come out of Gaza and onto her screen, the matter being, that she herself does not know Gaza beyond cruel images? How is it possible to go beyond the dead images Gaza exports of itself? Her video When Things Occur (2017) explores this matter. It is based on Skype conversations with Gazans who made images that were shared on the internet in the summer of 2014, representing the digital embodiment of their mourning and grief. Through conversations with the photographers, Oraib raises the issue of representation and of the political economy of images of war from the point of view of the local.

While her film Offing (2021) is a conversation between Berlin with Gaza, this time it is a Zoom call with artist Salaman Nawati in the context of the 2021 War on Gaza. In the video, we hear Nawati’s voice describing both the hardship and mundanity of daily life under the conditions of war against footage shot by Oraib outside of Gaza. The film begins with the brittle sound of a recording device and fluorescent lights on a black background. Yellow and pink lights glow in front of the camera while we hear a child’s voice trying to film with a camera for the first time. We hear a horse’s hoof banging on the ground and the buzzing of a fly become muffled. We then see cacti twisting in the sun, and a close up of silver white hair on an arm. The sequence ends with the bending of a photographic print of a sculpture that unfolds into a blur, intercepted by the sound of bombs from a mobile screen device. In the voice over, we hear Salaman Nawati: Night and sound are among the hardest things to endure in the condition of war; you can drain out sounds by turning up the volume of a TV, but it is impossible to choose not to hear the sound of bombardment, or the sound of a drone, which “feels like something was planted in your brain and is constantly buzzing.” Images of sculptures from the Warburg Institute archive are interspersed throughout the first part of the film. The images are only classified later in the closing credits as “Gestures” from the Warburg folders Killing, Dying, Fleeing, and Fighting.

          

Nawati’s description of life under siege evokes Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness, a chronicle by the poet of his time under the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982. Darwish conveys the anguish of incertitude, the terrifying sound of falling bombs, the sounds of death. A mystical passage on yearning for coffee and the difficulties of satisfying basic needs under siege also come through in Nawati’s narration. He also brings children into the equation. For him, taking a mere shower is a debacle. When families come under siege, he describes how disaster makes every family member choose to stick together in the same room. We are confronted with the minute details that humanize that social unit despite the “feeling of being partially dead, as overdue martyrs, passing time until it is our turn.” We see many images of nature a ‘majnuneh’ flower bush (Arabic for Bougainvillea), edited against the sound of fire. We see the sky, a palm tree, black screens, the Mediterranean. We are repeatedly interrupted by a framer mounting photographs of Abu Mazen (a picture that sometimes hangs in shops, restaurants, car workshops in Palestine). The picture here is double-sided, however, with Abu Amar on the flipside, being mounted and framed for distribution. The act of framing images of political leaders, who end up wrapped in plastic waiting to be delivered, is evocative of how these figures stand isolated from the narrative of the reality of occupation and siege. Wrapped in plastic, realpolitik is severed from the facts on the ground. The mounting of the portraits is interrupted by a sequence of images filmed in an empty amusement park, bringing color and a degree of lightness to the other images. This is also the function of images of various types of cacti (which are in themselves, repeated symbols, and signs in Palestinian art history), interrupted by the soundtrack of Inn Ann by Daboor and Shabjeed on a screen device as well as images from demonstrations elsewhere on a screen device. This sequence of apparently disparate images is also reminiscent of how, while browsing through our screens, we jump from sensible regime to sensible regime.

 

The urgency of the moment under siege, here and elsewhere; the binarity of “we” spectators against a suffering “them,” is broken by the proximity of Nawati’s narration, resulting in a possibility for making sense of this, together. In our shared world, we share cruel images believing that cruel images may be capable of changing the same reality they depict. The principle of activism is, after all, exercising the power of making visible and actionable. Instead, Oraib Toukan invites us to turn to the disquiet of the past that shapes our shared world, pointing at a key shift from cruelty to humanity. She does this by highlighting relationality, which means, the support structures behind humanity, as opposed to the power structures that are behind the cruelty. Toukan therefore signals the possibility of a new pre-political, a shift from consuming images in hoping for change to actually making sense of them together—changing reality relationally “toward lives we can project with others”[3].

Irmgard Emmelhainz

Mexico City, March 2022