The Archive as Detritus: Naeem Mohaiemen’s Jole Dobe Na

Abstract

Through a series of reflections on the film Jole Dobe Na (Those Who Do Not Drown, 64 minutes, 2020), directed by Naeem Mohaiemen, this essay explores the relations between archives, dust and memory. It argues that memory is constantly struggling against the proliferation of detritus that clutters the material archive as we attempt to recover or reconstitute the past. Mohaiemen’s Jole Dobe Na, a film about loss and mourning, places its protagonists in an abandoned hospital filled with disused furniture, equipment, and records, through which we pursue the thread of memory like searchers in an archive. But while Mohaiemen’s earlier, research-driven films have excavated archives for documents, photographs and film footage in order to comment on history or release unexplored historical possibilities, Jole Dobe Na appears to view the archive itself as debris, always threatening to collapse into dust as memory confronts the past as wreckage. Mohaiemen’s Tripoli Cancelled (2017) and Jole Dobe Na (2020), films set in liminal, derelict spaces (an airport and a hospital) both speak to the questions of site and space that preoccupy cinema today, especially artists’ films meant for gallery viewing. They also reflect on the archive as a ruin rather than a repository.