Diaries of an impasse: the video works of Basma Alsharif

Abstract

This article offers a new reading of Basma Alsharif’s work explored through the form of diary film. By problematizing the term ‘post- Palestinian’ with which Alsharif’s practice has been described, the author foregrounds the limits of post-language in attending to Alsharif’s treatment of home in her two short films We Began by Measuring Distance (2009) and Home Movies Gaza (2013). Lauren Berlant’s theorization (see Cruel Optimisim, 2011) of the impasse serves as a key companion to probing the critical capacity of Alsharif’s films in revisiting certain attachments to the concept of home in relation to Palestine and in exploring other affective binds that foster collective rehearsals towards liberation.

Basma Alsharif’s Home Movies Gaza (2013) begins with the end. Her opening scene is a reversed one-take recorded from a fast-moving car and, in its inverted form, first shows glimpses of the Gazan sky before abruptly cutting to the pervasive concrete. Along the way, this three-minute shot depicts playful, chatters and chuckles of children in what appears to be the end of their school day and, in contrast, picks up on the warped beeps of vehicles protesting at being delayed by the traffic. In the backdrop, walls are covered with all sorts of postings: different services and offers, well wishes for the newlyweds, praises to the martyrs, the map of Palestine, and the Palestinian key for return. As the concrete closes in on us, Alsharif’s camera peers through the car window to capture the cadence of movement, while the gentle sound of the accompanying wind propels us to search for the open sky which, in its unfettered allure, affirms that a reality outside of confinement awaits.

During the 10 years that followed the release of Home Movies Gaza (2013), Gaza has been subject to incomprehensible violence. The Zionist entity and its killing machines have repeatedly encroached upon Gaza’s sky to carry out many of its documented ghastly crimes, the most recent of which unfolds as I type these words. ¹ Gaza’s sky, however, demands that it ceases to be constricted to such hovering horror. Against the images that Israel captures, collects and circulates of Gaza vis-à-vis the viewfinder of a target, we can rethink Gaza’s sky as a position from which another image becomes possible, one that offers a different contention with the all-encompassing blockade of land, sea and sky that the Israeli occupation has imposed on Gaza for 17 years, and which the Palestinian Authority (PA) operating in the West Bank, and the Egyptian regime bordering Gaza from the south have facilitated. This other image has transpired with the paragliding resistance fighters of the Izz El-Din Al-Qassam Brigades who, before embarking on the operation of 7 October 2023, must have first been able to imagine that a different function for Gaza’s sky is not only possible but also necessary, that something other than Israeli jets could fly over Gaza and different images from, as well as of, its sky could be engendered and disseminated. This practice of image making is invoked here mainly for its capacity to extend a visual politics of resistance (see Hatoum and Assali, 2023) that emerges directly in opposition to colonial modes of visualization, encompassing surveillance, subjugation and wholesale devastation.

As such, this visual strategy by Al-Qassam attests to a critical moment of mediation informed by the Palestinian resistance’s latest operation which, according to Abdaljawad Omar (2023: 3), has heralded a phase ‘where meaning, form, and structure are relentlessly called into question, and are all ultimately degraded’. In line with Georges Bataille’s conception of l’informe or the formless, Omar considers the latter to be a process that destabilizes the order of signification, not to disavow it altogether, but to rather locate the breaks and breaches in structures of meaning out of which certain forms arise. Furthermore, for Omar, there exists a pivotal rapport between the formless and anti-colonial resistance, in that the latter is ‘inherently interwoven with the very structures and forms of colonialism it seeks to challenge, but also signifying that it possesses the capacity to deform the colonial order’ (p. 5). As such, Omar considers that the armed resistance in Gaza, in the specificity of the Flood as a formless process, has explicitly actualized the decomposition of the settler–colonial entity as well as the legacy of its European colonial forefathers, a process whose impact has been very palpable given the many attempts of the Zionist entity to slow it down by, first and foremost, perpetrating a genocide in Gaza.

In this article, I would like to use Omar’s understanding of the formless as a point of departure against which to offer a different reading of Alsharif’s work (specifically in relation to the depictions of home in her films. Here, I am specifically concerned with the term ‘post-Palestinian’ (see Reynolds, 2019) with which Alsharif’s artistic practice has been described, especially in light of recent publications that refer to this particular signifier when situating AlSharif’s films in relation to those of other diasporic Palestinian filmmakers. ² Of course, such nomenclature will not be exclusively critiqued in so far as it imparts a semantic predicament to be overcome; instead, it must be located within the intricacies of the material reality to which it pertains and from which it comes to be expressed as such. Omar’s analysis attests to the possibility of breaking down, degrading and deforming specific systems of signification while allowing us to further weigh the valence of this possibility against simply moving past or beyond what is posited as a crisis of meaning. From here, I argue that the term ‘post-Palestinian’ is only a symptom of, even an accelerationist take, on what Omar calls an ‘impasse, a state of paralysis where one is incapable of moving through a condition, or a set of norms or ideas’ (p. 13). Although Omar primarily analyses articulations of resistance vis-à-vis their capacity to deform the order of colonialism as a primary marker of this impasse, he nevertheless touches on the impact of this process in destabilizing ‘cultural, aesthetic, ethical, political, and legal categories’ (p. 7). As such, I extend Omar’s argument to probe the potential of film work to undermine the structures that seek to appropriate, co-opt, or even completely neutralize any subversive function that the medium might garner to effectively break with prescribed forms of docile dissent. From here, this article explores how the work of Alsharif, in the diaristic elements present in two of her short films We Began by Measuring Distance (2009) and Home Movies Gaza (2013), can be read as contending with the impasse of the present that Omar describes, particularly in relation to the many workings and reworkings of home as a politico-affective object.

Staying with Palestine

Before engaging the specificities of these mediations that the films under scrutiny make available, some theoretical grounding is necessary. First, I take ‘post-Palestinian’ as a prompt while taking issue with the term itself given that the shortcomings it enables are more likely to overshadow the malleability it might imply if it were to express, as Alsharif put it, the ‘production of work that wasn’t necessarily activist’ (Nash, 2015). Here, the activist stance is not refused per se; it is rather challenged for what some documentary film practices are thought to reproduce through the derelict framework of liberal humanitarianism. In seeking to further investigate the framing of her practice in its capacity as post-Palestinian, Alsharif asserts that the latter does not indicate a negation of the occupation nor a careless recognition of it; rather, it is an invitation ‘to look at the world through Palestine’, instead of ‘looking at Palestine through the world’ (Nash, 2015).

Some scholars like Kristin Lené Hole (2023) consider this approach to be one of de-exceptionalization, in that it counters certain documentary film methods that single out Palestine in their framing. She writes that, over the past couple of decades, ‘a larger group of contemporary Palestinian experimental filmmakers’ like Alsharif, have strayed away from ‘overdetermined images of suffering from the region, which have reduced Palestinian lives to a handful of visual tropes rooted in victimization and violence’ (p. 388). However, in order to attend to the many positionalities that inform contemporary filmic mediations exclusively through what Lené Hole describes as ‘post-Palestinian’ in so far as it is deemed to be ‘non-masculinist and non-nationalist modes’ (p. 389) presents us with a serious quagmire. First, to sever the work of Alsharif from the history of militant film and the ‘revolutionary paradigms’ of the 1968–1982 as a direct reference to the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) reifies the dichotomy that, on the one hand, presumes that all post-Oslo filmmakers, diasporic or not, have one thing in common: their fragmentation. On the other hand, it regards all radical takes on film that borrow from the long and ample history of Third Cinema ³ as heteronormative and, by the same token, patriarchal. This view is, to say the least, reductionist, not only because it seems to justify the disbelief in militancy and the labour of film owing to it – a dyad which continues to exist – by opposing this practice to the allegedly non-patriarchal and non-heteronormative fragmentation that accompanied the post-Oslo period; but also, such framing does not elaborate on the materiality of this fragmentation, as if the latter is not a primary byproduct of settler-colonial violence sustained by local compradors as well as international accomplices. Hence, there are different ways with which Palestinians confront this fragmented space for politics and contend with the images that mediate such discrepancy. To refuse the spectacle of suffering must be accompanied by an intricate examination of what produces the conditions of atrocity to begin with, so that we can quit certain habits with which our eyes learn to see and further extend the congruent spectacle. This shall be informed by how we attend to the different forms of violence vis-à-vis the social relations that give rise to them so that we likewise refuse any categorical claims that denounce violence tout court, claims that aim to vilify acts of resistance and the modes of visualization associated with them. In other words, to premise difference on the grounds of negation when it comes to Palestinian modes of visualization might lead to idle abstractions in that whatever does not ‘bolster fictions of the heteromasculine revolutionary subject and a bounded homogenous nation-state’ (Lené Hole, 2023: 410) is thus positively, and pacifyingly, conceived as post-Palestinian.

Such allegorical distinctions that give rise to signifiers such as ‘post-Palestinian’ must be partly understood in relation to certain modes of production and distribution in the realm of culture. This is what Hanan Toukan (2021) addresses in her reading of neoliberal funding schemes and their effect on cultural production in Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine. For Toukan, this saturating discourse on difference that nonetheless binds the network of a transnational art scene in the countries she discusses in her book is fuelled by ‘postmodernism’s ironic tendency to universalize itself’ and is more concretely expressed in diplomatic missions, specifically cultural diplomacy since the 1990s, sponsored by foreign capital which substantially demarcates the parameters of art and culture in the region, for both institutions and practitioners. The discursive space that the postmodern allows, with descriptors such as ‘post-Palestinian’, in its preoccupation with the liminality from which dissenting narratives emerge and are assigned a motif of what is construed as experimental aesthetics, risks obfuscating ‘structural historical dynamics, such as disparities in power, the inequalities of class, and the violent persistence in geopolitics’ (p. 217). Along these lines, if the post in post-Palestinian tends to the capaciousness, and indeed, to the internationalism required for liberation beyond borders, then the beyond implied in this case must not be uncritically entertained. Furthermore, the ambiguity that ‘post-Palestinian’ alludes to is more likely to compromise the tenacity of armed struggle in defending the historical tie of Palestinians to their land beyond the status of ownership, thus a commitment that has existed for many prior to the extractivist logic of modern nation-states and their bourgeois conceptions of a polity.

Moreover, the term ‘post-Palestinian’ seems to feed into the same logic that Rana Barakat (2018: 5) has called ‘a process of museumification’ which the Palestinian village of Lifta has undergone. In ‘Lifta, the Nakba, and the Museumification of Palestine’s History’, Barakat posits that Lifta’s standing edifices that were not levelled to the ground like other neighbouring villages during the Zionist pogroms of 1947 onwards, have been deployed to drive ‘settler manipulation of the narrative and the space’ (p. 2) as exemplified in Israel’s settler-expansionism guised as preservation. Barakat’s argument links the neoliberalization of Lifta to the discourse of heritage mediated by the settler-state and the lexicon of discovery that the Israeli Antiquities Authority, as a colonial apparatus, utilizes to sustain its ethno-national myths. Hence, the discourse of preservation emerges at odds with that of return, in that Lifta, in the settler-colonial imagination, is manufactured as a becoming-museum ‘where a not-so distant past is preserved as a utopia’ which might or might not include ‘a new modern building plan’ as a capital scheme for tourism, something that is key to the commodification of heritage (p. 5). As such, to work against the settler-colonial project feeding off Lifta’s ‘ruins’, thus its museumification, Lifta must be approached with the intention of return in mind, ‘a return to the land for Palestinians to live not among the ruins but in the vitality of return as deruination’ (p. 8).

Similarly, the post in ‘post-Palestinian’ seems to ossify a certain version of the Palestinian subject that once was, thus relegating it to a far-flung past, accessible only if one were to glance back at the subject’s ruins or symbolic remains either with tender reminiscence or resenting despair, very much in line with what the politics of museumification produce. By symbolically fixing the post prefix’s adjacent root, Palestinian, what is absented in this encounter I think, are the politics of confrontation with which we are to probe the present as a site of contestation. What if, instead of moving past and away from the contradictions of the present, we pause and stay with them? This is where Lauren Berlant’s (2011) theorization of the impasse comes in handy while thinking around the question of home in Alsharif’s work, in that it provides us with a thorough conceptualization of the impasse that Omar has presented us with while specifically tracing it back to affect. Here, affect is probed as an active site that registers the historical process of collectively making as well as breaking attachments to the home space, a fundamentally political space. As such, the reading that this article makes available is aware of the layered and shifting meanings of home that are synthesized through the different attachments as they appear in Alsharif’s work and are informed by her own socio-political position. In addition to images, the following will highlight a two-fold reading of sonic elements: narration and ambient sound, both in their diegetic and non-diegetic forms, as they walk us through the aesthetic translations of the affective impasse at play.

Narrating the impasse

Abdelwahab Doukkali’s ‘The Love That Was’ enters the sonic field in Home Movies Gaza (2013) through a jump cut following the opening scene. The song plays softly as the camera tracks the merger of sea and sky from the moving car’s window. The song, however, is a story about an impossible love which, as the lyrics explain, has become a folk tale that the old recite to children before they go to sleep. The song stretches well into the next scene, marking both a segway and a standstill. Now played through the speakers of a handheld radio, the wrinkly hands of its holder hastily switch frequencies to live reporting on Gaza’s public health. From the minister of health’s muffled speech, the serene voice of a woman takes over as she tells, from the comfort of her chair in contre-jour, a translated passage into Arabic from William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies (1954), which originally chronicles the daily life of children stranded on an island following a plane crash. Absorbed as she is in reciting Golding’s depiction of the children’s everyday, the woman is joined by the voice of a man recounting parts of the same passage only at a different speed. His voice interjects at the same time as a shot of Gaza’s sea is superimposed on the fixed frame of the woman in her chair. Their voices are out of sync, and the subtitles registering them engulf the screen and mirror the delay in narrations. The only element that seems to weave them together is the sound of waves crashing until it too dissipates, and silence ensues.

Following the short pause, the man resumes his reading of Golding’s tale as his voice accompanies us alongst a tracking shot of Gaza’s coast depicting the men and children in the vicinity. In a way, the lives of the children on the island cross paths with the lives of children in Gaza through this audio-visual superimposition, yet not unproblematically so. Golding’s novel has been perceived as a moral tale against the dangers of self-governance, indicating a regression to uncivilized time. Alsharif’s remediation, however, is a critique of the shortcomings of such a reactionary take that ties civilization to the linear passing of time. Her method throws into flux the certainty established by linear history, whereby the delay in narrations points to the different temporalities that attest to the possibility of trivial time, of ‘the pleasures of morning, the bright sun, the whelming sea and sweet air’ as the novel goes, to exist even within the harshest of confinements.

In Alsharif’s work, we can understand this discrepancy of temporality that structures the everyday in relation to Christian Quendler’s explication of diary films. Quendler (2013) examines literary modes of diary keeping and locates the firm bind between a writer and time’s linear passing. Nevertheless, in the medium of film, there always emerges the potential to disrupt the orthodox commitment of the diary to progressive time. If we were to speak strictly in formalist terms, film has the capacity to assemble various images, sounds and texts that, by centring the function of montage, one can provide endless possibilities for new configurations. However, while both We Began by Measuring Distance (2009) and Home Movies Gaza (2013) engage diaristic elements of the everyday, they do not seem interested in what Laura Rascaroli (2020: 163) calls ‘the idyllic image of happy domesticity’ nor in the clear-cut boundaries that separate the enclosed space of the house from the ‘non-house’ (p. 155), features that have been characteristic to classic home movies. By establishing a distinction between the home and the house, Laura Rascaroli begins her chapter in Film and Domestic Space (eds Baschiera and De Rosa, 2020) following John Berger’s short elucidation of the terms in And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (1991). Berger, Rascaroli (2020) writes, described the home ‘as the ontological centre of the world’ (p. 154) which is not necessarily tied to a geographical reference point per se, yet expresses a broader attachment to being in and of itself. Berger (1991) speaks of a ‘surrounding chaos’ that threatens the home and, if it so happens that it takes over, not only renders one ‘shelterless but also lost in nonbeing, in unreality. Without a home everything was fragmentation’ (p. 45). Rascaroli (2020) builds on Berger’s account to further posit a distinction between the home as that which helps us ‘to make sense of the world’ and, in contrast, ‘the house as a temporary shelter’ (p. 154) marked by contemporary flows of displacement, whether forced or voluntary. In some way, Berger’s reflection can be read as a commitment to the world at large to be one’s home, a commitment which, first and foremost, depends on semantic cohesion. As per Berger’s construal then, homeliness, as an affective attachment to the home, is achieved through a commitment to the stability of meaning. In contradistinction, the uncertainty engendered by the condition of displacement, no matter its cause, results in the collapse of this timeless reference, rendering the subject’s attempts at sense-making and, by extension, at home-making, rather unavailing.

Both of Alsharif’s films seem to operate exactly from this place of uncertainty which, although it conveys the disruption of a given attachment to the home, is not however an absolute disavowal of what home can come to possibly mean. For example, in We Began by Measuring Distance (2009), a game of measurements signals the fluctuating affective state whose collective character is assigned by an undisclosed we that the film’s raconteur espouses in his narration. Different units of measurements are at work – degrees, feet, centimeters – and just when one starts to take this measuring task seriously, an apple becomes an orange. One quickly learns that the aim of this game is just that: playing and replaying the impasse. The absurdity reaches its peak when the distance between Gaza and Jerusalem, revealed on a rag whose edges are seemingly fastened by the grip of two individuals vying the gusting wind, is the actual distance: 78 kilometers. The distance is reiterated by the narrator a few times before his voice gradually disappears along with the adjoining text that visually confirms the distance. The narrator re-enters the sonic field by measuring, once again, the distance between Gaza and Jerusalem. This time, however, the distance is not in kilometers. The numbers projected are rather dates that convey the different phases of colonialism in the history of Palestine: 17, 48, 67 are direct references to the Balfour Declaration, the catastrophe or Nakba, the six-day war or Naksa, respectively. ‘Our measurements had left us melancholy’ is what the narrator ends the distance game with and ushers us into a journey that takes place at the Virgin Forest, a place which for many, much like Palestine, ‘we had seen only in books’, he continues. Here, one cannot help but think of the environmental references that Alsharif employs as the home space suffers from ecological violence while the tranquil footage of vegetal and marine life permeates the screen. Researcher and filmmaker Phoebe Campion (2021) provides an ecological reading of Alsharif’s We Began by Measuring Distance (2009) which engages thoroughly with the environmental violence that Israel has been committing since the inception of its colonial project. From uprooting indigenous flora as early as 1948, to the ongoing ‘military mobilization of wind in herbicidal warfare’, or the sewage ejection into Gaza’s sea, Campion (2021) reckons with the capacity of Palestinian films to attest to Israel’s ecological horrors as she references filmmakers Razan AlSalah and Larissa Sansour whose works have also dealt with the intersection of ecology and colonialism. Emphasizing this ecological facet of colonial projects is tangible in both of Alsharif’s films. The home space is construed in relation to referential points that also exist outside the space of the house, including the sea and sky. In We Began by Measuring Distance (2009), the arcadian tracking of jellyfish in the depths of the sea is interrupted by a video recording of an Israeli airstrike where phosphoric bombs lighting up Gaza’s sky bear resemblance to the creature’s tentacles; fish whirling in the dim waters are weighed against archival footage depicting fleeing women whose haste is slowed down and movement made lethargic, while the camera’s flash exposes their bodies as though emerging from a pitch-black void. In Home Movies Gaza (2013), a thermographic video rendering of farm animals tracks their movement as though they are military targets and is set against static shots of vacant spaces inside the house: the living room, the TV room and the kitchen. Indeed reconfigured, the meaning of home is explored through the non-house as it accentuates the idea of the home not because it is conceived, as Rascaroli (2020: 160) put it, as ‘the space which we are not at home’. Quite the contrary, Alsharif’s films allow us to reimagine the non-house, with its external referentials, as an extension of the home rather than its repudiation.

Here, it is important to note that contending with the impasse of the present – premised by the colonial condition yet not reduced to it – involves a certain breach to the homeliness that Berger might have assumed in his conception of the home. However, this breach does not dismiss intimacy altogether, but rather calls for a certain redirecting of affective commitments alongside which certain forms of intimacy might transpire. This is what Daniella Agostinho (2021) addresses in (W)archives: Archival Imaginaries, War, and Contemporary Art. In her chapter titled ‘Cruel Intimacies’, Agostinho brings to the fore the contradictions of operating within the ‘global sensorium’ from which humanist artistic delineations emerge to perpetuate mediations of violence ‘as mere topic or object of representation’ (p. 209). Against that, she proposes to stay with the discomfort of confronting our affective aptitudes with which we have come to first encounter the aesthetics of mediated suffering. Rather than distancing, Agostinho calls for coming to terms with our own implication in the ‘affective-material infrastructure’ (p. 215) through which these images are hence expressed. Here, Agostinho’s work on affect goes hand in hand with that of Berlant. Affect, according to Berlant (2011), has been slighted in the normative sphere of politics, for it is depicted as that which opposes thought and is reduced to fleeting feelings that emerge in the immediacy of an individual experience. Berlant’s work, however, carved out room for affect to be explored as a space for politics in its own right, given that they explored affect, not as mere feelings that arise in solitary subjects, but rather as a structure of relationality in a ‘shared historical time’ (p. 15).

This collective undertaking of affective responsibility is one that might not necessarily be mediated by the same flow that favours ‘the filter’ which speech – in its presumed pledge to coherence – passes through in order to relay what Berlant terms ‘political desire’ (p. 231). In keeping with Agostinho, this desire for the political can be expressed by way of colliding mediations that express the disruption of certain attachments to the political. This is what Alsharif’s We Began by Measuring Distance (2009) partly demonstrates. The film begins with the sound of a siren fused with the voice of a woman screaming ‘father, father, father, father, shoot him, shoot him’. The sound is laid on and extends over three consecutive shots of the sun hiding behind vast clouds, refusing to be fully conspicuous. As the echo of the wailing tragedy slowly recedes, a narrator usurps the soundscape and forces a mood shift. His deadpan voice illustrates the extent of his alienation from the everyday which has no appeal beyond the leverage it allows him to access the past through the present. As the narration progresses, memories of and from home grow even more faint, and the present, in its impeded capacity to rouse acts of remembrance, becomes bleaker. ‘Our homeland truly is a history that is no longer within reach’ the narrator says before announcing the arrival of night-time. However, night-time, with its temporary shield against exposure, fails to conceal whatever is left of the narrator’s baffled memories of separation which, like the sun, are clouded with trivialities. These trivialities, nevertheless, are loaded with symbolism: it is as though the time between the start of an overwhelming fog established in one of the early scenes, and its eventual dissipation, was never really lived. This is where Alsharif’s contention with past and present, with remembering and misremembering, begins to unfold. What remains from this hiatus that split the tragic event of displacement from the displaced population, in Palestine and across the world, is the feeling of growing ‘more and more and more and more and more . . . unsettled’. The insistence on verbally and visually reiterating the intensity of being unsettled is also an insistence on dwelling in the impasse. This only renders more critical the encounter of severing certain attachments with the home, both as a space where one resides as well as an intimate memory that is endlessly sought and recreated.

What could this temporality, embodied in split, deferred and borrowed narrations, tell us about the uncertainty that the home, as a material and symbolic entity, has come to inhabit? As mentioned earlier, the ‘classic public sphere communication’ is preoccupied with certain filters that are faithful to a mode of speech by way of which the body politic is habitually addressed (Berlant, 2011: 229). This, of course, is directly associated with a mode of history that not only presupposes a consistency in narration vis-à-vis the linear passage from past to present but also must have the capacity to obliterate or co-opt other histories along the way. Here, it might be helpful to situate the narration technique that Alsharif employs in her two films in relation to the development of oral history in Palestine with its notably diaristic elements. Nur Masalha (2012) provides a concise account that outlines the gendered aspect of oral history and memory work by Palestinians after the Nakba, to which storytelling has been key. As someone who has built on the work of Rosemary Sayigh, one of the pioneer scholars to ever record and study the oral history of Palestinians, Masalha points to the espousal of oral history as something that had to be done, very much on a visceral level, by Palestinians after their forced displacement to keep their memories, especially those that tie them to their land, alive in some way or form. It was not until the mid-1980s that oral history began to be theorized as a resistance tool against ‘Zionist hegemonic and Palestinian elite narratives’ (p. 217). As Masalha notes after scholar Fatma Kassem, women took over the figure of the storyteller or Al-Hakawati which, in the history of Arab cultural production, has been dominated by men. Against continuous attempts at eradication, popular storytelling has become integral to the liberation struggle and borne witness to a Palestinian shared past that is not exclusively defined by the experience of displacement. However, as Masalha observes, these accounts were often discredited in favour of sources expressed in hard copies and inscribed by men, two criteria that have long warranted the validity of historical documents.

It could be that Alsharif’s employment of narration in both films, performed exclusively by a man in We Began by Measuring Distance (2009) or paired with a woman whom he joins only to then replace her, such as in Home Movies Gaza (2013), is a critique of the assumed role of men as always-already makers, interpreters and raconteurs of history. However, other than the gendered aspect of narration, one could read this interjection not as interruption, but rather a continuation of a certain mode of history that develops orally and extends throughout generations. Furthermore, Alsharif’s use of narration is not tasked with validating historical facts. In Alsharif’s work, the propensity of the subject of displacement is self-evident not because to narrate is to merely prove. Instead, to narrate is to experiment with the rupture of a semantic fixity upon which the home is forced to dwell. As such, Alsharif’s approach to narration does not comply with the reciprocity of communication that speech, in its presumed intelligibility, promises. Here, it is important to stress the role of montage in accentuating the contradictions that narration seeks to reveal in the unfolding of gendered and generational forms of oral history vis-à-vis the strategies of remediation, repetition and abruption with which narration occurs. This is even more pronounced when narration is coupled with images that merge the density of the past with the intricacies of the present. Specifically, Alsharif’s editing technique de-emphasizes the routinized mediations of the homely home and serves to ‘hazard the value of conventional, archaic political emotions and their objects/scenes’ (Berlant, 2011: 263) so that the ordinariness of intimacy is revisited, and attachments to it are dissected and potentially transformed.

Is it the drone or the cello?

In Alsharif’s films, ambient sound, both diegetic and non-diegetic, sets the tone for the dialectical rhythm at play. While ambient sound interjects prior to and after narration, it does not serve to cushion the latter, but to rather upset the presumed coherence of speech. Alsharif’s use of two classical Arabic songs in each of the films, both revolving around an unattainable love, attests to the uncanny thread which she draws between a cruel attachment to the idea of home and its futile consequences. Abdelwahab Doukkali’s ‘The Love That Was’ in Home Movies Gaza (2013) ends with the death of two lovers after their lapidation, while Abdel Halim Hafez’s ‘Fortune Teller’ in We Began by Measuring Distance (2009) begins with a prophecy that predicts the martyrdom of a passionate lover. This can be read as a break with an attachment construed in tandem with an inferred pan-Arab sentiment that permeated the 1960s and 1970s and which these songs are supposed to simulate in their allusion to some heroic tale that ends rather tragically. Correspondingly, when asked to elaborate on the ways in which hope is taken up in her practice, Alsharif insisted on its imbuing presence by saying: ‘we continue to imagine and strive for something better, for things to change, even when we know it won’t happen, when we are completely doomed’ (Mackreath, 2018). There is, as one can indicate, a cruelty that unfolds in Alsharif’s reading of hope. However, Alsharif also points to the porous edges of the space where hope looms, for it must not be entirely relinquished, but instead rethought: ‘And so my hope shifted away from Palestine, because I have this luxury in the diaspora, and towards connecting it to other histories I saw Palestine reflected in’ (Mackreath, 2018). Here, one should note that the geographic leverage of Alsharif’s diasporic condition is centred in the process of distancing herself from this particular attachment to hope. However, the separation that Alsharif speaks of is not one that is exclusively mediated by her physical distance from Palestine. This distance is also the byproduct of what Toukan (2021: 103) calls ‘a class of cultural producers’ whose work, notwithstanding its critical capacity, still operates within the parameters of local and global elites against which diasporic constellations are sustained. It is by taking heed of the stakes that this class of artist confronts in relation to the conditions of their labour – implicating the commitment to break with all forms of hegemony, not only state-led ones – that we can more concretely explore Alsharif’s contention with the political vis-à-vis her own treatment of the impasse.

Furthermore the notion of hope proposed by Alsharif bears a cross-reference to Berlant’s optimism, an affinity that carefully binds hope to optimism and which Berlant had established in the introduction to their book Cruel Optimism (2011). Specifically, Berlant wrote that cruelty attaches itself to optimism only when the desire which one seeks is hampered by the object in which it initially sought to materialize. More concretely then, it becomes crucial to consider the affective structure within which an optimistic attachment is repeatedly sustained, albeit cruelly. This cruelty is what Alsharif attends to when she weighs what is considered a ‘romantic position’ against a more ‘realistic’ assessment of political viabilities (Mackreath, 2018) while this shift specifically appears in Alsharif’s films in the form of an attachment which can no longer be sustained. In both films, the featured songs can be thought of as the soundtrack of the impasse that communicates this cruel attachment. Alsharif’s method of repurposing these songs expresses a kind of détournement or what Kenneth Berger (2020) calls ‘the repetition of the object’, here, the song hijacked by the medium of film in that it allows us ‘to return to that object in its difference from itself, to see it as something new’ (p. 16). This détournement is one way to explore what Berger theorizes as an ‘aesthetic refusal’ that is addressed as ‘first and foremost a refusal of communication’ (p. 3). Berger draws particular attention to the necessity of understanding communication alongside capitalism’s construal of labouring subjects and the reification of relations of production and, in contrast, provides an ample reading of Guy Debord’s work on the spectacle and its refusal, particularly in his film Howls for Sade (1952). Howls for Sade was remarkably disappointing to many who attempted to see it because it breached a certain habituation of the senses: the blank screen meant that there was nothing to see. This appears to be at odds with what one would expect from the medium of film in its direct reliance on the presence of images. However, Debord’s aim as well as that of the Situationist International ⁴ of which he was part, was not to abandon cinema altogether, but to explore its antispectacular potential (Berger, 2020: 13). This antispectacular capacity of film manifests in Alsharif’s practice as a disruption of spectacle-induced mediations of settler-colonial violence not only visually but also sonically, as both images and sounds inform what Berlant (2011: 67) termed ‘the affectivity of the historical present relayed by an aesthetic transmission’.

Thus, by breaking the assumed synchronicity between audio and video, Alsharif’s method of treating ambient sound tampers with the rhythm, hence structure, of the soundscape. This ambience, according to Berlant, expresses a desire for the political which manifests as moving in an ‘ambit’, a movement which, although it exists in diffusion, carries the ‘ambition’ of finding its multiple and ever-mutating forms (p. 230). As such, the indoor and outdoor reference points in Alsharif’s films permit a nuanced construal of the home’s sonic sphere which, in its distinct renderings, reflects the shifting affective attachments to the home space. More specifically, while some sounds are depicted in sync with the outdoor space where they were originally produced, such as the wind and the waves, other sounds external to the house are relayed in their capacity to perforate through the walls of the former.

In Home Movies Gaza (2013), the sound of the war drone accompanies us throughout the second half of the film. The drone’s aerial gaze is not reciprocated; we hear its whirr, but we do not see it. Here, the invisibility of the drone is not merely a tactic of aesthetic refusal, but rather emerges as part and parcel of the reality of drone warfare. In Alsharif’s film, the drone imbues the everyday soundscape as its constant hovering renders its evasion impossible. Towards the end of the film, the drone’s humming overlaps with the sound of a cello playing as we gaze at a fixed frame of Gaza’s skyline at dusk where only sound indicates movement. The film later cuts to a scene of a teenager in her pajamas awkwardly practising her cello in the living room. As the drone’s buzz permeates, the girl’s cello playing becomes inaudible and a woman’s voice interjects as she rushes her child into the house right before the sound of an aerial shelling saturates the soundscape. This is where the inside and the outside collapse by way of the aural complexity that the diegetic and non-diegetic juxtaposition creates, and further testifies to the extent of acoustic violence that, once again, traverses the parameters of the house and disrupts the home’s undisputed homeliness. The sonic legibility of the drone in Home Movies Gaza (2013) is contrasted with soundbites in We Began by Measuring Distance (2009), so stretched that one cannot decipher what they originally had registered. Even when superimposed on the clip of women fleeing in distress, one cannot be sure if these exaggerated sounds are those of their shrieks, or just any sound deliberately rendered unfathomable. Again although the home space in Alsharif’s work is not always homely as per Berger’s description since meaning-making is necessarily compromised, her films nonetheless communicate a specific form of intimacy which, as Agostinho (2021: 219) might put it, is ‘not a relationship of perceptual proximity, but rather one that cultivates radical illegibility’ as a way to differently navigate as well as push the boundaries of the multilayered impasse.

We began to have the distinct feeling that we had been lied to

The impasse of the present from which the home space in Alsharif’s films is accessed implicates the many forms with which film calls into question the affective structure informing the political. Alsharif’s editing technique, which deliberately turns away from closures and verdicts, constantly negotiates the fluctuating attachments to the home space, a negotiation that is expressed in repetitions, overlaps, splits, pitches, silences and stretches. However, to have the capacity to contribute to a different vision for the political is not always guaranteed. By foregrounding the historical weight of this capacity, we learn that not all acts of refusing certain attachments to the political will always yield entirely different relationalities. Alsharif’s practice navigates this intermittent space between refusal and potentiality without the promise of resolution, while rethinking existing attachments to the home and contemplating possible ones. ‘We began to have the distinct feeling that we had been lied to, that we, unfortunately, have not rested at all, and that our measurements had left us empty handed.’ We Began by Measuring Distance (2009) concludes with this crushing realization. What do all these feelings of deceit, weariness and vulnerability tell us about the affective attachments at play, those being undone and, in contrast, those that might be woven together anew? This expression with which the film ends serves as a verbal culmination of affective dissonance. However, rather than fencing off the anxiety that engulfs the present and the subsequent aporia that imbues the future, the home in Alsharif’s films, as a ‘becoming-object’ (Berlant, 2011: 64), centres them.

Subsequently, understanding Alsharif’s contention with the home in tandem with Berlant’s theorization of the impasse, its multiple negotiations with diaristic film elements, as well as a certain aesthetics of refusal, offers a different reading of Alsharif’s work that does not necessarily require a literary modifier, which the post-prefix is here emblematic of, to express difference. This scepticism towards post-language here can also be read as an active refusal of a certain way of communication, not necessarily calling for its total negation, but rather an invitation to revisit the object under scrutiny by expressing our understanding of it differently. As Karim Kattan (2023) writes, Palestinians have repeatedly been forced into a system of recognition through a non-antagonistic space for politics where their humanity is negotiated only to be disproved. The Zionist war on Gaza, under the auspices of imperialist and neo-colonial global powers, epitomizes just that: ‘In the media, Gaza is an abstraction, a space designed for the violent death of an abstract people inhabiting it.’ In his essay, Kattan mentions how this very abstraction was expressed in the form of a demand. He was asked by an undisclosed organizer who invited him to deliver a keynote speech at a conference in Austria to obliquely consider critical notions such as borders, exile and memory while forcing his own body into forgetfulness.

Facing a similar form of abstraction of which Kattan speaks, Alsharif withdrew as a juror and filmmaker from the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in its 2023 edition after the festival had issued an abominable statement that erased decades of settler-colonial violence against Palestinians while ensuring the suppression of those who stand for the liberation of Palestine. It is unfortunate yet not unforeseen that some film festivals will only preach liberation so long as it inhabits the confines of the frame rate. Once an image of liberation escapes the grid and is experienced in its materiality rather than its simulation, they rush to disavow it. In times like these, language, as an apparatus of communication, can – and does – fail us. This failure not only relates to one’s inability to be expressive, to the lack of adequate words that relay the immensity of catastrophe; sometimes, this failure is orchestrated by way of an imposed framework that methodically fails to know beyond what it is allowed to register.

This brings us back to Omar’s contention with the formless alongside which I first began examining the term ‘post-Palestinian’ in relation to Alsharif’s artistic practice. The insistence on making this term a point of contention throughout this article has been, as stated earlier, mainly associated with its resurgence in recent years to describe the work of Palestinian filmmakers in the diaspora, those who presumably dwell in perpetual liminality from which they produce images whose only distinct feature is that they dissent with a purported totalizing image of Palestine. Thus, part of my argument has been concerned with reading Alsharif’s work from within the affective impasse of the present by probing the formal aspects of her two films and, more broadly, situating Alsharif’s practice in the larger economy that conditions cultural work, whereby its positionality within an art market, neoliberal in its globality, has gained traction with signifiers such as ‘post-Palestinian’.

Here, I return to Omar’s consideration of the formless in so far as it is a process, not a thing in and of itself, that responds to the structure it seeks to deform, so it is not arbitrary in its formlessness. In other words, one way to understand the formless is through its capacity to evade stability so long as the structure it seeks to debase operates on multiple fronts of which the semantic is but one. Yet, the post in ‘post-Palestinian’ seems to curtail the horizon of possibilities that Palestinian artists might choose to invoke in their practice, in that the post prefix already ascribes to a Palestinian artist a seemingly fixed reference point that demands to be demarcated only to be surpassed. Therefore, if film work were to have any useful role amidst this devastating destruction of all aspects of Palestinian life, then it must be one that begins by at least refusing a sparse, and very much sterile, position within an order that strives to usurp whatever critical capacity that film, or any other medium for that matter, might potentially yield and alongside which a different reality can begin to take shape.

Finally, this article has opened up to what is yet to appear when ‘the consensual real’ (Berlant, 2011: 211) fails us time and again but, instead of quelling historical contradictions, reverting to scripted concessions and ‘accepting a meager presence within a horizon of annihilation and erasure’ (Omar, 2023:13), we must carefully attend to the contradictions of the present that also condition the realm of cultural production. It is only then that we might be able to contribute to the process that the Palestinian resistance has already effectuated within the occupied real by confronting different aspects that make up the settler-colonial order as well as undermining the structures that sustain it. Thus, rethinking our affective commitments today becomes imperative as we learn to align our efforts towards an anti-colonial future while we rehearse our way collectively and adamantly towards liberation, no post-prefixes necessary.