Still Life

An avant-garde work conceived and directed by artist Cynthia Madansky, Still Life confronts head on the persisting taboo of linking Zionist exceptionalism to the de-linking of Arabs and Jews. Unabashedly condemnatory of the effects of Zionism in Palestine, the film’s striking and disconcerting formal structure at once documents and cinematically critiques the violent effects of occupation on everyday Palestinian life in a way that evokes the foregone Palestinian revolutionary aesthetic. Like Peace and Zero Degrees, Still Life is a cinematically reflexive work. It orients a self-consciously asymmetrical spectatorial horizon that forcefully and unequivocally repositions perspective on the struggle, not merely beyond the complacency and a historicality of news information-gathering, but against the every-day replication of industrial (and) surveillance techniques in which it often unwittingly participates. As I shall illustrate, key to such repositioning is Still Life’s peculiar voice-image structure, which radically subverts the oriental travelogue aspect of typical Middle East peace coverage and representation.

Set in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPts), Still Life is divided loosely into five parts, each distinguished by its depiction of the Israeli occupation through a non-linear series of equally paced, tightly framed shots of the devastating, claustrophobic, immobilizing effects of occupation on Palestinian life, community, and property. The film’s first part depicts the ruins of Palestinian homes, schools, businesses, and municipal buildings that were demolished in 2004 by the IDF as part of collective punishment maneuvers in areas of the Gaza Strip. Such demolitions are illegal under international law (e.g., in May 2004, 227 houses were destroyed in the Rafah Refugee Camp, rendering 3451 Palestinians homeless). The second part depicts various segments of the Israeli Apartheid Wall under construction across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, also in contravention of international law. The third part depicts conditions at IDF checkpoints across the West Bank, which restrict movement within Palestinian domains of work, residence, commerce, and governance— likewise in contravention of international law. The fourth part depicts Palestinian public representations (posters, wall art, and graffiti) of various forms of resistance—much of which is legal under international law—to the oppressive conditions of occupation revealed in the first three parts, including especially the armed struggle and its “martyrs.” The fifth part intricately reprises the prior four parts.

Still Life’s steady pace and non-linear progression are supplemented by a highly mannered shot composition that carefully frames and reorients its objective field, performing a peculiar cinematic subjection of filmmaker and spectator to the Palestinian cultural landscape. Each shot in the series contains a modicum of movement either in the pro-filmic or through a deliberately unstable camera. For example, the first two parts of the film comprise shots containing minimal pro-filmic movement, shots that are mostly flat and devoid of human figures. Madansky’s camera is often so unsteady as to render palpable her fearful reaction to the massive destruction she is filming and the studied tableau of oblivion into which she will later arrange the shots. The film’s third part is more frequently peopled and includes numerous shots of demonstrable movement. Many of these shots are stable and more deeply focused, as though affirming the steadfastness, or sumud, characteristic of the Palestinian struggle. At the same time, a close framing of shots of Israeli bulldozers demolishing buildings and shoveling dirt, and of Palestinians scaling the Apartheid Wall abstracts those movements, rendering them static or stalemated—just as erratic framing around latter, stiller shots suggests a contrasting disorientation within Palestinian reality (Fig. 1.3).

While Still Life’s fifth part will return to and conclude the film with shots recalling—but never repeating—shots from earlier sections, especially shots which are peopled, its fourth part marks a critical hiatus in the apparently serial depiction of Palestinian reality’s uneasy progression from relative stagnation to limited movement, from sheer disaster to fitful rebirth. The shot content of the fourth part is almost entirely representational, still, flat, and unpeopled, and its running time is decidedly shorter than that of the other parts. Indeed, the film’s key, hiatal section performs unsentimentally through its succinct tableau of stark simulacral imagery the oft-ignored Palestinian demand, recognized by anti-occupation activists as fundamental to solidarity, that the Palestinian past and Palestinian dead—however innocent or defenseless—be acknowledged and remembered, and that by extension, Palestinians be allowed to return to their historic lands (al-Qattan 124). In this respect the fourth section resituates an orientalist gaze on Palestinian violence with an act of cinematic violence. It is an immanent narrative interruption signaling the Palestinian demand that their right to resist oppression and lament their dead be accepted as a prerequisite for the progress demanded within the so-called peace camp, in turn thwarting on principle the typical spectatorial desire for ideal closure or solution.

Clearly Still Life’s structure recalls Peace and Zero Degrees in this respect. Its subversion and derailment of linear progression and the nostalgia for discovery often accompanying it, moreover, are also familiar to feminists and postmodernists: repetition of images, circularity, narrative irruption, and figuration of resistance through simulated recollections of social loss. The film likewise records no dramatic action, only the remnants of life constantly shattered by the violence of occupation: rubble, blocked passage, and monuments to the dead. These techniques of controlled recognition undercut the sense of spectatorial entitlement associated with patriarchy and class exploitation, redirecting attention toward the act of framing and, by analogy, the social geography of occupation. Thus Still Life evokes the work of Maya Deren, for whom narrative movement is effectuated by contextual reorientation of nodal figures across a series of reframed shots rather than by matched continuity across distinct places, by shifts in existential coordinates rather than by teleological projection. In Still Life cinematic space is “ampliated” (Carroll), becoming a formal signiier of the historical causality and social dislocation at the objective core of the struggle (cf. Khatib 15–16). The film’s images refuse to serve as the silent backdrop or incidental stage-setting deployed commonly to rationalize Zionist eminent domain, and in this way they underscore the fact that historic Palestine was in reality inhabited prior to its colonization and expropriation by European Jews.

Unlike Deren’s silent oeuvre, however, in which cinematography marks the socially transformative praxis of a counter-intuitive “eye,” Still Life includes an ironical, interrogative voice-over spoken by Madansky to an audience comprising hypothetical participants in a guided tour of the oPts. This voice-over drives an aesthetic wedge between the image-track and soundtrack, effectively designating their disjunction, rather than shifting backgrounds, as the film’s “context” and fulcrum of forward movement. The ensuing interrogation refuses to mimic or copy, while nonetheless relentlessly identifying, the shattered world before the camera as a site of broken and erased life repeatedly destroyed by techniques which bear and ramify, like dominant cinema, the exploitation, the theft, the literal absenting of their reproductive means: the collective labor of the Palestinian people.

This technique justiies Madansky’s references to disorientation and desire, which in this context are highly politicized: “Do you know where you are?” “Do you know what you are looking at?” “Do you know who lives here?” “Do you recognize the kitchen?” “Do you like the view?” The voice-over serves not to convey facts directly or to answer questions (unless to pose additional ones), but instead to perform sardonically, mordantly, even moralistically, Palestinian alienation from the film’s objective content (“Would you live here?”), from its spectator-tourist (“Would you like to visit?”), from its Jewish-American director (“Who is responsible for this?”). Indeed, in the musings of Palestinian filmmaker and critic Sobhi al-Zobaidi: “As a Palestinian writing these words, do I allow myself to think of or to imagine a meta-text for the ilm because Cynthia is Jewish? Yes I do...” (al-Zobaidi, “Asking”).

More specifically, as the film advances, it introduces prescriptive and evaluative concepts which help to describe the images—house, building, neighborhood, room, office, roads, trees, garden, water, earth, remnant, wall, checkpoint, hero, martyr—and which draw attention to their socio-historical and transformative character—cause, crime, destruction, punishment, pain, fear, safety, health, rightness, security, responsibility, happening, getting to work, creating safety, protesting, stopping, speaking, thinking, and feeling. These concepts are always contextualized with further questions and qualiied by dissonant sound-effects drawn from Zeena Parkins’ anti-realist musical composition, Dollar Shot, thus emphasizing that the concepts are mediated economically in relation to the images of Palestinian destruction. Hence the questions: “Who is paying for this?” “How much does this cost?” “Who is funding this?” “Who paid for this?” “Who pays for this?” “Is this okay?” “Is this right?” “Are you afraid of this?” “Are you silent because you are afraid?”

In this way, Madansky’s interrogation addresses and holds answerable a spectator whose alienation from Palestine the film re-envisages anti-Zionistically, articulating a profoundly prophetic perspective, that of the dialectical seer. Without a doubt, spectators for whom the occupation is uncharted territory will learn something about it through the ilm’s visual and verbal suggestions with a modicum of ideological resistance. But spectators for whom the occupation has been the subject of denial will be significantly challenged by the same techniques. Again to quote al-Zobaidi,

"Maybe it is the tone in her voice and the simplicity with which she throws her questions that makes me think that Cynthia means a certain kind of audience. An audience who has forgotten these simple facts like reminding a rich man of the times when he was poor...There is a certain sarcasm in her tone that develops into sorrow as these questions are repeated over and over again...She tells no stories but invokes many a story we have stored in our memories. As much as she speaks to our consciousness, the repetition of the images and words delve into our unconscious words, linking thus the un-linkable (like Jewish and Palestinian victimhood, for example)." (ibid.) [my emphasis]

In effect, Still Life’s Zionist spectator is at once marked out and integrated, induced into an uncanny shock that may awaken an obscured, fragmented memory of contemporary Palestine cruelly robbed and ransacked in the name of Jewish safety. This spectator is brought closer to the struggle, closer to her alienated relationship to the state of internal exile and existential im/possibility that is Palestinian life under occupation. Rather than re-enact the salutary Western consumption of Palestine through techniques of empathy and identiication common not only to documentary cinema of the struggle but also to progressive guided tours of the region (Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace; Global Exchange), Still Life refuses to reify the struggle or its own representation thereof through the putatively sublime allure of pathetic images and gruesome thoughts. Its interrogation articulates a self-critical mantra that invokes and deconstructs the racist history of the film’s unvoiced Ur-concept, Zionism: European Jewish suffering as the purportedly unchallengeable rationale for the settler-colonial formation of an exclusivist Jewish nation-state on expropriated Palestinian land. Again, we turn to al-Zobaidi:

"I can’t stop myself from seeing Jews there in the rubble...I can see Jews underneath the rubble and above it at the same time. I wonder how conscious of her “Jewishness” Cynthia was when she was filming and editing or when she was recording her voice...but it is there in her unconscious, I am sure about this." (ibid.) [my emphasis]

Al-Zobaidi’s observations attest both to Madansky’s recognition of the need for Jews to move beyond their embeddedness in particular movement fields that keep them distant from Palestinians (see Landy 30–31), 13 and Still Life’s praxis of holding up a cracked mirror that disallows the fetishistic consumption—racializing incorporation—of human suffering propagated, ironically, by all too many Palestinian–Israeli struggle films apropos of their ideological predecessor, the Holocaust film. In this way Still Life radically reclaims the collective impulse at the core of any such representation, a principle of struggle shared by Palestinians, in the words of al-Qattan, with “all oppressed peoples of the world” (al-Qattan 121), a sentiment echoed by Ilan Pappe, for whom “I did, and still do equate Jewishness and morality, not as superior to any other position, but rather a comfortable heritage I belong to and I can rely on when making moral judgments” (Out 178). This post-Holocaust film illuminates the contemporary decimation of Palestine by compelling uncanny, but never mystical, recognition of Zionism’s own history of rape, plunder, and murder, of alienation from home, work, mobility, and the right to mourn one’s dead. The film’s layered and confrontational conveyance of information about the occupation accommodates degrees and kinds of spectatorial knowledge, not for the sake of consumerist inclusiveness, but in order to position a radically alterior interlocutor, an epistolary Thou who, in consenting to “ride” with Madansky’s calmly abrasive questions, must face the possibility that the real, human price of occupation is more than the cost of a DVD or a guided tour of Israel and the oPts. It is the abstraction, internalization, and displacement of suffering and sacrifice which facilitates ideologically the continuation of deadly violence (Fig. 1.4).

Still Life’s Thou is asked to recant the territorial demarcation of transcendental “framing,” of life stilled unilaterally by illegal walls, checkpoints, bulldozers, and bullets paid for by covert arms and munitions sales and the insidious expansion of Third World debt, all in the travestied name of a universal deity. Placed instead on an uncertain but politically determinate path (“Did you know this was happening?” “Do you think this is okay?” “Do you think this is a crime?” “Who beneits from this?” “What would it take to stop this?” “Do you want to?” “What can you do?” “Do you want to do something but don’t know how?” “Would you say something?” “Have you said anything?” “Do you speak of this?” “Do you protest this?”), Still Life’s Thou bespeaks a contested commitment to authentically derealize the dead and supra-alienated labor of destruction and self- destruction that has come to substitute for Palestinian self-determination and self-expression, and that has justiied the self-designation of Palestinian film as a “cinema of the poor” (al-Qattan 121). Perhaps the effect is best expressed with a quote from the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, whose own ofice at the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah was ransacked by the IDF in 2002, and whose famous words are scrawled in English on a wall in Still Life’s final shot: “If you destroy our lives, you will not destroy our souls.” Still, there is life.

FROM: Visualizing the Palestinian Struggle: Towards a Critical Analytic of Palestine Solidarity Film (Global Cinema Series, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)