Part of COMBAT BREATHING

COMBAT BREATHING: PERPETUAL RECURRENCES, PART 3: PERPETUAL RECURRENCES

Film Notes

What characterizes the militant image? What historical conditions produced it and what kinds of histories were, in turn, produced by it? Where might it be found today? This program brings together a selection of contemporary works that frontally engage the legacies and continuities of Third Cinema and the tricontinental geographies of leftist, anti-colonial collaboration and mobilization that were this cultural movement’s primary condition of possibility. These works, as with Third Cinema, refuse clear-cut divisions between formal acuity and socio-political signification, and ground cinema’s documentative, archival, and imaginative powers as useful tools in the ongoing decolonizing process. Such a process involves grappling with the positive and negative lessons of prior movements in order to deduce alternative pathways to liberation.

The selected films in this program revisit various sites of unfinished and unfolding anti-colonial struggle, from Ghana and Palestine to Yugoslavia and Algeria. Orienting viewers toward critical reflections on the historical twists and turns of the capitalist world-system on macro and interpersonal scales while remaining firmly rooted in their respective presents, the works by Mila Turajlić, John Akomfrah with Black Audio Film Collective, and Reem Shilleh further articulate the persisting structures of colonialism in their intensifications and mutations following from these mid-twentieth-century decolonization movements. The continuity of said conditions into this millennium can only ever engender, as these films themselves embody, the “perpetual recurrence” of a countervailing militant image.

Reem Shilleh
PERPETUAL RECURRENCES
2016, 60 min, DCP
A meta-reflection on the militant image and its contemporary reappearances, PERPETUAL RECURRENCES montages scenes extracted from numerous films and videos created over the last four decades by Palestinians and about Palestine, tracking thematic, gestural, and compositional repetitions between works produced during the Palestinian revolutionary period of 1968-82, the period following the 1993 Oslo Accords, and the volatile twenty-first century. Through Reem Shilleh’s methodical stitching together of repeating filmic occurrences – with respect to location, political discourse, mise-en-scene, objects, and so on – various scenes become unfixed from their narrative contexts and historical conditions, inviting expansive associations and haunting correspondences. Meandering in a seemingly improvised fashion between cinematic fragments of classroom instruction and conversing militants gathered under trees to handheld camera shots of refugee camps and moving car shots of streets, checkpoints, and landscapes, Shilleh’s vast media traversal materializes an equally lyrical and deconstructive reimagination of exercises in film programming.

Introduced by Tiffany Malakooti.