...

9 ‘The photograph is not only an ..

..
committed? Must radical formalism and its established-beyond-a-
image (as a painting is an image), .. reasonable-doubt kinship with violence not be tested against the medial
..

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/screen/article/63/3/393/6710443 by National University of Theater and Cinematography user on 03 November 2023
an interpretation of the real; it is ..
..
.. ‘death masks’ (photographs, videos, &c.) that proliferate in our world,
also a trace, something directly
stenciled off the real, like a
..
..
..
‘stencilled off the real’ at Abu Grahib, Jdaidet al-Fadl or Mariupol?9
..
footprint or a death mask.’ Susan ..
..
Sontag, On Photography (New ..
.. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjac030
York, NY: Anchor Books, 1977), ..
..
p. 154. ..
..
..
..
..
...
..
..
Gil Z. Hochberg, Becoming Palestine: Toward an Archival Imagination of
..
.. the Future. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2021, 208 pp.
..
..
..
..
..
..
KAY DICKINSON
..
..
..
..
..
..
Where do archives stand within anti-colonial resistance? For sure, they
..
..
..
become victims of purloinment, appropriation, manipulation, destruction
..
..
..
and all other means of obliterating an enduring claim on territory. To her
... great credit, Gil Hochberg chooses not to build Becoming Palestine as a
..
..
..
.. memorial to those losses. Instead she invites us into the practices of a
..
..
.. small cluster of Palestinian artists who deploy the archive to revivify and
..
..
.. invent.
..
..
..
Hochberg is avowedly no historian. For her, that discipline’s
..
..
..
monopolizing of the archive as the source of fact blockades access to
..
..
..
what archives might offer as a means of activation and envisioning.
..
..
..
In the artworks prized by her book,
..
..
...
..
the archive is used as a source of a yet-to-come future, and not as an
..
..
..
explanation of the present (how we have arrived at where we are).
..
.. In this sense, the archive is never ‘found’. It is always made and
..
..
.. remade [...] These potential futures are the mark of collective
..
.. aspirations to live otherwise. (p. 14)
..
..
..
..
..
..
The schism she draws between purposes is, perhaps, a little stark.
..
..
..
Purportedly this gaze towards the horizon ‘cannot be found in preexisting
..
.. archives and must be created through speculative ones’ (p. 4); but is there
...
..
.. really a ‘traditional’ archive that does not look to the future? Ultimately,
..
..
.. though, her rhetoric strives towards admirable objectives: not to mire
..
..
.. Palestine in the preservation of primordial, pre-colonial remnants or
..
..
..
wallow in tragedy; rather to rightfully spotlight it as a rich testing ground
..
..
..
for bold new blueprints for independence and sovereignty designed from
..
..
..
within lived experiences of colonization.
..
It follows, then, that Hochberg devotes the best part of her book
reviews

..
..
..
.. (Chapters 1 to 5) to a conscientious detailing of six contemporary
...
..
.. Palestinian artists’ work. The Deleuzian imperatives (note the book’s
..
..
.. title) of the Introduction soon give way to these artists’ own narrations, as
..
..
.. well as studies of the thematic contexts that inspire them. This approach
..
..
..
outweighs any impulse to bend their oeuvre to overarching or
..
..
..
overbearing theoretical tenets. As a consequence, there are occasions
..
..

393 Screen 63:3 Autumn 2022  Reviews

 ...
..
..
when Hochberg returns to issues of futurity at the close of a chapter that
..
.. can seem a little abrupt.

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/screen/article/63/3/393/6710443 by National University of Theater and Cinematography user on 03 November 2023
..
..
.. Who are these artists? All are fluent in English, western-trained, with a
..
..
.. sturdy grounding in prestigious Global Northern art and art-film circuits.
..
.. One might just as easily encounter their work at MOMA or Tate Modern
..
..
.. as in Palestine itself. Jumana Manna’s film A Magical Substance Flows
..
..
..
.. into Me (2015) opens Hochberg’s explorations. This documentary charts
..
..
.. Manna’s journey through the music of the territory according to pointers
...
..
..
from the German-Jewish ethno-musicologist Robert Lachmann.
..
..
..
Hochberg joins Manna in pondering the ramifications of a trajectory
..
.. motivated by such an archivist, active in the 1930s and thus before the
..
..
.. creation of the State of Israel. Chapter 2 homes in on three of Kamal
..
.. Aljafari’s films, which Hochberg dubs the ‘Jaffa Trilogy’. Across these
..
..
.. works Aljafari increasingly manipulates a corpus of Israeli movies shot in
..
..
..
.. his native town in order to expose the culpability of cinema in the
..
..
.. machinery of colonial expulsion. Throughout the Israeli output that he
...
..
..
cites, Palestinians have literally been removed from the frame or rendered
..
..
..
as background; in Aljafari’s reworkings, post-production tools draw
..
..
..
these once peripheral Palestinians to the centre as he simultaneously
..
.. erases Israeli presences.
..
.. Chapters 3 and 4 are bound by a concern with archaeology, perhaps
..
..
.. Israel’s most forceful archival method for ratifying its biblical-historical
..
..
..
.. claims on the land. The first pivots around another single film, Larissa
..
..
.. Sansour’s In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (2016), an
..
..
...
experimental short whose science-fictional rendition plays with the
..
..
..
forging and foxing of archaeological proof. For Hochberg, In the Future
..
.. disassembles the projects of nationhood built upon such findings.
..
..
.. Chapter 4 continues this discussion by absorbing how Ruanne
..
.. Abou-Rahme and Basel Abbas’s multi-layered work And Yet My Mask Is
..
..
.. Powerful (2016–19) warps the Israeli state narrative’s self-justification
..
..
..
.. through artefacts and ruins. And Yet copies these objects ‘without
..
..
.. permission’ and welcomes participants to embody the archive, in so
..
..
...
doing to defy colonial paradigms, to think and live beyond them. Lastly,
..
..
..
Chapter 5 involves itself with Farah Saleh’s dance work Cells of Illegal
..
..
..
Education (2016), which animates a history of resistance from the First
..
.. Palestinian Intifada (1997–91 or 93) in order to imbue physicalities that
..
.. gear up for the coming liberation.
..
..
.. Like Hochberg I have, with good reason, dedicated proportionately
..
..
.. considerable space to outlining the conceptual efforts these projects
..
..
make. Her accounts are delivered in an elegant, thoughtful, sympathetic
reviews

..
..
..
..
...
and direct fashion that conforms respectfully to the ways in which these
..
..
..
artists also describe their creations. However, as someone who has also
..
..
..
followed Manna, Aljafari, Sansour, Abou-Rahme and Abbas, and Saleh
..
.. for many years, I occasionally found myself wondering what fresh ideas
..
.. Hochberg was actually contributing to these discussions. This is a
..
..
.. long-standing puzzle for academics: how to bring more than just light to
..
..
.. the work of subjects who are, themselves, immensely articulate about

394 Screen 63:3 Autumn 2022  Reviews

...
..
..
their practice and, in these cases, frequently well-versed in the writings
..
.. that are then brought on board as theoretical fortification. To give an

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/screen/article/63/3/393/6710443 by National University of Theater and Cinematography user on 03 November 2023
..
..
.. example, this is the epigraph that helps launch Chapter 4, in which
..
..
.. Abou-Rahme appreciates, in language remarkably similar to Hochberg’s
..
.. own, the remnants of Israeli-destroyed Palestinian villages as ‘the place
..
..
.. from which to think about the incomplete nature of the colonial project
..
..
..
.. [... which] activates a potentiality to become unbound from colonial time’
..
..
.. (cited p. 87). When the artists have already expressed themselves so
...
..
..
fluently in near-identical scholarly terms – in interviews and essays, as
..
..
..
well as in the art itself – what then differentiates an academic study from
..
.. a catalogue essay?
..
..
.. Hochberg certainly manifests no compulsion to critique or nit-pick in a
..
.. manner that presumes to rise above her subjects. I was immensely
..
..
.. thankful for her humility in this regard. Other types of intervention or
..
..
..
.. proposition would nevertheless have been exciting to see, most pointedly
..
..
.. at moments that bore the scope to nourish the study of anti-colonial art
...
..
..
practice through similarly resistant and situated epistemological
..
..
..
frameworks. After so many years of dense questioning about the nature
..
..
..
and purpose of the archive in our disciplines, it felt like a missed
..
.. opportunity that Hochberg’s lengthy Introduction, as well as her
..
.. conjectures in the case-study chapters, should largely retread familiar
..
..
.. paths through Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida and Hannah Arendt.
..
..
..
.. Edward Said has a few, less-frequent look-ins, but to ignore him in any
..
..
.. study of Palestinian culture would come across as wilful expungement.
..
..
...
And how are we to interpret the passage in which Israeli-developed Gaga
..
..
..
choreography is brought in to elucidate Saleh’s dance practice?
..
.. Hochberg admits that the two techniques digress in outcome because the
..
..
.. former is ‘primarily an expression of freedom, pleasure, and joy’
..
.. (p. 110). That such joyful outpourings through movement are not
..
..
.. available to a Palestinian in the same territory, that maybe Gaga’s
..
..
..
.. emancipation even comes at the expense of possibilities for Palestinians,
..
..
.. is an avenue that Hochberg does not follow to expose the inequalities
..
..
...
enshrined within thought, creativity and their uptake. To be clear, when
..
..
..
Hochberg notices within Abou-Rahme’s and Abbas’s work ‘a direct
..
..
..
reference to Gilles Deleuze’s concept of becoming’ (p. 101), her
..
.. conclusion is absolutely tenable. My point is more to ask why, as
..
.. scholars, we sometimes stop short in identifying and duplicating our
..
..
.. shared paradigms? Given our professional training, there is real potential
..
..
.. for us to augment or reconfigure these canons with anti-colonial thinking
..
..
that injects vigour into such art’s aims as much as it might serve to
reviews

..
..
..
..
...
deviate from Global Northern orthodoxy and supremacy. Why default to,
..
..
..
and thereby bolster, the western canon at the same time as uniting with
..
..
..
decoloniality?
..
.. These reservations notwithstanding (and they apply far beyond
..
.. Hochberg), the abiding contribution of Becoming Palestine is how it
..
..
.. extends awareness of some particularly provocative and politically acute
..
..
.. art. This book conducts careful, detailed labour throughout, explaining

395 Screen 63:3 Autumn 2022  Reviews

 ...
..
..
works that have existed almost exclusively within the time-limited
..
.. confines of metropolitan art museums and art-film festivals. Such pieces

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/screen/article/63/3/393/6710443 by National University of Theater and Cinematography user on 03 November 2023
..
.. deserve a longer life-span. They dwell at the cutting edge of thinking
..
..
..
.. otherwise through colonization and envisioning a future beyond it.
..
..
.. Becoming Palestine ultimately provides that perpetuation in a more
..
..
..
distributable and affordable form – the book (perhaps also as a teaching
..
..
..
aid). In this, Hochberg’s monograph serves a valuable purpose as an
..
..
..
archive of sorts itself, even if it is not quite as inventive or radical as the
... ones she is cataloguing.
..
..
..
..
..
.. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjac032
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
.. Michael Winterbottom, Dark Matter: Independent Filmmaking in the 21st
..
..
..
.. Century. London: Bloomsbury/BFI, 2021, 190 pp.
..
..
..
... HUW D. JONES
..
..
..
..
..
..
.. The first Covid-19 lockdown in spring 2020 was not only a time of
..
..
.. Zoom parties, Joe Wicks workouts and clapping for carers. For many it
..
..
..
was also a chance to ask what does it all mean, where am I going, and is
..
..
..
it all worth it? One person who took this moment to pause and reflect on
..
..
..
his career and profession was Michael Winterbottom, the multi-award-
..
..
..
winning filmmaker, best known for such films as Welcome to Sarajevo
..
.. (1997), Wonderland (1999) and 24 Hour Party People (2002), as well as
...
..
.. the television sitcom The Trip (BBC, 2010–14; Sky, 2017–20). With film
..
..
.. production suspended, Winterbottom took to Zoom to interview other
..
..
.. British directors about the challenges involved in getting their films
..
..
..
financed, produced and distributed. Dark Matter, his first book, presents
..
..
..
the outcome of these conversations and reflections.
..
..
..
Winterbottom has brought together an impressive roster of talent.
..
..
..
Apart from industry veterans Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, Stephen Frears
..
.. and Danny Boyle, most are mid-career directors in their forties and
...
..
.. fifties, with at least half a dozen feature films to their name. They include
..
..
.. Andrew Haigh, Joanna Hogg, James Marsh, Steve McQueen, Carol
..
..
.. Morley, Paweł Pawlikowski and Lynne Ramsay. Winterbottom makes
..
..
..
clear from the start the directors he spoke to ‘are not intended to be a
..
..
..
representative cross section of directors working in Britain’; he simply
..
..
..
approached people ‘whose films I like and respect’ (p. vii). Some work in
..
the popular genres of comedy (Edgar Wright) and horror (Ben
reviews

..
..
..
.. Wheatley), or in more niche markets like feature documentary (Asif
...
..
.. Kapadia) and art cinema (Peter Strickland). A few other potential voices,
..
..
.. including Andrea Arnold and Clio Barnard, were for various reasons
..
..
.. unavailable. It must be said, however, that most the interviewees are
..
..
..
middle-aged white men, and most belong to the social-realist tradition of
..
..
..
British cinema.
..
..

396 Screen 63:3 Autumn 2022  Reviews