The Brooklyn Rail

Samirah Alkassim writes: “Gaza is a place many of us visit only through its mediation. Our understanding of the place and the people who live there is enriched by its images, especially those created by Palestinian and Palestine-solidarity filmmakers and artists.”¹ Basma al-Sharif’s 2014 experimental short Deep Sleep takes this visitation a step further, inviting its viewers to bilocate through hypnotic flicker and indeterminate landscape. The film, which just turned ten over the summer, will screen on October 19 at Anthology Film Archives.

Control over Gaza’s image is as volatile as it is integral to the perception of the conflict on the global stage. Since the acceleration of violence and conflict in Gaza, it’s become clear that Gaza is made a site of visual abstraction to hide the facts of indexical representation: the mapped abstraction of an image from a drone, flattened by distance; the bleary eye of a low-resolution satellite; what hides in a pixel.² Beyond drone footage, when Gaza is realized in images from the ground, it has often been made abstract by its destruction; we are presented with an image of a lack where something once was and left to wonder. To counteract this, Palestinian artists, activists, and filmmakers have been tasked with creating indexical representations of Gaza to offset the violence of abstraction in Israeli-sanctioned imaging. If we are to understand abstraction as a pillar of Israeli military strategy in the occupied Gaza Strip, rendering the violence suffered by Palestinian people at their hands inconspicuous, Palestinian resistance movements are obliged to retaliate by making real (for foreign parties) the effects of Israeli occupation and genocidal efforts through indexical image.

At the same time, however, “the representative image is a ‘cruel image’” when it comes to representations of Palestinian abjection and pain, “perpetuating the violence of war in its easy consumption by viewers.”³ To immortalize the image of the suffering Palestinian as the exemplary icon of the Gaza Strip is an abstraction of a different kind, marking the severity of Gazan life as it is now and casting it in amber, thus simultaneously solidifying this experience as inherent to the region and divorcing Gaza from the rest of the world. In other words, Gaza is not an island, death is not inherent to the Palestinian identity, and to suggest as much through images would be a violence, too.

Where, then, does the battleground of representation/abstraction leave contemporary Palestinian filmmakers? Can abstract image-making function as a reparative position to imag(in)e Gazan past, present, and futures?

Deep Sleep emerges as a potential way out of this dichotomy. Incorporating both abstract and figurative images from in and out of the Gaza Strip, Deep Sleep realizes the latent political potential of traditional practices of “flicker film” while deepening the diversity of images of Palestine in the very indeterminacy of the images presented. Al-Sharif comments on the didacticism of both abstract and representational images of Gaza and imagines a space beyond the binary, where things aren’t so clear. This reorientation disarms viewers, granting an alternative entry-point to encounter the Palestinian landscape, a radical act when didactic image-making appears as the only avenue for liberatory representation. A landscape is still a landscape when viewed upside down, but our visual heuristics fail. We’re challenged to think differently.

Deep Sleep’s title comes from the process of its making; shooting between ruins in Athens, Malta, and the Gaza Strip, the filmmaker engaged in self-hypnosis, attempting to film only while in a trance state. Al-Sharif’s desired end to her self-induced hypnotic state was to successfully bilocate between the foregone civilizations of ancient Greece and Malta and the Gaza Strip of past, present, and future. Because each landscape is often indistinguishable from any other, the indeterminacy of the three locations and the filmmaker’s bilocation melds the three together, opening up a speculative space wherein one can imagine a Gaza discorrelated from the effects of the occupation. Furthermore, the blending of location allows for a speculative future for Gaza, even if the realization of such a future is unlikely. According to al-Sharif:

I wanted to remove the specificity of Gaza, and allowed other sites (Malta and Athens) to be a reflection of Gaza, its past, and a future it never achieved. The three sites are heavy with ruins of ancient civilization, some more recognizable than others, but ultimately it is about surviving beyond the presence of history.⁴

Al-Sharif’s film will screen as part of the final program of Landscape Cinema: Poetics and Politics, curated by Pavle Levi. A scholar of Eastern European aesthetics and experimental film at Stanford University, Levi’s series proposes a new aesthetic framework, crossing time and geographical boundaries in its proposition. The framework: an image of a landscape is a political one. Under every image of a golf course lies a mass grave. A landscape necessarily excludes people, turning its focus to topography, but this exclusion only underscores the strange absence of a human subject. As Levi writes in “The Cinema of Cleansed Landscapes (On Image Politics after Yugoslavia),” “emptiness or absence function in these films not merely as traces of distinct authorial styles; they also bespeak a demand to the viewer to participate: to fill in these films’ gaps, to imagine what is lacking in their strategically emptied and, therefore, incomplete visual register.”⁵

Born in Kuwait to Palestinian refugees and growing up between Kuwait, France, and the United States, al-Sharif’s relationship to Gaza has always been precarious; although she had relatives living in Gaza throughout her childhood and visited every year, the volatile political landscape requires a certain mental gymnastics, for fear that visiting, let alone life, would be made suddenly unfeasible. Moreover, at the time that the artist made the film, a fixed relationship to any landscape felt impossible—that summer, al-Sharif had packed all of her belongings into a storage unit, living completely itinerantly, for better or worse. Reimagining Gaza through the mediation of other lands reads as a reparative move in this light, as a way to protect oneself and one’s memory against the unpredictable present and future.

As a child in 1970s Belgrade, Levi underwent repetitive syntonic therapy for a lazy eye; for the uninitiated, such therapy requires the patient to follow the strange dark spot of the after-image of strobing lights. Forty years later, al-Sharif uses the front tails of Super 8 film, saturated in deep blues and yellows, to strobe the viewer into a collective dream of a place we may not ever get to visit. Dreams and movies have always been tied together, if only because of their respective once-removedness from ordinary life. In Deep Sleep, though, a film can be a dream of the thing you don’t remember, as a portal that makes the “real world” recede, if only for a few minutes. In its wake, something like a horse galloping through the olive trees, or a woman climbing the stairs, becomes visible, plainly, for perhaps the first time.