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It was
in the middle of July 2014 – in the tumult of Operation Protective Edge – that
I came across an article on an Indian news site. Mor Ostrovski, a 20-year old
soldier in an IDF sniper unit, had uploaded to his instagram account an image
of a target – the looming head of a very young Palestinian boy – dead centre in
the crosshairs of his rifle. I saw this as an addendum to something I’d read a
few days earlier – Instagram and Art Theory, which posited that the proliferation
of photos on social media is not an aberration in the history of images but a
continuum – through viral propagation – of existing modes of representation
(selfies a bastardized form of self-portraits, food pictures a variation on
still life and so on). Furthermore, the origins of these ‘original’,
‘classical’ modes were in themselves not really as respectable as we imagine
them to be – for example, portraits developed partly because artists had to
draw their royal patrons for subsistence. No image is therefore as innocent as
it seems to be, no image too ignoble to be discarded without due thought. Social
media had understandably exploded on poor Ostrovski but there was more to be spent
on his image than mere outrage.
Now, on being asked to write something pertaining to Palestinian cinema, I was in a quandary: the only film on the conflict made by an insider (or a stakeholder) I’d seen was some four years back in a festival screening, little of which I remembered. My history lessons on the conflict were murky at best, so what was I to do with this assignment?
With
the student protests of France in May ’68 a major filmmaker died, signing his
penultimate film with a triumphant declaration: FIN DU CINEMA. The filmmaker
reborn in the wake of this was no longer interested in placing himself in the
history of the moving image, but in holding a photograph of Jane Fonda in
Vietnam to task and questioning its implications. In 1970, this filmmaker, J-L
Godard, and his young friend, J-P Gorin, went to Palestine to make a film on
the resistance – Jusqu'à la victoire (Until Victory) – which never got released
in its intended form.
“In 1970, this film was called
Until Victory.
In
1974, this film is called Here and Elsewhere. Here. and Elsewhere.”
It is
in this later film that I found something to chew on – an outsider’s
perspective on strife; of what it means to be sitting thousands of miles away
from Gaza and scrolling through the fine print of photos of its bombed remains on
Facebook. Here. And elsewhere. Of being part of an image-saturated world and
watching the subjects of the ‘sympathetic’ image, subjects without an equivalent
access into our own ‘reality’. Elsewhere. And here.
It is
in the image of a Palestinian fighter with his machine gun that we find a matching
countershot to Ostrovski - a zoom-in that dynamizes the frame, ‘bringing us
closer to the conflict’. The conflict here between these militarized images:
Ostrovski’s instagram belonging to a lineage of ‘cool’ war and espionage
iconography (action movies, video games), Godard’s/Gorin’s shot an
appropriation of agit-prop third cinema documentaries. Seemingly different
image-histories that share the same ideology – the construction of the image is
in itself the argument for the respective 'political cause’. If one was to
strip away the specific aesthetic of these images, the 'raw data' might be re-purposed
for very different ends.
With
the dissolution of the Dziga Vertov group and his subsequent encounter with
Anne-Marie Mieville, Godard began to see the faultlines in his erstwhile project. Therefore he turned the raw images from his uncompleted
Palestine film against themselves, with some new material filmed in France – in
effect shifting the focus from the Palestinian struggle itself to the violent
appropriation that ‘sympathetic’ outsiders unleash on it.
Image:
- a hand adding four digit numbers on a calculator, 1917 + 1936 (and somewhere 1789), to try to arrive at 1970. Revolutionary maths that don’t add up because the references are all wrong.
- a young Palestinian girl declaiming Israel in front of war ruins. Heroic gestures that date back to the public spectacles of the French Revolution.
- five people holding photographs of the Palestinian resistance walk in a queue towards a camera, holding their photos up and leaving. Then they move sideways in a queue, simulating a montage.
“A
point in time when one sound takes power over the others. A point in time when
this sound seeks, almost desperately, to keep this power.
How
did that sound take power? It took power because, at one given time, it made
itself represented by an image.”
How,
then, does one think through these data-bytes of war? By juxtaposing relentlessly
and constantly, one with the ‘other’, one with the ‘self’. If there is anything
to be learnt at all from the work of Godard, it is that meaning can only be
found in the abstract maelstrom of images and sounds that don’t add up. It is
in not understanding fully – in struggling
with meaning – that one grasps dialectics.
To
return to Ostrovski, the real terror in his photo is the violent hierarchy in
it: the blatant position of power than he wields over the boy, who’s unaware
that he’s in imminent danger. To see, as a voyeur, is to exploit. The
terrifying fact is that Ostrovski can jokingly think of shooting the kid and
then magnanimously let him go, taking just a ‘cool’ photo as a record of his
benevolence. To land as a Frenchman in Palestine and hold a movie camera is a
luxury, as is flicking through photos of bombed-out Gaza on Facebook. We can
just as well choose not to.
P.S.:
I learnt while researching for this piece that the Ostrovski scandal actually
happened in February 2013, a full year and a half before some enterprising
Indian newspaper decided to recycle it as shocking news from the present
warfront. Here. And elsewhere.
(written in September, 2014. Commissioned by, translated and published in bangla here.)
