Even the Sea is Broken: Return and Loss in Razan AlSalah’s Video Works

Even the Sea is Broken: Return and Loss in Razan AlSalah’s Video Works

This article probes the ways in which returning to Palestine is imagined in Razan AlSalah’s two video works Your Father Was Born 100 Years Old, and So Was the Nakba (2018) and Canada Park (2020). In foregrounding the refusal of configurations substantiated by state concessions and normalisation trea...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Film-philosophy Vol. 28; no. 2; pp. 248 - 268
Main Author: Makki, Samira
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Edinburgh University Press 01-06-2024
Subjects:
dialectics
glitch
loss
Palestine
poethics
return
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Summary:This article probes the ways in which returning to Palestine is imagined in Razan AlSalah’s two video works Your Father Was Born 100 Years Old, and So Was the Nakba (2018) and Canada Park (2020). In foregrounding the refusal of configurations substantiated by state concessions and normalisation treaties, the article treats loss as central to the manifold rehearsals of return. In AlSalah’s work, loss is understood not as becoming less, but rather as a proposition for becoming otherwise. Here, the practice of loss is explored through the glitch as both a conceptual framework espousing opacity and a pragmatic tool engaging pixel breaks. Rather than reducing the glitch to a mere erroneous aesthetic, the article underscores the active capacity in encountering a glitch or deliberately engendering it by exploring the tensions between colonial imageries reproduced in digital maps, and, in contrast, montage as AlSalah’s tool for intervention. Finally, the article serves as a theoretical experimentation with what I call “dialectical poethics,” which reads the filmic return through loss as an attempt to go against linearity, intelligibility, and finality, yet insists on a materialist grounding of the glitch as a method that is historically situated rather than always-already emancipatory.
ISSN:1466-4615
1466-4615
DOI:10.3366/film.2024.0268