One cannot colonize without a map, which is especially true of the demolished and settled territories of Palestine, where advanced public-private surveillance programs, such a Google’s contributions of cloud computing and facial recognition software to Israel or the AI targeting system known as Lavender, subject ordinary people to constant monitoring and the threat of execution from ground level to lower earth orbit. Accompanying the direct horror of guns, bombs, and bulldozers are these hidden mechanisms for apartheid and military violence. This August, Spectacle continues its Palestine solidarity and fundraising screenings with two experimental documentaries that offer subversive ways to scrutinize and utilize surveillance and aerial imaging technologies.
Following up last month’s screenings of Indian artist group CAMP’s FROM GULF TO GULF TO GULF is THE NEIGHBOUR BEFORE THE HOUSE, another radical exercise in collaborative documentary filmmaking in which eight Palestinian families place a CCTV camera on top of their homes and elucidate the changing face of a claustrophobic Jerusalem. Accompanying this work is Canada-based Palestinian filmmaker Razan AlSalah’s latest feature, A STONE’S THROW, a biographical portrait of AlSalah’s father who fled Haifa as a child during the first Nakba, told partially through the use of Google Maps and a mix of other analog and digital media.
What both films raise through these technologies are anti-imperialist panoramas and satellite views of occupied Palestinian landscapes, and in the case of A STONE’S THROW, polluting extractive zones. These films also offer alternative means of addressing the often imbalanced dynamics between documentary subject and filmmaker, bringing with them urgent insights into mobility, power, and the politics of looking.
THE NEIGHBOUR BEFORE THE HOUSE
(الجار قبل الدار)
Dir. Shaina Anand (CAMP), 2009-2011.
Jerusalem. 60 min.
In Arabic and English with English subtitles.
THURSDAY, AUGUST 1 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 7 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, AUGUST 12 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 31 – 7:30 PM with filmmaker Q&A
In an inversion of technology commonly used to observe and control, eight Palestinian families place a CCTV camera on the roof of their homes in East Jerusalem. Shot in 2009, and edited into its feature in 2011, each sequence of the THE NEIGHBOUR BEFORE THE HOUSE spotlights a different neighborhood, filmed and married to live commentary and dialogue by each of the families. These vantage points trace a geographical history of enclosure and dispossession, from a non-extant neighborhood along the Western Wall to views of IDF training exercises in the Western Wall Plaza, droves of tourists, and the Israeli surveillance apparatus itself. Two of the families in Sheikh Jarrah, evicted a few months before recording, observe and negotiate the distance between the settlers occupying their family home from across the street. Exceptional in its demonstration of how space articulates power, the film is a haptic and affective cinematic expansion of what post-1968 revolutionary Japanese critics and filmmakers called Fūkei-Ron, or landscape theory.
“The neighbourhood is scattered and inaccessible, the neighbour is turning out to be a monster. Going beyond the technical misuse of surveillance technologies, the filming methods open up to new potentials: a house becomes a support for a camera, a sort of tripod built from stones. The petrified position of the camera only allows movements on a fragile surface of the image. It is not possible to change the perspective and switch from one self to another.” –Florian Schneider
Members of CAMP will be present on August 31st for an in-person Q&A.
A STONE’S THROW
(على مرمى حجر)
Dir. Razan AlSalah, 2024.
Canada, Palestine, Lebanon. 40 min.
In Arabic and English with English subtitles.
THURSDAY, AUGUST 1 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 7 – 10 PM
MONDAY, AUGUST 12 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 31 – 10 PM
A standout selection from the 2024 edition of Prismatic Ground, Canada-based Palestinian artist Razan AlSalah’s latest film presents an auto-biographical account from her father, who was displaced as a child from Palestine to Lebanon during the first Nakba. To support his family, Amine would leave Beirut routinely for over a month at a time to work for an oil platform on the secretive Zirku Island. Connecting a broader lineage of Palestinian labor and extractive sites, AlSalah’s family story is interwoven with the sabotage of a British pipeline from Iraq to Haifa in 1936.
Barred from access to location shooting, A STONE’S THROW instead creates a haunting and occasionally humorous visual tapestry with a toolkit of creative code, satellite maps, bizarre corporate films, and analog filmmaking. In doing so, the story of an individual man provokes contemplation of a present moment where Palestinians have to move to escape genocidal violence and fossil fuels keep flowing from the earth.
Preceded by
YOUR FATHER WAS BORN 100 YEARS OLD, AND SO WAS THE NAKBA
(أبوكي خلق عمره ١٠٠ سنة، زي النكب)
Dir. Razan AlSalah, 2018.
Canada, Palestine. 7 min.
In Arabic with English subtitles.
From the perspective of a ghost in a machine. AlSalah’s grandmother is dropped into a Google Streetview of Haifa and wanders in search of her family home and son Amine. This maze of still, distorted images from a transformed city offers no hospitality. 70 years after the Nakba, on the ports used to displace Palestinians to Beirut, the phantom finds tourists.
Special thanks to Shaina Anand, Razan AlSalah, Inney Prakash, and Abyn Reabe.