No title available
Not today Justin
Monterey Bay Aquarium
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
Kiana Khansmith
shark vs the universe
#extradirty
The Bowery Presents
No title available
RMH
No title available
The Bright Sessions
Cookie Run:Kingdom Official!
sheepfilms
The Stonewall Inn
almost home
Color Me Curious
taylor price
izzy's playlists!
KIROKAZE
seen from India
seen from Germany
seen from Brazil
seen from Malaysia
seen from Germany
seen from United Arab Emirates
seen from Iraq
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Canada
seen from United States
seen from Venezuela
seen from United States
seen from Singapore
seen from Canada
seen from Laos
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Venezuela
seen from Russia
@filmsoftheflesh
Happy Palestinian Film Thursday!
It's week 2 of me watching a Palestinian film, and supporting cinema of Palestine on Thursday nights (AEDT). This week's film is the short documentary: Jamila's Mirror (1993). Dir. Arab Loutfi. This documentary is a retrospective of the Palestinian women who have fought as guerilla freedom fighters in the Palestinian resistance. Watch it free on YouTube.
Club Vatican (1984, dir. George Kuchar)
Sins of the Fleshapoids (1965), dir. Mike Kuchar
Sins of the Fleshapoids (1965), dir. Mike Kuchar
‘Children of Shatila’ (Lebanon, 1998) film by Mai Masri. In this scene the youth of the Palestinian refugee camp interview an elder with a video camera.
Sins of the Fleshapoids (1965), dir. Mike Kuchar
I would prefer that people speak the word “death” and acknowledge the death that comes along with this disease, I mean we’re not all asymptomatic muscle boys and kickboxing dykes fighting this epidemic, there is a tendency in the face of media images of AIDS, you know that we’ve been fed over the years… there’s a tendency to try to fight those images, so that there were created statements like people living with AIDS, people fighting with AIDS… which I find nothing wrong with and I agree with trying to dismantle those media images, but then I think at times in the activist community there’s a tendency to go into total denial about death which society has always done anyways. I always felt as a teenager and growing up that if this society even could for five minutes deal with mortality, on a coast-to-coast level, I mean in education and our institutions and our schools, that most of us would never be doing the things that we’re doing, that we wouldn’t care to live in and support the social structure if we really understood something about our mortality.
To leave the bed of a friend who can’t even put a spoon in his own mouth and then go to some public gathering where somebody makes a statement that “AIDS is not about death”... is outrageous to me. It’s no less outrageous than what common media will do. [...] You know, I think it brings up other issues, too, you know, that I’ve experienced over the last seven, eight years, of buzzwords like courage and strength, that… he or she was so courageous as they came to their death, or he or she had so much strength and uh, they’re just buzzwords for politeness, and I’m not gonna crawl into the media grave of AIDS and just die courageously or politely. You know, I have no desire to be polite in the face of being slowly murdered.
[...]
I know that, you know if I die I’m not gonna die simply because I got fucked in the ass without a condom or swallowed some stranger’s come. I know that I’m gonna die because of the way that this disease has been handled by those in positions of power.
[...]
There seems to be this sort of aversion to anger, and it’s not just, I mean just in society in general, anger gets the same treatment as mortality, which is people just go into denial about it, or, somehow, anger as an emotion is yet another taboo in this country: we should suppress our anger, we shouldn’t speak angrily [...]. Anger is an emotion that I think is extremely valuable, it’s a transitory emotion, it’s something that leads you out of one place and into another, whether it’s out of inactivity into activity… and it somehow catalyzes a series of reactions to events that one experiences or one contains or one carries. I’ve had people try to explain away some of the things that I’ve said or done by saying “oh, he’s angry because he has AIDS”, and I don’t think you need to be carrying this virus to have a reaction to how this epidemic has been handled. I think everybody has a right to be angry and I feel like I’ve come to a place in my life that… if people prefer to see me as a monster at times because of what they witness of my anger, then I prefer to be seen as a monster. It’s actually comforting, because it just gives me more room, and allows me more room to express the range of things that I feel. If I come to a place where I feel hate [...] and that starts translating itself into activities I think that’s perfectly good for myself, it’s where I am, it’s what I see and perceive and respond to. [...] rage is a really interesting tool to dismantle this whole illusion of things like one tribe nation or general public or what’s acceptable and not acceptable. The things that I loved in experiences of activism were not so much the media revolutionaries or the photogenic revolutionaries or activists who, you know, most get attention or press or airtime on some spot on the TV news; the people that I’m most enthralled by or that I feel the most responsive to is, like, the lesbian waitress from New Jersey who, with her frightened girlfriend are for the first time laying their body on the line where they’re choosing to get arrested, and what I love about them and what I’m really impressed with [...] is that they actually are approaching a wall of illusions called law, and they’re dismantling that wall for the first time in their lives. And once you cross that line you realize that these religious institutions, these public buildings, these institutions of government, you realize they’re just made of stone, or series of stones placed together. You realize that these people, especially those responsible for this epidemic, [...] are just made of blood and muscle and bones. And those buildings and those people can be dismantled just as easily as anything else, once you break through that wall of illusion called law… I have no traditional moral reaction to the idea of murder, in terms of what I was fed growing up in this society. I don’t see the slow murder of myself and the people I love as being any more acceptable or less acceptable than the murder of others in order to either protect ourselves or to take revenge. And the only thing that occurs to me in those thoughts of murder… is wondering if the planet will spin a little bit faster once these people are gone.
David Wojnarowicz monologuing in the short film Bust (1991, 15'), directed by Richard Morrison. Partial transcription and emphasis mine.
I would prefer that people speak the word “death” and acknowledge the death that comes along with this disease, I mean we’re not all asymptomatic muscle boys and kickboxing dykes fighting this epidemic, there is a tendency in the face of media images of AIDS, you know that we’ve been fed over the years… there’s a tendency to try to fight those images, so that there were created statements like people living with AIDS, people fighting with AIDS… which I find nothing wrong with and I agree with trying to dismantle those media images, but then I think at times in the activist community there’s a tendency to go into total denial about death which society has always done anyways. I always felt as a teenager and growing up that if this society even could for five minutes deal with mortality, on a coast-to-coast level, I mean in education and our institutions and our schools, that most of us would never be doing the things that we’re doing, that we wouldn’t care to live in and support the social structure if we really understood something about our mortality.
To leave the bed of a friend who can’t even put a spoon in his own mouth and then go to some public gathering where somebody makes a statement that “AIDS is not about death”... is outrageous to me. It’s no less outrageous than what common media will do. [...] You know, I think it brings up other issues, too, you know, that I’ve experienced over the last seven, eight years, of buzzwords like courage and strength, that… he or she was so courageous as they came to their death, or he or she had so much strength and uh, they’re just buzzwords for politeness, and I’m not gonna crawl into the media grave of AIDS and just die courageously or politely. You know, I have no desire to be polite in the face of being slowly murdered.
[...]
I know that, you know if I die I’m not gonna die simply because I got fucked in the ass without a condom or swallowed some stranger’s come. I know that I’m gonna die because of the way that this disease has been handled by those in positions of power.
[...]
There seems to be this sort of aversion to anger, and it’s not just, I mean just in society in general, anger gets the same treatment as mortality, which is people just go into denial about it, or, somehow, anger as an emotion is yet another taboo in this country: we should suppress our anger, we shouldn’t speak angrily [...]. Anger is an emotion that I think is extremely valuable, it’s a transitory emotion, it’s something that leads you out of one place and into another, whether it’s out of inactivity into activity… and it somehow catalyzes a series of reactions to events that one experiences or one contains or one carries. I’ve had people try to explain away some of the things that I’ve said or done by saying “oh, he’s angry because he has AIDS”, and I don’t think you need to be carrying this virus to have a reaction to how this epidemic has been handled. I think everybody has a right to be angry and I feel like I’ve come to a place in my life that… if people prefer to see me as a monster at times because of what they witness of my anger, then I prefer to be seen as a monster. It’s actually comforting, because it just gives me more room, and allows me more room to express the range of things that I feel. If I come to a place where I feel hate [...] and that starts translating itself into activities I think that’s perfectly good for myself, it’s where I am, it’s what I see and perceive and respond to. [...] rage is a really interesting tool to dismantle this whole illusion of things like one tribe nation or general public or what’s acceptable and not acceptable. The things that I loved in experiences of activism were not so much the media revolutionaries or the photogenic revolutionaries or activists who, you know, most get attention or press or airtime on some spot on the TV news; the people that I’m most enthralled by or that I feel the most responsive to is, like, the lesbian waitress from New Jersey who, with her frightened girlfriend are for the first time laying their body on the line where they’re choosing to get arrested, and what I love about them and what I’m really impressed with [...] is that they actually are approaching a wall of illusions called law, and they’re dismantling that wall for the first time in their lives. And once you cross that line you realize that these religious institutions, these public buildings, these institutions of government, you realize they’re just made of stone, or series of stones placed together. You realize that these people, especially those responsible for this epidemic, [...] are just made of blood and muscle and bones. And those buildings and those people can be dismantled just as easily as anything else, once you break through that wall of illusion called law… I have no traditional moral reaction to the idea of murder, in terms of what I was fed growing up in this society. I don’t see the slow murder of myself and the people I love as being any more acceptable or less acceptable than the murder of others in order to either protect ourselves or to take revenge. And the only thing that occurs to me in those thoughts of murder… is wondering if the planet will spin a little bit faster once these people are gone.
David Wojnarowicz monologuing in the short film Bust (1991, 15'), directed by Richard Morrison. Partial transcription and emphasis mine.
They Do Not Exist (1974) by Mustafa Abu Ali (watch)
from PalestineCinema.com:
Salvaged from the ruins of Beirut after 1982, Abu Ali's early film has only recently been made available. Shooting under extraordinary conditions, the director, who worked with Godard on his Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere), and founded the PLO's film division, covers conditions in Lebanon's refugee camps, the effects of Israeli bombardments, and the lives of guerrillas in training camps. They Do Not Exist is a stylistically unique work which demonstrates the intersection between the political and the aesthetic. Now recognised as a cornerstone in the development of Palestinian cinema, the film only received its Palestine premiere in 2003, when a group of Palestinian artists "smuggled" the director to a makeshift cinema in his hometown of Jerusalem (into which Israel bars his entry). Abu Ali, who saw his film for the first time in 20 years at this clandestine event noted: "We used to say 'Art for the Struggle', now it's 'Struggle for the Art'"
From 1993 to 1995, [Mirha-Soleil] Ross and partner Xanthra Phillippa MacKay published gendertrash from hell, a quarterly zine which "[gave] a voice to gender queers, who've been discouraged from speaking out & communicating with each other". They managed the zine's publisher, genderpress, which also distributed other transsexual pamphlets and literature, corresponded with local organizations and sold buttons. In standard zine format, gendertrash was a combination of art, poetry, resource lists, serialized fiction, calls to action, classified ads, illustrations and collages and movie reviews. By and for transsexual, transgender and transvestite people, it addressed gender experiences at the individual and societal level and prioritized sex workers, low-income queers, trans people of colour and prisoners. Articles frequently addressed the erasure of transsexuals from lesbian, gay, bi and queer communities and the communities' co-opting of trans identities and issues. Four issues of gendertrash were published, and its run ended in 1995.
(“Dancing Wimmin” by Jeanne B [Mirha-Soleil Ross], from gendertrash issue #1, p. 9)
The Gendertrash from Hell zine issues on archive.org, link also contains the film Gender Troublemakers (1993)
Another link to the first issue (with the others in “related readings”, just below) this time on transreads.org
Wikipedia, genderoutlaws.tumblr.com, lgbtqdigitalcollaboratory.org.
"Children of Shatila opens with 1982 archive footage of Israeli war planes over Beirut, flames rising from the city, tanks moving inexorably towards Shatila, long panning shots over heaps of dead bodies of people, and a downed white horse, lines of heartbroken grieving women, men in face masks digging burial preparations. That was the history the children in the film never saw for themselves, but know in great detail from family and community lore. One boy talks with complete composure of how the bulldozers in the neighbourhood scooped up bodies of Palestinians and Lebanese together in death as they had been in life, and then, how his own aunt died, “Her head was cut off.” Mai’s technique is very rarely to use interviews, but rather to keep the camera running as ordinary life goes on with people talking, especially children, who have just got used to her being a part of it. Scenes in a classroom, in a family dinner, running through the alleys, jokes and games unfold so naturally that the viewer is in Shatila, not watching from the outside. There is truth conveyed in this seemingly effortless work method (which is in fact the fruit of a great investment of time and of listening skills) that could never be achieved in a traditional interview with all its opportunities for reflection before and cutting afterwards making for a confected product.
Children of Shatila shows a crowd of children watching boys’ and girls’ groups dancing the traditional dabka with everyone clapping along. Mai brought them a new game. She is glimpsed giving a small digital camera to one of the children, and the film begins to show the images and footage of one child after another as they turn the camera on the scene, on each other, even on her, and watch the images on the small screen with absolute wonder.
Children interview each other on film and tell each other their dreams of being grown up, how they will be doctors, engineers, spacemen, and how they will get their houses in Palestine back. Again, their own footage is shown as part of the film. They move through the camp as a group and one girl asks a very old neighbour sitting in the dusty alley outside his home what it had been like leaving Palestine, and what would he do first if he went back. “We were a wretched lot – barefoot,” he tells them of his family’s flight to Lebanon in 1948, before going on to say he would first rebuild his house on returning, then look after the land and the olive trees. He leans forward to speak intently into their camera as he tells the children to promise him that even if it takes 100 years or more they will never forget Palestine. This is the history that all of them know as well as if they have lived it themselves and which we see reflected in all the painting, poetry and dreams that fill the children’s lives."
Text by Victoria Brittain, author of Love and Resistance in the Films of Mai Masri. Published by Palgrave Macmillan 2020
(x, x, x)
Children of Shatila opens with 1982 archive footage of Israeli war planes over Beirut, flames rising from the city, tanks moving inexorably towards Shatila, long panning shots over heaps of dead bodies of people, and a downed white horse, lines of heartbroken grieving women, men in face masks digging burial preparations. That was the history the children in the film never saw for themselves, but know in great detail from family and community lore. One boy talks with complete composure of how the bulldozers in the neighbourhood scooped up bodies of Palestinians and Lebanese together in death as they had been in life, and then, how his own aunt died, “Her head was cut off.” Mai’s technique is very rarely to use interviews, but rather to keep the camera running as ordinary life goes on with people talking, especially children, who have just got used to her being a part of it. Scenes in a classroom, in a family dinner, running through the alleys, jokes and games unfold so naturally that the viewer is in Shatila, not watching from the outside. There is truth conveyed in this seemingly effortless work method (which is in fact the fruit of a great investment of time and of listening skills) that could never be achieved in a traditional interview with all its opportunities for reflection before and cutting afterwards making for a confected product.
Children of Shatila shows a crowd of children watching boys’ and girls’ groups dancing the traditional dabka with everyone clapping along. Mai brought them a new game. She is glimpsed giving a small digital camera to one of the children, and the film begins to show the images and footage of one child after another as they turn the camera on the scene, on each other, even on her, and watch the images on the small screen with absolute wonder.
Children interview each other on film and tell each other their dreams of being grown up, how they will be doctors, engineers, spacemen, and how they will get their houses in Palestine back. Again, their own footage is shown as part of the film. They move through the camp as a group and one girl asks a very old neighbour sitting in the dusty alley outside his home what it had been like leaving Palestine, and what would he do first if he went back. “We were a wretched lot – barefoot,” he tells them of his family’s flight to Lebanon in 1948, before going on to say he would first rebuild his house on returning, then look after the land and the olive trees. He leans forward to speak intently into their camera as he tells the children to promise him that even if it takes 100 years or more they will never forget Palestine. This is the history that all of them know as well as if they have lived it themselves and which we see reflected in all the painting, poetry and dreams that fill the children’s lives.
Text by Victoria Brittain, author of Love and Resistance in the Films of Mai Masri. Published by Palgrave Macmillan 2020
(x, x, x)
Fun Fact if you like niche films and/or electronic music: this month The Criterion Channel is streaming 13 films about the Black electronic music underground. The collection is curated in collaboration with Dweller, a music festival and platform centering Black voices in dance music.
Afrique 50 (1950, documentary, 17mn)
The first French anti-colonialist film, the film derived from an assignment in which the director was to cover educational activities by the French League of Schooling in West Africa (in modern Mali and Ivory Coast).
The director, René Vautier, later filmed what he saw, a "lack of teachers and doctors, the crimes committed by the French Army in the name of France, the instrumentalization of the colonized peoples".
For his role in the film Vautier was imprisoned over several months. The film was not permitted to be shown for more than 40 years. (x)
In France the film is currently available for free for a week on tënk here. Elsewhere you can find it here, with English subtitles.
In 2024, I'm watching a film from Palestine every Thursday. I've called this, Palestinian Film Thursday! This is a list of what I intend to
In 2024, I'm watching a film from Palestine every Thursday. I've called it Palestinian Film Thursdays! I've made a list with a tentative schedule on Letterboxd. Join me, if you like! Suggestions are very welcome!
On Thursdays, We Support Palestinian Cinema / By Merry on Letterboxd
Last update 19.01.2024
new update, new films to watch :)
The Shadow The West, by Edward Said. (1986)
Edward Said focuses on the plight of the Palestinians which can be seen as the most enduring residue of the modern encounter between the Arabs and the West. Said traces the course of European involvement with the Near East via the Crusades to Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt and the French and English entrepreneurs, adventurers and empire builders who came in his wake.
Link to the full film.
