The Future is Only a Fold Away: Archiving Rehearsals with Film, for Palestine

Abstract

In this Thesis by Publication (TBP), I provide a close reading of six films made by three Palestinian artists Razan AlSalah, Basma AlSharif, and Noor Abed. I specifically ask: How does loss inform the activity of archiving as one alongside which memory work is rehearsed in, and with, film work? In thinking with various interlocutors and concomitant theoretical frameworks, the three stand-alone articles comprising this dissertation come together in coherence if one were to reckon with loss as that which weaves them. It was with glitches, impasses, and ghosts as my companions that I have learned to read anew the films under scrutiny. This reading actively emphasizes the role of montage in negotiating the marks left by the conceptualized loss, respective to the work of each artist, by specifically attending to folds, that is, to the images and sounds loitering at the rim of the virtual, in the interval between intelligibility and opacity. It is along these lines that this dissertation posits that any claim to the future of archiving must be accompanied by a serious rethinking of our commitment to film, as both medium and method, in order to seriously consider the responsibility of memory work as political work, hence, to attend to the speculative promise and revolutionary potential of its collective rehearsals.