Experience – Information – Image: A Historiography of Unfolding. Arab Cinema as Example

Why do certain images of history reach us, while others remain seemingly forgotten, in the infinite breadth of the past? Why do only certain events seem to matter? I suggest those experiences are not forgotten but enfolded. The contemporary politics of historiography can be conceptualized according to the relationship between Experience, Information, and Image; a triadic relationship I have proposed to understand the nature of the image in the information age. While Experience is infinite, the vast majority of experience lies latent. Few Images ever arise from it. In our age, those that do tend to be selected, or unfolded, by political and economic interests that deem them to be useful as Information. Nevertheless, anyone can unfold any aspect of Experience to become a public image, and artists (and others) do so in order to allow other aspects of Experience to circulate, before they enfold, back into the matrix of history. I will show an animated diagram that illustrates this concept of history as a flow of unfolding and enfolding, influenced by concepts from Charles Sanders Peirce and Gilles Deleuze. Many artworks can be illuminated by this process. My examples will be drawn from contemporary Arab cinema. In the heavily politicized Arab milieu, the Image world is constructed as a selective unfolding of only those aspects of Experience that are deemed to be useful or profitable. Some Arab filmmakers, rather than deconstruct the resulting ideological images, prefer to carry out their own unfoldings:  explicating hitherto latent events, knowledges, and sensations. Thus what official history deems merely personal, absurd, micro-events, or no events at all, becomes the stuff of a rich alternative historiography. This process characterizes the work of, among others, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Nisrine Khodr, Mohammed Soueid, and Akram Zaatari (Lebanon), Azza El-Hassan, Elia Suleiman, and Sobhi Al-Zobaidi (Palestine), and Mohamad Khan (Egypt)

Loving a Disappearing Image

L'auteure explore comment un spectateur, lorsqu'il est confronté à un film ou à un vidéo détérioré et vieilli, identifie le cinéma comme un média en train de mourir au moment même où il l'observe. Elle parle de plusieurs films expérimentaux et vidéos dont le sujet est la désintégration du film, souvent le film erotique. Un modèle psychanalytique de la mélancolie est avancé pour expliquer ce processus identificatoire, mais il est considéré insatisfaisant puisqu'il fait déjà partie du principe de maintien de la cohérence de l'ego. Un modèle de mélancolie de dévotion est plutôt avancé, afin de montrer comment on pourrait aimer une image en disparition.The author explores how a viewer identifies with a decaying or disintegrating film or videotape, given that cinema is, in effect, dying even as we watch it. She discusses several experimental films and videos that take as their subject the disintegration of film, often erotic film. A psychoanalytic model of melancholia is posited for this identificatory process, but it is found to be unsatisfactory since it is premised on the maintenance of the ego's coherence. Instead a model of devotional melancholia is posited for how one might love a disappearing image

Archival Romances : Found, Compressed and Loved Again

Images have a life cycle that is material, social, and imaginative. Their trajectories are especially evident in the work of Arab media artists. Like others in places where official image archives are difficult to access, value glitch, error, and loss of resolution not only for their own aesthetic interest but also as indications of the labor of love required to access the past. Analog demagnetization and lossy digital compression; glitch, error, and artifacts introduced by compression; and layers of formatting draw attention to the trajectories and life cycles of images. Rania Stephan, Mohammad Allam, Riad Yassin, Roy Dib, and other Arab media artists painstakingly amass VHS collections of popular movies and TV shows, in archives that augment in care while they diminish in quality. Other artists including Akram Zaatari, Sophia Al-Maria, and Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige draw attention to the new meanings that attach to anonymous images as they travel online, finally to be embraced by the recipient

Archival Romances: Found, Compressed and Loved Again

Images have a life cycle that is material, social, and imaginative. Their trajectories are especially evident in the work of Arab media artists. Like others in places where official image archives are difficult to access, value glitch, error, and loss of resolution not only for their own aesthetic interest but also as indications of the labor of love required to access the past. Analog demagnetization and lossy digital compression; glitch, error, and artifacts introduced by compression; and layers of formatting draw attention to the trajectories and life cycles of images. Rania Stephan, Mohammad Allam, Riad Yassin, Roy Dib, and other Arab media artists painstakingly amass VHS collections of popular movies and TV shows, in archives that augment in care while they diminish in quality. Other artists including Akram Zaatari, Sophia Al-Maria, and Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige draw attention to the new meanings that attach to anonymous images as they travel online, finally to be embraced by the recipient

Transcultural engagement with Polish memory of the Holocaust while watching Leszek Wosiewicz's Kornblumenblau

Kornblumenblau (Leszek Wosiewicz 1989) is a film that explores the experience of a Polish political prisoner interned at Auschwitz I. It particularly foregrounds issues related to Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust in its diegesis. Holocaust films are often discussed in relation to representation and the cultural specificity of their production context. However, this paper suggests thinking about film and topographies, the theme of this issue, not in relation to where a work is produced but in regards to the spectatorial space. It adopts a phenomenological approach to consider how, despite Kornblumenblau's particularly Polish themes, it might address the transcultural spectator and draw attention to the broader difficulties one faces when attempting to remember the Holocaust. Influenced particularly by the writing of Jennifer M. Barker and Laura U. Marks, this paper suggests that film possesses a body ¬¬- a display of intentionality, beyond those presented within the diegesis, which engages in dialogue with the spectator. During the experience of viewing Kornblumenblau, this filmic corporeality draws attention to the difficulties of confronting the Holocaust in particularly haptic ways, as the film points to the unreliability of visual historical sources, relates abject sensations to concentrationary spaces and breaks down as it confronts the scene of the gas chamber