A valuable discovery, but not unique, as filmmaker and programmer Mohanad Yaqubi lays out in his lecture I Laugh Because I Know They Can’t Kill Me, presented at Eye as part of the programme Songs and Scenes from Palestine, which opened with this rarely screened work. Palestine has been filmed ceaselessly since nearly the invention of the film camera, and so often, these films were made by foreigners – occupiers, helpers, bystanders. The lecture, available online below, is a cinematic investigation of images produced in and about Palestine since the 19th century – a positioning of cinema in the Palestinian struggle as an effort against disappearance, but also one for ownership over the frame.
The fight against forgetting
Songs and Scenes from Palestine, which took place at Eye in May, featured screenings and talks that offered up the history and culture of Palestine in the words and images of Palestinian artists and filmmakers. Mohanad Yaqubi’s lecture I Laugh Because I Know They Can’t Kill Me is now available online. His cinematic investigation of images produced in and about Palestine since the 19th century is an effort for ownership over the frame.
By Farah Hasanbegović29 July 2024
In an archive a short walk from Amsterdam Central Station sits a film can with negatives that were imprinted by the light of the Palestinian sun almost 100 years ago. The film, From Cairo to Jerusalem is credited as being from the United Kingdom in 1928, a time recorded in history as the period of the British Mandate of Palestine. The copy available in the Eye Filmmuseum’s archive even features professionally crafted Dutch titles. In the records of the Collection Centre, we discover that the film is listed as having been distributed by a short-lived film school based in the Hague at the end of the 1920s.
still Why (Monica Maurer, 1982)
Watch the lecture Mohanad Yaqubi gave in Eye:
still A Night We Held Between (Noor Abed, PS 2024)
The programme Songs and Scenes from Palestine, which took place at Eye in May, featured screenings and talks that offered up the history and culture of Palestine in the words and images of Palestinian artists and filmmakers.
A people and a place can be made to disappear even when they are filmed - by having their voices taken away, in being subject to foreign projections on their struggle, in being put into dialogue with their oppressors. With works from Lina Soualem, Kamal Aljafari, Larissa Sansour, Jumana Manna and Noor Abed, as well as the myriad of archive films and fragments brought forth by Mohanad Yaqubi in his talk, a vibrant, living sense of Palestine emerges and endures in and out of the cinema space. A sense of home.
In an edition of the Cahiers du cinéma in 1975, author Serge Le Péron writes that Palestinian memory is one exploded in time and space - and that fragments of it landed across the world in the forms of films. It is the onus of Palestinian filmmakers to perpetually (re)constitute a memory of a life and a struggle that continues, from Palestine to all the places in the world that keep record of its past.
In a session for curators and archivists leading up to his lecture at Eye, Yaqubi says: “There is no power to manifest an archive.” The constituent archive of Palestinian memory is scattered across the globe, in state and personal collections and in the backgrounds of other filmed materials. It is also added to each day, in images sent out to our phones from Palestine via compromised internet connections. The privilege of maintaining the memory and evidence of Palestine has long since fallen on all of us.
still We are the Palestinian People (Newsreel, 1972)
Reflecting on a moment when the cinemas of Palestine, Lebanon and beyond were liberated by television from a primary duty to report, by which makers were drawn to more artistic explorations, Yaqubi stresses how many films, stories and images of Palestine have travelled the world even just in the past 50 years. To paraphrase the lecture embedded below, at this point to say I don’t know about Palestine would be an impossible statement - and an ideological one.
“The moment we are not able to accumulate, like they can, we are subjected to being forgotten,” says Yaqubi, in reference to the ability of privileged places to maintain stable archives and records. Collections like that of Eye and places like it are able to extend a hand in the fight against forgetting. It’s all the more vital that they are preserved and shown, and remain open when it’s time to help.