This paper argues that through the medium of film, filmmaker Kamal Aljafari is able to reclaim Palestinian space; namely, Aljafari uses editing techniques to add new meaning to found footage, and in doing so reveals and reaffirms Palestinian presence in urban space. First, it discusses how the built environment is used by the Israeli occupation to maintain control over Palestinian daily life. An analysis of the verticality of space helps us understand the visual power of occupation infrastructure such as walls, and the destruction left in its wake. With this in mind, it turns to analyzing Aljafari’s films, in which he uses certain types of found footage, filmed for disparate purposes. Ruins in Jaffa, in the background of Israeli B-movies, and a street corner filmed by a surveillance camera, are the images he makes use of. The implications of using images from the occupier’s cinematic output and surveillance footage in a heavily militarized environment such as Palestine/Israel are examined. Aljafari’s editing choices when re-appropriating this footage illuminate how the re-use of archival footage can constitute an anticolonial reclamation of urban space. Through the act of editing, digital presence in Palestine is possible, allowing Palestinian filmmakers like Aljafari to disrupt the colonial spatial order and be repatriated in some capacity. Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s dichotomy of absent presence when it comes to Palestinians’ relationship to the homeland, which alludes to a state of in-betweenness while waiting for an opportunity to return, is relevant when these filmmakers’ ability to be present in Palestine from afar, if only digitally, is discussed. Cinema thus plays a part in the larger de-colonial movement of a return to Palestine.
Alice Reiter (Wed,) studied this question.