On the Otolith Group's Nervus Rerum

The Right to Opacity: On the Otolith Group’s Nervus Rerum T. J. DEMOS We clamor for the right to opacity for everyone. —Édouard Glissant Taking as its subject the Jenin refugee camp in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, Nervus Rerum (2008) is a thirty-two-minute film by the London-based Otolith Group, commissioned by Homeworks IV: A Forum on Cultural Practices, which met in Beirut in 2007, and recently screened at Tate Britain in February, 2009.1 Juxtaposing excerpts from the writings of Fernando Pessoa and Jean Genet with mystifying imagery of the West Bank camp, the film builds on the artists’ remarkable Otolith trilogy of 2003–2008, for which its two members, Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar, exploited the critical potential of the “essay film”—a distinc- tive mixture of documentary and dramatic imagery accompanied by poetic, historical, and often autobiographical narration that, in the tradition of such diverse filmmakers and groups as Black Audio Film Collective, Harun Farocki, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, and Anand Patwardhan, works to disrupt the clear boundaries between fact and fiction, subjectivity and objectivity, the real and the imaginary. In the process, the Otolith Group has invented inspiring new political and creative possibilities for filmmaking as a critical and conceptual art. Most significantly, Nervus Rerum—its title borrowed from Cicero’s Latin, meaning “the nerve of things”—confronts the problem of the representability of a people confined to a geographical enclave by a longstanding military occupation. Established in 1953, the Jenin refugee camp was built to shelter Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their native towns and villages in the areas that became Israel following the nation’s founding during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Under Jordanian control for nearly twenty years, the Jenin camp fell to Israeli occupation during the Six-Day War of 1967, and was later handed over to the Palestinian National Authority in 1996. With a population of some 13,000 1. The screening was one part of a series of exhibitions by the Otolith Group this spring in London, with successive shows at two of the city’s prominent alternative galleries: Gasworks and the Showroom. OCTOBER 129, Summer 2009, pp. 113–128. © 2009 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 114 OCTOBER Palestinians, most of whom are descendents of refugees of 1948, Jenin’s inhabitants resist settling in the West Bank, clinging instead to their displaced status and thereby refusing to surrender their right of return to their historical land. Nominally self-governing territories, camps such as Jenin today form so many extraterritorial islands surrounded by Israeli military power. Writing about the West Bank’s “multiplying archipelago of externally alienated and internally homogenous ethno-national enclaves,” composed of Israeli settlements and military outposts and Palestinian occupied territories and refugee camps, Eyal Weizman states: “In this unique territorial ecosystem, various other zones—those of political piracy, of ‘humanitarian’ crisis, of barbaric violence, of full citizenship, ‘weak citizenship,’ or no citizenship at all—exist adjacent to, within, or over each other.”2 Nervus Rerum brings visibility to the Jenin camp, populated by refugees who have no political rights or means of political representation. Yet it does so, strik- ingly, without positioning the camp’s Palestinians as transparent subjects of a documentary exposé. This refusal to represent the unrepresented delivers us to one particularly arresting aspect of the film: the visual experience of passing through narrow labyrinthine passages of tightly grouped buildings while gaining no information about the camp’s inhabitants—neither from direct testimonials nor descriptive commentary. Nervus Rerum depicts those who live in a political state of exception; but where one would expect anthropological insights and cultural access to Jenin’s inhabitants, there is only blankness and disorientation. In other words, this film is ruled by opacity, by the reverse of transparency, by an obscurity that frustrates knowledge and that assigns to the represented a source of unknowability that is also a sign of potentiality. As suggested in the “Trialogue on Nervus Rerum,” in which Eshun and Sagar discuss the film with film historian Irmgard Emmelhainz, one starting point for their project was “the conundrum of representing Palestine.”3 What is that conundrum? There are many. Unraveling them will also assist in locating the framing conditions and motivations that define Nervus Rerum’s starting point. First off, in their Trialogue the Otolith Group points to their desire to avoid reproducing what has been termed “Pallywood” cinema; that is, the clichéd—and thus all too easily dismissed—genre of victim reportage intended both to expose the truth of the traumatic suffering that results from Israel’s political and military policies, and to elicit the audience’s emotional sympathy as a way of mobilizing 2. Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007), p. 7. 3. I cite the Trialogue as it appears reprinted in these pages. An earlier version of the Trialogue was published in the 7th Shanghai Biennial catalogue. See “A Trialogue on Nervus Rerum,” in The Shanghai Papers, ed. Annette W. Balkema, Li Ning, and Xiang Liping (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2008), pp. 74–80. The Trialogue has also been performed publicly by Eshun and Sagar as “A Dialogue on Nervus Rerum,” as in the exhibition Image Wars at the Institute of International Visual Arts (InIVA) in London, forming one edition of a series of research workshops I organized under the rubric “Zones of Conflict” between October 2008 and February 2009. All subsequent quotes of Eshun and Sagar refer to the Trialogue as published here. The Right to Opacity 115 The Otolith Group. Still from Nervus Rerum. 2008. support for Palestinians (as we saw recently with Israel’s 2009 bombing and inva- sion of the Gaza Strip).4 Whereas those who make such documentaries attempt “to speak truth to power” by documenting the human cost of Israel’s occupation, these filmic or video-based treatments often only reaffirm the oppressive power’s control—as when, for example, “breaking news” stories are neutralized by their seamless assimilation into the dominant narratives and recursive structures of mainstream media reporting, raising ratings without altering opinion. If mainstream reporting refers primarily to its own set of codes rather than to reality itself, as media theorist Niklas Luhmann has argued, then what hope can the documentary exposé have in challenging public perception in the mainstream media’s regulated environment?5 It is for this reason that we might agree with the Otolith Group’s rejection of such filmic and video-based strategies as ineffective. Yet not all Palestinian cinema, one could argue conversely, is trapped in this dilemma, nor must all documentary accounts end up merely providing mass media 4. “Pallywood” is a term coined by Boston University historian Richard Landes in 2000 in refer- ence to the sensationalized televised death of the twelve-year-old Palestinian Mohammed al-Durrah, who died in Gaza crouching next to his father after being allegedly shot by the Israeli Defense Force. In its original usage, the word identified the ostensibly staged theatricality of al-Durrah’s shooting, defining a convention of Palestinian propaganda on the melodramatic level of Bollywood film. The term is raised by Emmelhainz in the Trialogue. 5. See Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media, trans. Kathleen Cross (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 116 OCTOBER with sensationalist fodder.6 Consider, for example, the case of Mohamed Bakri’s Jenin, Jenin (2002) a documentary film that portrays what the filmmaker calls the “truth" about the “Battle of Jenin,” referring to the bombing of the refugee camp by the Israeli Defense Forces in April of that year, which drew Palestinian accusations of a massacre.7 Comprising footage of buildings reduced to rubble and firsthand accounts of the attack, the film presents the evidence of catastrophic destruction alongside emotional testimony from its survivors.8 On the one hand, Jenin, Jenin per- petuates the longstanding Palestinian strategy of producing documentaries about the horror of Israel’s military incursions in order to raise international public con- sciousness and encourage condemnation. The film’s conventions, in this regard, date back to the “revolutionary” period of Palestinian film of the 1970s (consider, for instance, Qais il Zobaidi’s Away From Home (1969) which portrays Sabina Camp near Damascus—in operation since 1948—through the voices of the children who live there; and Mustafa Abu Ali’s They Don’t Exist (1974) which presents the history of South Lebanon’s Nabatia Camp, which was bombed by the Israeli Air Force on May 15, 1974, with numerous civilian casualties).9 Following suit with its documentary expose, Jenin, Jenin appeared to represent a clear instance of cinema’s political effec- tiveness, particularly on the basis of its ostensible threat to the Israeli public’s support for the government’s militarized policies against the Occupied Territories, as judged by the Israeli Film Ratings Board, which charged the filmmaker with libel and banned the film from public cinemas in Israel immediately upon release10 (although the Tel Aviv and Jerusalem Cinematheques screened the film despite the Israeli ban, which was later overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court11). Despite the act of censor- ship, however, Israeli filmmakers have made no less than three filmic retorts to the censored film—all aired on primetime television—rebutting Bakri’s version of the events, which demonstrates that documentaries, in addition to whatever oppositional energies they may promote, often serve to entrench conventional views.12 6. See, for instance, Ariella Azoulay, Atto di Stato. Palestina-Israele, 1967–2007. Storia fotografica dell’occupazione (Milan: Mondadori Bruno, 2008), which represents an archive of documentary pho- tographs of Israel’s occupation, untranslated as of yet into English.

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