An Atonal Cinema: Resistance, Counterpoint and Dialogue in Transnational Palestine

Description

This is a book about Palestinians elsewhere and Palestinian elsewheres. Articulating an ambiguous right to remain out-of-place as a spatialized response to the fossilized present, the films and filmmakers in this book examine Palestine, as a place and idea, from the dissonance of exile. An Atonal Cinema: Resistance, Counterpoint and Dialogue in Transnational Palestine theorizes a transnational consciousness within contemporary Palestinian cinema as one which articulates an 'atonal' cinema, utilizing contrapuntal dialogue as a mode of resistance with which to respond critically to the 'place-myth' of Palestine in films produced within Palestine but without Palestinians. Drawing on a genealogy of Edward Said's atonal thinking of counterpoint, I argue that the films in this book display a 'double-consciousness', through which Palestine is simultaneously elided and re-inscribed in a contrapuntal dialogue between the 'here' of its contemporary reality and the 'elsewhere' of its historical image. An Atonal Cinema's radical approach includes cinematic texts from Europe, South America and Israel in its corpus, which have both triggered and been shaped by critical responses in contemporary Palestinian Cinema. Drawing on both literature and cinema, An Atonal Cinema draws on the work of Edward Said, Mahmoud Darwish, Jean Genet and Carlo Levi. Films by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Luc Godard, Menahem Golan and Miguel Littin are read contrapuntally through contemporary responses from Ayreen Anastas, Basma Alsharif, Mohanad Yaqubi, Elia Suleiman and Kamal Aljafari.

Robert G. White is a lecturer in Media and Communication at Kingston University, UK. His research explores the intersection of film, critical theory and geopolitics. He is the co-editor of Spaces of Crisis and Critique: Heterotopias Beyond Foucault (Bloomsbury, 2018). His research has also been published in Film Criticism, RCL and the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies.

Using Edward Said's writings about music and exile to launch a theorization about the contrapuntal voice in Palestinian diasporic cinema, this book calls into question the very terms of the diasporic and exilic in the Palestinian context. Roger C. White's rigorous yet easy to read prose is deeply informed by the preceding and current literature on Palestinian cinema, the history of Palestine, and the history of modern philosophy to the present, while maintaining a critical eye on the dissonance and gaps between this latter field and his objects of study. Within the pages of one book, we journey from Said's responses to Jean Mohr's photographs about Palestinian refugees in After the Last Sky to Godard's and Genet's critical works on the Palestinian revolution, and Pasolini's essay film, Sopralluoghi in Palestine [Location Scouting in Palestine], to place in relief the films of the pre-Nakba Palestinian/Chilean Miguel Littin, and the films of Elia Suleiman, Kamal Aljafari, Mohaned Yaqubi, Ayreen Anastas and Basma Alsharif. White's assertion that the contrapuntal voice and the "resistance of image" distinguishing these filmmakers challenges the history and concept of partition in Palestine-Israel and fills a gap in contemporary studies of Palestinian cinema. * Samirah Alkassim, Assistant Professor of Film Theory, George Mason University, USA *