CINEMATIC CONFRONTATIONS AND IMPERIAL ARCHIVES:
PABLO ALVAREZ RESPONDS TO KAMAL ALJAFARI’S PARADISO, XXXI, 108

Images are instrumental sources of evidence in chronicling global conflicts. Without them, recent or past wars hardly exist in the imaginary of distant spectators. But precisely because of their indexical value, images of war are perpetually subjected to interpretation and manipulation. They inevitably enter what Jane Gaines refers to as a “war on images”, where they are used ideologically to either reproduce or refute hegemonic frameworks and political discourses.

In a recent TV interview, an Israeli soldier condemned the leaking of CCTV footage involving an alleged sexual assault on a Palestinian prisoner during the ongoing genocide in Gaza. For the soldier, this footage – which captures soldiers covering the alleged assault with their riot shields – “slanders the name [of the IDF] in the world”, which according to him is “a very healthy army”. Of course, the “name” being slandered here is, as the CCTV footage and multiple human rights organisations have documented over decades, based on a constructed reality; a discourse that legitimises military occupation and abstracts imperial violence in Palestine. The publication of this footage risks exposing a fissure in this imperial discourse, where the IDF’s self-representation collides with the (indexical) reality beneath it.

This dichotomy between the reality and representation of war underlies Kamal Aljafari’s recent short film, Paradiso, XXXI, 108 (2022). The film repurposes Israeli propaganda films commissioned by the Israeli Army during the 1960s and 1970s. In these materials, the IDF is portrayed in the same positive light as imagined by the aforementioned soldier: as a modern, precise, and sophisticated army driven by collective effort, a strong sense of camaraderie, and mastery of state-of-the-art war technology. The footage shows IDF soldiers and war machinery advancing fearlessly across the hostile desert of Al-Naqab in battle against an enemy that is never seen, always distant and hidden. This narrative, in an unequivocally Orientalist tone, evokes the heroic endeavour of a modern and “healthy” IDF during the 1967 war against Israel’s “primitive” and “threatening” Arab neighbours. It also perpetuates the Zionist myth of Palestine as a “land without a people”, a trope that legitimises Israel’s occupation and its settler-colonial project.

Paradiso appropriates and reworks these overtly propagandistic images through various editing techniques, thus transforming their purpose and turning them into a ‘fictional drama of men playing at war’. By re-ordering the footage or replacing the voiceover narration with elegiac classical music, the film creates an almost burlesque and absurd narrative of the already picturesque depictions of the IDF. Through this playful editing, Aljafari poses serious questions regarding the status of war images. “Was then Your image like the image I see now?” wonders the pilgrim contemplating the imprint of Christ’s face on the Veil of Veronica in Paradiso, the passage from Dante’s Divine Comedy that gives the title to Aljafari’s short film and is also referenced in a short story by Borges. Like Dante’s Paradiso, Aljafari’s film interrogates the reality of the image fabricated by the IDF in these fictional films.

Set within a new cinematic context, these heroic images further reveal their function as what Ariella Azoulay (2019) describes as “another imperial technology” used to abstract and reproduce imperial violence. When re-edited and reduced to the absurd, the violence underlying these images is not only exposed but reversed, confronting the imperial discourse embedded within them.

In fact, this confrontation is also inherent in the filmmaker’s mere appropriation and manipulation of the archival military footage. Paradiso is part of a series of cinematic interventions made by Aljafari over the last decade in response to the Israeli colonial archive. In his 2015 film Recollection, Aljafari erases Israeli actors from scenes of fictional films shot in Jaffa, his hometown, in a decolonial practice that foregrounds “invisible” Palestinian “extras” otherwise relegated to the background of these films by zooming in on them. In a more recent work, Aljafari digitally defaces characters from Israeli fictional and non-fictional footage and recovers Palestinian archives looted and stored by Israel during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. With Paradiso, Aljafari continues his archival film practice, which he describes as a “work of sabotage against the colonial archive”. As a Palestinian with very limited access to colonial archives, Aljafari’s re-editing of military fictional footage constitutes a political gesture in itself—an act of sabotage against colonial hegemonic archival practices and conditions. In this sense, Paradiso intervenes both discursively/cinematically and materially/archivally by subverting the violent meanings of these fictional films while challenging their location and ownership.

GUEST CURATOR’S BIO

Pablo Alvarez is an independent researcher and film worker with an interest in the relationship between cinema, history, human rights, and social change. He is the co-director of Falasteen on Film, a community cinema showcasing Palestinian films in Birmingham, and also serves as a coordinator at Screening Rights.