This is not a Film

An object deflecting a bullet at an opportune moment is a filmic trope. The requisite quality, alongside bullet-proof material or bulk, is that the object be somehow consequential, comedic or poignant: a holy book, a silver cigarette case that results in smoking saving a life rather than shortening one, St Christopher worn by a rational person to indulge a superstitious one. Ammunition from the gun of an ex-IRA mercenary lodged itself in a stolen police identification badge rather than continuing its trajectory into the chest of Sin City’s hero-vigilante Dwight McCarthy;¹ the eponymous coin in One Silver Dollar² performs the same deterrent task; in Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow³ and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Thirty-Nine Steps⁴ books protect the respective heroes’ hearts. The examples are numerous, and the trope entrenched.

Still from Sin City (2005)

Wael Zuaiter, in Autumn 1972, was in the habit of carrying in his breast pocket a battered volume of One Thousand and One Nights. This collection of folk stories is the inscription of those passed on by word of mouth since the time of the legendarily clever Scheherazade who employed them to protect herself against the murderous intentions of her husband, King Shahryār. He married and beheaded a new woman every night in revenge for an earlier betrayal; Scheherazade was next in line, but on their wedding night she narrated a dramatic story to her husband, thrilling and full of suspense. Breaking off at dawn, she promised the enthralled king that she would finish the tale the next night. He could not resist and curtailed his cruelty for one night. So, staying alive another day, she would, each subsequent evening, finish the previous night’s story, but then half begin another, until, after a thousand such nights, the king fell in love with her and renounced his vengeful ways. Scheherazade had saved her own life with stories. On the sixteenth of October, 1972, as he traversed the stairwell of his apartment building on Piazza Annibaliano in Rome, a bullet fired at Zuaiter from a Beretta .22-calibre pistol ripped through the worn pink cover of his manuscript, then each page of the volume, its every ancient collected tale, coming to rest in the book’s woven spine.⁵

Wael Zuaiter's copy of One Thousand and One Nights

This was not a film. The twelve other bullets fired by Israeli Mossad assassins that night entered Zuaiter’s head and chest, ending his life around 10.30pm. He would be the first of those assassinated in retribution for the kidnap and killing of the Israeli Olympic team at Munich by Palestinian group Black September earlier that year.

Material For a Film

Emily Jacir is an artist with an acute sense for the cinematic. She is also a Palestinian. In her work, the militarised dislocation of the Palestinian diaspora is replayed through the steady record of smaller, personal displacements. The violence of exile is considered through quiet installation of texts and photographs. Jacir’s underlying project as an artist is shaped and defined through her own placelessness as a Palestinian, as such, her work reconfigures notions of site specificity.⁶ Dispersion too, the necessary by-product of dislocation, is pervasive in her practice. It acts as a method of distribution, when works appear in newspapers, or when an entire film festival is played out through the passing hand-to-hand of VHS tapes;⁷ it performs the role of subject, when she employs the participation of her far-flung countrymen; and it characterises medium, in installations made up of text, photography, sculpture and video. The themes of dispersion and the cinematic combine to arguably most powerful effect when Jacir approached the tragedy that befell Wael Zuaiter in her work, Material for a Film (2004–ongoing).

Emily Jacir, Material for a Film (2004–ongoing). Installation view in the Italian pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007.

A Palestinian poet and intellectual, Zuaiter was returning from visiting his companion Janet Venn-Brown on the night of his assassination. He carried volume two of One Thousand and One Nights – which he had been reading earlier that evening on her sofa – as he was in the process of translating it from Arabic into Italian. When not home to the fated volume, his pocket was filled with seventeen sheets torn from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Jacir found these pages, accompanied by a letter from Zuaiter’s brother Omar, in an airmail envelope on which Venn-Brown had written:

Wael carried these around in his pocket when he was studying Dante. He said a whole book was too bulky anyway one page would last him a long time.⁸

Jacir also unearthed photographs of Zuaiter, including one taken posthumously of his body lying in a pool of blood. She found a tiny glimpse of him acting as an extra in The Pink Panther (1963),⁹ telegrams consoling Venn-Brown on her loss. So, painstakingly, the artist pieced together a man’s life, his death and the impressions he left behind. The title of the work came from a chapter of Venn-Brown’s publication For a Palestinian: In Memory of Wael Zuaiter (1979). In this version of ‘Material for a Film’, Elio Petri and Ugo Pirro compiled a series of dialogues and interviews with those who had known Zuaiter in Rome. Petri died shortly after the book was published and their project was never conceived but Jacir retained the title. The sense of a cinematic event, or epic, is resonant through the work. The title also presents other readings, the role of artist as director, and also the ultimate failure in the minds of her audience of the idea of a film doing the same work as that which stands before them.

Emily Jacir, Material for a Film (detail) (Telegram: 18/10/1972) (2004–ongoing)

Presented as a large-scale installation of rigorously researched archival material, Jacir’s Material for a Film performs acts of commemoration, both for the life she has unearthed, that of her own arduous journey through a plethora of information and emotions, and, entwined throughout, for the particular existential condition of being Palestinian. It does this all without barely showing the artist’s hand.

Material for a Film had its inaugural display at the 2007 Venice Biennale in Robert Storr’s exhibition for the Italian pavilion: ‘Think with the Senses – Feel with the Mind. Art in the Present Tense’. The first Palestinian artist to be awarded a Golden Lion in recognition of her achievement here, Jacir was subsequently nominated for the Deutsche Börsche Photography Prize 2009, the work was hence displayed for the first time in the United Kingdom in the Photographers’ Gallery. Here at the Serpentine, Jacir’s selection of materials, some repeated as photographs of themselves or referenced across the room by a related item, creates a narrative that disrupts both the circularity of the gallery experience and the linearity of the cinema. The viewer is displaced, and in being so, agitated into a state of emotion seemingly incongruent with the restrained museuological medium of presentation. A more powerful rendition of the contemporary artist’s authoring, or ordering, of archive seems unlikely.

One Thousand and One Nights

Emily Jacir, Material for a Film (Performance) (2005–2006) at 2006 Sydney Biennial. 1,000 blank books shot by the artist with a .22 caliber pistol, mixed media and 67 C-type prints

There is a second related work titled Material for a Film (Performance) (2005–2006). This installation takes the form of remnants of a performance. Every double-page spread of Zuaiter’s copy of One Thousand and One Nights was photographed by Jacir in 2005; here, printed to scale, displayed five deep, centred at eye level,¹⁰ each page is rendered legible. Whereas the ancient Arabic of the text itself might evade comprehension for the majority of viewers, the perforations and tears the bullet made throughout the book readily recall the same damages wrought upon Wael Zuaiter’s body by its twelve confederates. The traumatic story is further told and retold a thousand times in the second part of the installation, where 1000 blank white books are displayed on floor-to-ceiling white shelves, the cover of each pierced with a bullet from a .22-calibre pistol. Yet, redemption, such as that of King Shahryār on the one night after a thousand nights, is never achieved. Each book is stripped of its story; they exist without beginnings or conclusions, documenting only their own inadequacy as books, as representative objects, as artistic catharsis, as monument to an individual life lost or the loss of an entire people. Jacir’s work offers no solace.

Micha Ullman, Library (1994–1995). Photo: Jason Francisco

The rows of white books recall a sculpture set into the cobbles of Berlin’s Bebelplatz. A glass window reveals to passers-by a white room underground, where empty shelves, enough to store 20,000 books, make up Micha Ullman’s Library (1994–1995). This is a monument to the books burned by Nazis and their student supporters in May 1933. The window is flanked on two sides by plaques quoting Heinrich Heine, a nineteenth century playwright whose works were amongst those destroyed: ‘where books are burnt, people will eventually burn too’. Ullmann, an Israeli artist, used, as Jacir, the formal restraint of minimalism to contain the universal horror of a book destroyed. Yet in their similarity, their differences resound; the implicit violence and relatively ephemeral composition of Performance highlight the durability of Library. An accusation of cultural amnesia could be voiced in this comparison, one described previously by Edward Said:

[T]his is the most extraordinary of exile’s fates: to have been exiled by exiles, to relive the actual process of up-rooting at the hands of exiles.¹¹

To Work with a Plan

Still from Emily Jacir, Crossing Surda (a record of going to and from work) (2002). Two-channel video installation, one 30-minute video and one 132-minute video

Jacir states that she’s spent her ‘entire life going back and forth, connecting with people, family, and friends.’¹² As an artist with two countries of residence, Jacir’s life and practice are both replete with journeys; through these her eye has become attuned to the subtle differences of movement possible under various restrictions. Gruelling viewing, Crossing Surda (a record of going to and from work) (2002) is a three-hour long video made in response to being held, for the same amount of time, at gunpoint in the pouring rain by a soldier who had thrown the artist’s passport in the mud.¹³) Jacir moves beyond her own emotional response to this situation and turns instead to a generative methodology to widen the implications of her ordeal. Sol LeWitt’s words resonate, ‘to work with a plan is one way of avoiding subjectivity’.¹⁴ Hence, the viewer is presented with nothing more than a document of a commute: the two-kilometre walk between the artist’s home in Ramallah and her place of work, Birzeit University, filmed surreptitiously over eight days. The artist adheres strictly to objectivity and neither critical voice-over nor explanatory text permeate the bleak landscape, the film’s solitary star, viewed from knee-height, covertly recorded by a camera hidden in Jacir’s bag.

Still from Emily Jacir, Texas With Love (2002). Video Installation, 60 minutes Video-DVD, MP3-CD with 51 songs

Instead, the threat of violence and the restriction of mobility are revealed through half-seen signs of territorial conflict: empty buildings, tanks and stationary soldiers amongst the moving legs and arms of Jacir’s fellow commuters passing through a military checkpoint. The denial of climax and narrative drama provokes a deeper understanding of the relentless situation of the people it depicts. The work displayed alongside Crossing Surda is Texas With Love, made in the same year but in the Jacir’s other country of residence, the self-proclaimed land of the free. She drives for one hour through the state of Texas in the United States uninterrupted, recording the view ahead through her windscreen. The soundtrack of the film is made up of music selected by fifty-one Palestinians who were asked what music they would listen to if they were able to make such a long voyage. This time, the visual clarity of her neo-conceptual practice is interrupted by pop and political messages occurring in a second register, thus the film is empowered indirectly with the emotions and polemic of the chosen songs. Both autobiographical, and both examining the difficulties of travel for exiles, the videos shown together present a stark contrast. Where as Texas With Love uplifts the journey through filmic romance, Crossing Surda brings the monotonony of the commute crashing back to earth.

Where We Come From

Installation view of Emily Jacir, Where We Come From (2001–2003) (detail)

Again, playing the role of almost-genie or prosthesis, in making Where We Come From (2001–2003) Jacir asked Palestinians, living both in occupied Palestine and abroad, if she could do something for them, anywhere in Palestine, what would it be?¹⁵ Israeli military rule in Gaza and the West Bank prevented, and continues to prevent, many Palestinians living in these areas – isolated from one another by the adjoining land under Israeli control – from leaving one to reach the other. Those exiled are prohibited from returning to Palestine or Israel at all. With repatriation or permanent rehabilitation of this dispersed people both impossible even after fifty years, Palestine remains something other than a geographical location. Instead a collective imagining or hope for future restoration, this dream a necessary salve to the compounded suffering of Palestine’s exiles.

For this reason, Jacir’s titling refers to both a geographical area and a collective ideology whilst quietly acknowledging the inadequacy of her artwork to convey the complexity of either, or, perhaps, our inability to understand. Of the thirty requests or so that proved viable, the artist documented herself performing these acts. The resultant photographs, alongside texts in Arabic and English detailing the original appeal, comprise the final installation work. By juxtaposing the quotidian – pay my telephone bill, water a tree – with the emotionally charged – visit my mother, visit my mother’s grave – Jacir weaves a rich tapestry encompassing the fractured existence of the displaced, where both intimate desires and everyday chores are denied with equal veracity.¹⁶ The alienation of those in a state of exile from the free and rooted majority is most apparent in the innocuous or banal demands in this work. What pleasure is to be found in playing football on the street in Palestine in particular? Or in walking? Drinking water?¹⁷ Or as one participant put it, precision evading him, in doing ‘something on a normal day in Haifa, something I might do if I was living there now’? The fact that these acts are physically possible and almost indistinguishably similar to their equivalents performed in innumerable other accessible locations – Houston, New York, Israel – is testimony to the exile’s plight.

Jacir’s finesse in selecting a form for presenting each work underscores the delicate balance she has achieved in their collective narrative. Lori Waxman contends that it is the ‘snapshot quality’¹⁸) of Jacir’s photography that belies its conceit; the images appear familiar, commonplace. Why are they on the white walls of a gallery space rather in the reject pile of someone compiling a photo album? Their amateur aesthetic renders them almost recognisable, they could belong to any of us. Yet the work continues to side-step empathy. Despite the audience’s familiarity with the medium and the acts conveyed, they cannot understand the needs and desires of Jacir’s participants. They are left instead to search each image, each text, for some resolution to an unidentifiable anguish they can feel but not completely comprehend. Edward Said offers an account:

Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and its native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted […] The achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind for ever.¹⁹

Jacir’s birthplace has been given variously as ‘Saudi Arabia’,²⁰) ‘Kuwait’,²¹ ‘Palestine’.²² A New York Times journalist, interviewing the artist on the event of her solo exhibition at the Guggenheim, apparently unaware of the significance of these discrepancies, asks the artist where she was – ‘in fact’ – born.²³ Of course there exists no single-answer response to this question for Palestinians, and no easy word to substitute as title for Where We Come From. Jacir operates quietly and effectively in this void bringing the human back into the facelessness of forced displacement; through conveying tragedy in both the cinematically grandiose and the mundanely domestic she ties these complicated issues together with precision and compassion.²⁴

1. Sin City (2005), directed by Frank Miller. A bullet to the heart apparently kills character Dwight, played by Clive Owen, during a shoot out. It is as his assassin casually examines the police badge that lies next to the body  – discovering that the bullet is still lodged in the metal part of the badge and vocalising his realisation that his target must, therefore, not have been shot – that Dwight rises behind him and retaliates by shooting him dead.
2. One Silver Dollar (1965), directed by Giorgio Ferroni. Gary O’Hara, played by Giuliano Gemma (aka Montgomery Wood), is given a coin early in the film by his brother Phil. Later, when Gary is unwittingly deployed to kill the now-estranged Phil  – known as bandit ‘Blackie’– the brothers meet in gunfire and Gary is protected from Phil’s bullet by the coin in his shirt pocket whereas Phil is gunned down by Gary’s associates before he has a chance to realise who they are all shooting at.
3. Sleepy Hollow (1999), directed by Tim Burton. Policeman Ichabod Crane, played by Johnny Depp, is given a book by love interest Katrina Anne Van Tassel, played by Cristina Ricci. She advises him to keep it close to his heart as protection. The book later saves him from a shot by Katrina’s stepmother, the film’s villain, Lady Van Tassel.
4. The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. A farmer’s hymnbook left in the pocket of a coat the farmer’s wife gives to Robert Donat, character Richard Hannay, deflects a would-be assassin’s bullet.
5. Testimony from Emily Jacir that forms part of her artwork Material for a Film (2004–ongoing). The event was also portrayed in Steven Spielberg’s film Munich made in 2005 but the artist has stated that the film had no influence on her work, her research having already been well underway by the time of its release. See, for example, an interview with the artist conducted by Michael Z. Wise: ‘Border Crossings Between Art and Life’, The New York Times, 30 January 2009
6. T. J. Demos, ‘Desire in Diaspora: Emily Jacir’, Art Journal, 62, 4, Winter (2003), 68–78, p.69
7. Jacir founded and co-curated the first Palestine International Video Festival in Ramallah (2002), with nowhere to show the films publicly they were instead passed from household to household. Loans made to the festival were done so under the warning that the material could be, at any moment, seized by the Israeli military and therefore not returned.
8. Jacir in Material for a Film (2004–ongoing).
9. Zuaiter plays a waiter in The Pink Panther (1963), directed by Blake Edwards. Filmed in Cinecittà Studios in Rome.
10. As at the 2006 Sydney Biennial for which the work was originally commissioned.
11. Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000)
12. Tom Vanderbilt, ‘Emily Jacir – Openings’, Artforum, February (2004), 140 –141
13. Tom Breidenbach, ‘Emily Jacir: Debs & Co. (Reviews: New York)’, ArtForum, June, (2003
14. Sol LeWitt, ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’, Artforum, Summer (1967), 79–84
15. Paraphrased from Jacir’s proposition displayed with the artwork: ‘If I could do something for you, anywhere in Palestine, what would it be?’
16. Quoted from Emily Jacir, Where We Come From (2001–2003): ‘Go to the Israeli post office in Jerusalem and pay my phone bill’, ‘water a tree that stands in a village that had been demolished in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948’, ‘visit my mother, hug and kiss her and tell her that these are from her son. Visit the sea at sunset and smell it for me and walk a little bit . . . enough. Am I too greedy?’ and ‘go to my mother’s grave in Jerusalem on her birthday and place flowers and pray’.
17. Where We Come From: ‘go to Haifa and play soccer with the first Palestinian boy you see on the street’ and ‘drink the water in my parents’ village’.
18. Lori Waxman, ‘Picturing Failure’, Parachute, 115 (2004), 30–45, (p.45
19. Said (ibid) p.173
20. Vanderbilt (ibid.
21. Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2009 Catalogue (London: The Photographers’ Gallery, 2009) p.139
22. Anderson, K., Bonnell, P., Cánepa Luna, M., Wing Yan Fongm, S., Gorton, S., Hemelryk, C., Lange, C., Lees, N., Lorz, J., Ormerod, L., Svelne, E. & Syson, J. eds., This Much is Certain (London: the Royal College of Art, 2004) p.107
23. Jacir responds, ‘no comment’. Michael Z. Wise, ‘Border Crossings Between Art and Life’, The New York Times, 30 January 2009
24. All images (except still from Sin City) © Emily Jacir. Courtesy Alexander & Bonin, New York, and Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London. Still from Sin City © 2005, Buena Vista Pictures