Between Form and Function

Abstract

In 1968, the first cinema unit of the Palestinian liberation movement was founded in Amman by Mustafa Abu Ali, Sulafa Jadallah and Hany Jawhariyyeh. Affiliated with Yasser Arafat’s rapidly ascendant Fateh movement, from 1969 to 1974 this organization completed a stylistically eclectic series of films addressing revolutionary changes in Palestinian society and politics. This essay identifies some of the more striking formal experiments undertaken in these early works, reading these in contact with historical and political conditions. It links a reading of the Fateh movement’s response to questions of political form or definition in this period, with an account of the aesthetic and structural innovations through which these early filmmakers pursued a cinema suited to the revolutionary moment. By distinguishing works of this early period from those that followed, and by highlighting the stylistic variations occurring in them, the essay shows filmmaking by militants affiliated with the liberation movement’s political establishment to have been more adventurous and formally unstable than has previously been suggested.