Ritualizing Life: Videos of Jalal Toufic

Abstract

The videos of Jalal Toufic almost always lead their of a certain public or private ritual.In Ashura: This Blood Spilled in My Veins Toufic documents a very public Shiite ritual of Ashura, the day of commemorative mourning for the saint Hussein ibn Ali. But some other rituals are of a more private nature. In The Sleep of Reason a private ritual of sleep is followed by a ritualized slaughtering of animals. The latter is shown in all its cruel details that the public usually tends to overlook. And in Mother and Son figures referring to Hitchcock's Psycho are shown involved in the deeply intimate rituals of death and mourning. The ability to reveal the inner complicity between ritual and the medium of video is one of the reasons Toufic's videos so powerfully capture the imagination of the viewer—beyond the immediate impact of their respective narratives.