The Right to Opacity: On the Otolith Group's Nervus Rerum

Abstract

Taking as its subject Jenin refugee camp in Palestinian Occupied Territories, Nervus Rerum (2008) is a thirty-two-minute by London-based Otolith Group, commissioned by Homeworks IV: A Forum on Cultural Practices, which met in Beirut in 2007, and recently screened at Tate Britain in February, 2009. juxtaposing excerpts from writings of Fernando Pessoa and Jean Genet with mystifying imagery of West Bank camp, builds on artists' remarkable Otolith trilogy of 2003-2008, for which its two members, Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar, exploited critical potential of essay film a distinctive mixture of documentary and dramatic imagery accompanied by poetic, historical, and often autobiographical narration that, in tradition of such diverse filmmakers and groups as Black Audio Film Collective, Harun Farocki, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, and Anand Patwardhan, works to disrupt clear boundaries between fact and fiction, subjectivity and objectivity, real and imaginary. In process, Otolith Group has invented inspiring new political and creative possibilities for filmmaking as a critical and conceptual art. Most significantly, Nervus Rerum its title borrowed from Cicero's Latin, meaning the nerve of things confronts problem of representability of a people confined to a geographical enclave by a longstanding military occupation. Established in 1953, Jenin refugee camp was built to shelter Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their native towns and villages in areas that became Israel following nation's founding during 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Under Jordanian control for nearly twenty years, Jenin camp fell to Israeli occupation during Six-Day War of 1967, and was later handed over to Palestinian National Authority in 1996. With a population of some 13,000