Visual, Spatial and Temporal Aporias in the Post-Palestinian Films of Basma Alsharif

Abstract

Abstract This article focuses on the films of diasporic Palestinian artist Basma Alsharif, analyzing the visual strategies she mobilizes to negotiate three aporias in Palestinian experience around visuality, space and mobility and temporality. Focusing on Ouroboros (2017) and Home Movies Gaza (2013), I explore the ethical ways she represents a situation of suspended violence without spectacularizing suffering or relying on overdetermined visual conventions. The films evoke both feelings of spatial constraint, and conversely, a diasporic expansiveness that characterizes a Palestinian structure of feeling. Finally, I look at Alsharif’s engagement with the concept of the eternal return, paying particular attention to the ways that it suggests a notion of time not predicated on the unitary, revolutionary (i.e., heteromasculine) subject and proposes a way forward not based on the exclusionary rhetoric of the nation-state. Throughout the article, I put her work in conversation with other female Palestinian filmmakers handling similar themes to identify emerging patterns in how Palestine is portrayed and conceived.