Nomadic Archives – The Palestinian Resistance Camera (1968–Today)

During the long 68’ period, a moment of struggle against Western colonialism and neo-colonialism affected the entire ‘Third World’: at the same time the Vietnam war was increasingly polarizing the world, independence movements were emerging and accumulating power. The “Palestinian Film Unit” (PFU) was a collective of filmmakers and researchers founded in the 1960s, who engaged in the production of films and documentaries within the framework of the “Third Cinema movement” (in Spanish: Tercer Cine). Around 1980- 1981, the situation between Israel and Lebanon had escalated and the PFU archivists feared for the fate of the Archive, and thus it has been moved a few times, until eventually in 1982 it disappeared, assumingly bombed, and most of the archival materials were destroyed. Only a few films that were sent to film festivals in Europe and the Arab world survived. In recent decades, we can observe the phenomenon of second-generation Palestinians working with these remains of the lost archive, or on the story of the PFU, producing documentaries and other film and media productions that revive and reinvigorate the story. These Palestinian filmmakers provided a vital, immediate response to geopolitical conversations that deliberately did not address them—a defining feature of Palestinian image-making.
Analogous to this phenomenon, among Palestinian filmmakers are numerous practices of “Citizen Photographers” or “Citizen Photojournalism” (Alan Stuart). Those are usually amateur Palestinians who also document their lives in the West Bank. They use video cameras or mobile phones and circulate the materials on social media. Despite the fact that these practices of Palestinian documentary photographers around the world are connected to a certain tradition, they arise without a clearly defined archival institution or a central digital collection that hosts the materials, whether physically or digitally. I refer to both archives as nomadic bodies of visual knowledge that entail a strong aesthetical and political form of self-(re)presentation. I seeks to discover what role the concepts of remembering, collecting and archiving—in its materialistic sense as a scattered, dislocated and nomadic phenomenon—play in the framework of such visual productions and how did they overcome the nomadic state of the Archive. Finally, I shall conclude how the archive becomes an invaluable medium in the Palestinian struggle for self-(re)presentation—as a means and not only as an end—to create a counter-narrative and counter knowledge.