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The following description is by Shimrit Lee writing for Warscapes.com
About the Film
Kamal Aljafari remembers when Jaffa was transformed into civil war-torn Beirut. Under the direction of Menachem Golan, the production team of The Delta Force (1986) created urban mayhem, arranging for the explosion of real buildings in the staging of a fictional battle. Aljafari recalls standing on the side of the road with a group of other children, eagerly awaiting a glimpse of Chuck Norris racing by in a van with the name of their school, “St. Joseph,” printed on the door. Years later, while flipping through television channels in a hotel room in London, Aljafari was shocked to recognize this scene. He sat on the bed mesmerized, not by the action shots but by the background: a clear documentation of the Jaffa of his childhood, a city which has since been destroyed, renovated, gentrified and rebuilt beyond recognition.
Aljafari’s latest film Recollection is composed entirely of footage from Israeli and American fiction features shot in Jaffa from the 1960s to the 1990s, primarily of the so-called bourekas genre that dramatized tense romantic relationships between Mizrahi male “thugs” and Ashkenazi female elites. Jaffa provided the perfect setting to construct new Israeli narratives on top of emptied Palestinian ruins. As Aljafari explains, Palestinians were effectively “uprooted in reality and in fiction.” In Recollection, Aljafari removes the Israeli actors to give the stage to the people who appear by chance in the background of these shots, including both Palestinians and Iraqi Jews who were settled in the city, enacting what he describes as “cinematic justice.”
Aljafari was born in neighboring Ramle in 1972 and later emigrated to Germany to attend film school. His previous films include The Roof (2006), which follows him on a return visit to the homes of his parents and grandmother in Palestine, and Port of Memory (2009), which traces the eviction of his mother’s family from their home in Ajami. Aljafari’s dark humor and silent communication style liken his work to that of Palestinian filmmakers Elia Sulieman and Michel Khleifi.
Unlike his previous films, Recollection has no central protagonist. Aljafari moves through the found-footage, creating the illusion of a dreamer sleep-walking through the city with a handheld camera. While Aljafari sometimes describes this unseen cameraman as himself, each excavated memory is shared, belonging to his grandfather, his mother, his neighbors, and others who cannot return. Each footstep holds a certain urgency; as Aljafari explains, “I walk everywhere, sometimes hesitant and sometimes lost. I wander through the city; I wander through the memories. I film everything I encounter because I know it no longer exists. I return to a lost time.”
In the first minute of the film, the viewer is introduced to Aljafari’s methods and the disappearing act that follows. David Ben-Gurion walks through an orchard and quickly fades into nothing. A group of actors in the 1966 Israeli musical comedy Kazablanevaporate from the foreground as the camera zooms in on a woman watching the scene for a nearby window. Speaking with scholar Hamid Dabashi as part of Columbia University’s Palestine Cuts initiative, Aljafari described the irony that he chose to play with: “It’s quite amazing that these films wanted to exclude and erase the Palestinian history of Jaffa; the Palestinians simply didn’t exist. At the same time, [these films] documented them!”
Aljafari describes the editing process as an obsessive, almost magical project of compiling a picture album, of re-making his memories through a found archive. It was a sort of forensics - the meticulous reconstruction of an environment that no longer exists. He often had to complete parts of buildings or roads that had been blocked out by the actors he removed, those he calls “cinematic occupiers.” In some cases, Aljafari has drastically altered the scene, in one case digitally repainting an interior wall from brown to blue according to his memory of these homes. At other times, he allows the Israeli actors to stay because editing them out completely would have been too difficult. One scene shows former actor Uri Zohar beating an effigy in a black and white alleyway. In another, Israeli singer Ofra Haza walks down a stairwell in footage from West Side Girl (1979). Instead of erasing her, Aljafari intervenes by flipping the scene upside down.
The film contains no narrative structure, instead taking the form of a repetitive and rhythmic poem. Time slows down as the camera lingers lovingly over the textures of a wall, a single tile on the ground, and a detail on a stone windowsill that resembles a human nose. At other points, the camera goes berserk, rapidly scanning the frothing waves of the sea or racing down an empty highway. Viewers witness the construction of massive high-rise apartments and the chaotic production line of an orange factory - moments in which the dreamer enters a nightmare. However, despite the rich poetic nature of each dream sequence, the significance of Aljafari’s methods and theoretical logic may be lost on a viewer who is unfamiliar with his intentions. The concept of the film is best understood (and enjoyed) when the filmmaker himself is present.
While all of the footage in Recollection was taken and pieced together from other people’s films, the sound is the only aspect that Aljafari recorded himself. In an interview with Nathalie Handel for Guernica Magazine, he describes his method of placing special microphones inside interior walls and deep into the ocean where many of Jaffa’s ruins were discarded by the municipality of Tel Aviv: “It was important for me to listen to the sound of the walls, life buried beneath, inside the sea. We recorded at night because that’s when places free themselves from the present, and its occupiers.”