For many years, Kamal Aljafari has been collecting Israeli and Hollywood fiction films shot in his hometown Jaffa. These are films in which Palestinians are absent, yet they exist at the edges of the frames, visible only in traces and shadows. Further preserved in this archive is a city; its gradual dismantling over the decades chronicled film by film. From the footage of dozens of films, Aljafari has excavated a whole community and recreated the city from his youth, before its destruction by colonization and prior to the settlement projects. “Though out-of-focus, half-glimpsed, I have recognized childhood friends, old people I used to say good evening to as a boy... My uncle. I erased the actors. I photographed the backgrounds and the edges and made the passers-by the main characters of this film. In my film, I find my way from the sea, like in a dream. 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.” The spectral politics of Recollection is accentuated by its soundtrack, recorded in collaboration with sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard, which brings to life the ghosts lingering beneath the city surfaces. With the help of contact microphones, vibration sensors and hydrophones, they not only captured the hidden sound layers resonating in the walls but also in the ocean, which for Aljafari symbolizes desire. “The Israeli government and the municipality of Tel Aviv destroyed Jaffa. They threw the homes they destroyed into the sea. But every year, in the winter, when the sea rises, it throws part of these homes back onto the shore. The Tel Aviv municipality collects them, throws them back, but the ruins return. Every year the sea brings them back.”
“In Recollection, freedom is experienced in ‘the sound of the ocean... the echo you can hear outside but recorded from inside the wall. Life buried beneath, inside the sea’. As the images move slowly, other times brusquely, from a silhouette to a shadow, a sliver of the port city of Jaffa to another, the sound moves us into the present unearthing a past. We begin to see the ruins as breathing bodies. We see the place Palestinians have lived in and have been exiled from. And gradually we are brought face-to-face with history, with destruction. The phantoms stare at us. The filmmaker ‘frees the image’, an act he calls ‘cinematic justice’.” (Nathalie Handal)
