| Series |
Ethnographic video online, volume 2
|
| Abstract |
Still Life is the first sequence in a triptych of portraits that explores the mediations of memory among three generations of Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon. It considers how a series of photos brought to Lebanon by Said Otruk, an elderly Palestinian fisherman from Acre, mediate both his present experience and recollections of his life in Palestine before 1948. We see how the reality represented in these images has become conflated with them; Said repeatedly misremembers the number of his fishing boat and his age when he left, and when he describes photos of Acre's waterfront as capturing the golden age, he seems to be gesturing as much at the splendid figure of his own youth as at the halcyon days of pre-48 Palestine. Rather than being a straightforward expository narrative, or an act of witness of political solidarity, the film is a meditation on the dislocations of memory, the effects of aging and forgetfulness, and the recollection of youthful vitality; the loss of Palestine is lyrically convergent with the felt loss of this vitality. The two portraits that complete the triptych examine spatial and ritual mediations of memory. |
| General note | Title from resource description page (viewed Feb. 6, 2014). |
| Date/time/place of a event note | Recorded in Lebanon in 2007. |
| Other forms | Previously released as DVD. |
| Reproduction note | Electronic reproduction. Alexandria, VA : Alexander Street Press, 2014. (Ethnographic video online, volume 2). Available via World Wide Web. |
| Language | This edition in Arabic with English subtitles. |
| Genre/form | Documentary films. |
