“When we talk of this as a place of destruction, we turn these people into the other.” This was how Jay Weissberg, the artistic director of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, held annually in Northern Italy, introduced one of the more emotional film experiences I’ve had this year. The occasion was a screening of Palestine: A Revised Narrative, built entirely around silent films from Palestine shot by the British army during World War I. Despite the fact that the footage is more than a century old, this is, for all intents and purposes, a new work.
Palestine: A Revised Narrative, which premiered at the Arab Film Festival in Berlin last year and screened at Pordenone last month, is presented as a “cine-concert,” incorporating a live 30-minute performance by the Beirut-based musician and artist Cynthia Zaven alongside images edited down from silent newsreels of Palestine provided by Britain’s Imperial War Museum. The “score” Zaven performs onstage is an ethereal combination of composed music and soundscapes created with the acclaimed Lebanese sound designer Rana Eid. Some of the sounds are of recorded speeches from politicians like Yasser Arafat and Henry Kissinger, though they’re played so distantly that the words dissolve into drones. Some of the sounds are derived from old audio recordings of Haifa that Eid discovered in her in-laws’ home.
Watching (and hearing) it all hit harder than I expected. Palestine: A Revised Narrative plays as a dreamy, deeply moving travelogue with a defiant political edge. These films were originally made to show the British advance through Palestine as they defeated the Ottomans, who had ruled the region for half a millennium. Zaven reedited the footage to shift the focus away from warfare and soldiers (including images of Field Marshal Edmund Allenby, the leader of the British expeditionary forces) and toward the people in the background of these events: the shepherds, fishermen, and ordinary humans caught up in the conflict. The effect is breathtaking, even though it shouldn’t be. We’ve been understandably inundated in recent years with images of the destruction in Gaza, but for all the urgency of such images, it is also bracing to be reminded that there have always been people here — everyday people living their lives, often amid the most unimaginable chaos.
That’s not to suggest that war is absent from this footage. Early on we see a seemingly endless pan across a bombed-out Gaza. We also see captured Turkish soldiers — including a band, still with their instruments. Later, we watch the mayor of Jerusalem, Hussein al-Husayni, surrendering the city to an English sergeant. (“Thus was the oldest capital in the world surrendered to a British soldier,” reads the contemporaneous intertitle.) But what comes through most vividly in the film is a vision of a land teeming with life, a land of verdant fields, of olive trees and crowded shores, of fishermen and shepherds and people of all kinds walking through bustling streets, at times dancing and singing together.
“Oh my god, it was overwhelming,” Zaven says of her first time seeing this footage. “I was used to seeing images from that era and from that region, but never on film. At the time, we were two months into the war in Gaza, and I was completely blown away.” Both she and Weissberg note that the footage serves as a rebuke to the oft-quoted myth that the area of Palestine was sitting empty and uninhabited until the founding of Israel, not to mention the absurd notion that no such place as “Palestine” existed in the first place: The very first image we see in the film is a contemporaneous British map of the region identifying it very clearly as Palestine.
Even so, these are ultimately fragments from the original films shot by the British. To look past the colonizing gaze of the footage, Zaven didn’t just rely on cutting out the shots of triumphant soldiers. She and Eid also sought to create a kind of unity through the score and Zaven’s live performance of it, over the course of which she generates unique sounds using a variety of objects situated atop her piano: scraping strings with resin, plucking fisherman’s wire to create bass notes, using small screws to evoke bells. Zaven notes that the only time she actually plays a melody on the piano is when we see the sea in Jaffa. (“Because I thought, Okay, everything has changed in Palestine, except the sea,” she says.) The soundscape’s melancholy unease conveys a sense of people persisting against the chaos of the world. “After we had all the elements together, I realized that it was actually the performance that was connecting all the elements,” Zaven says. “The movement of the body, the presence of the human being onstage, connects what’s coming from the image and what’s coming from the piano — the fixed image and the moving image, the past and the present, everything at the same time.”
Click here to preview your posts with PRO themes ››
Although this project is very much of the moment, the seeds for it originated in a program Weissberg put together for Pordenone in 2017 called “The Effects of War,” showcasing a wide array of silent films about the physical, emotional, and societal upheavals caused by World War I. “I was looking at things like malnutrition, starvation, and lots and lots of films about mutilated men,” he recalls. “And then I saw this film of Gaza being bombed in 1917 during the Second Battle of Gaza. And it was remarkable because you see these fertile fields and then the bombing of the Great Mosque. The images really stuck in my head for a long time.” Last year, Weissberg informed Rabih El-Khoury, programming director of the Arab Film Festival, of the existence of this footage. El-Khoury then contacted Zaven, who took 77 silent newsreels, all shot in Palestine during WWI, and edited them down to this 30-minute work. After premiering in Berlin, Palestine: A Revised Narrative has been presented at the Barbican in London and in Manchester as part of the Sahar Film Festival, and it will be at the Gabes Film Festival in Tunisia next May. Zaven says there are currently no plans to bring it to the U.S., though she certainly hopes to.
For Weissberg, now in his tenth year of programming Pordenone, this presentation represents yet another example of his efforts to make sure this 44-year-old silent-film festival — which serves as a valuable gathering place for scholars, archivists, historians, musicians, filmmakers, and ordinary cinephiles, not to mention locals — continues to speak to the world at large. At the festival, Palestine: A Revised Narrative was preceded by a 77-minute 1917 documentary, The German Retreat and the Battle of Arras, depicting the British army’s WWI Easter offensive around the northern French town. (Images of war were plentiful during this year’s festival, which also included the world premiere of a lovely restoration of Charlie Chaplin’s 1918 classic Shoulder Arms, probably the first wartime satire ever produced and a key work in Chaplin’s own evolution as a politically engaged artist.)
Despite its occasionally musty reputation, silent cinema is very much a living, breathing, ever-changing thing: New works are discovered all the time; brand-new restorations are screened at Pordenone with live musical accompaniment provided by artists from around the world; lectures, talks, and panels address ever-shifting issues of interpretation. But the perils of nostalgia are never far for a festival centered around cinema’s increasingly distant past. “I’m constantly looking for ways to counter the narrative that we are locked in amber and that we are people who always just want to look at the past in a nostalgic way,” Weissberg says, adding that “Italy itself has suffered terribly from a phony nostalgia for the ’30s and ’40s that the government continues to push.”
Part of pushing against such nostalgia requires recontextualizing these works in creative ways. Zaven was highly aware that most of this footage had been filmed for propaganda purposes by the British military. “These were newsreels that the British army was going to show the audience back home, saying, ‘Look what we’ve done in Palestine. We’re gaining terrain, we’re winning, we’re beating the Turks.’” In cutting through that material, however, she’s been able to bring forth something beautiful, touching, and maybe even a little hopeful. “What I thought was fascinating was seeing the population: the Christians in Bethlehem and Jerusalem, and the Muslims at the Mosque of Omar, and the Jews at the Wailing Wall,” she says. “That was the most moving aspect — that coexistence was not a sin. These people had so many things in common. They sang more or less the same songs. They celebrated together.”
