'Familiar Phantoms Triple Bill' Review: A Future Haunted… By Hope And Its Misfortunes
We live in times where the image simultaneously means everything and nothing. We see images come out of a genocide, and ask the question “What can we do?” and answer as we look away. We let images of the past haunt—yet never inform—our present. We live in times when words simultaneously mean everything and nothing. We speak for a Palestinian people’s suffering and ask the question “What can we do?” and answer as we don’t listen. We let words of the past haunt—yet never inform—our present. Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind’s triple bill of shorts Familiar Phantoms, As If No Misfortune had Occurred in the Night, and In Vitro raise such themes, drawing on the dehumanising experiences enforced upon Palestinians that leads them to contend with a past- a free Palestine before occupation- that haunts a cruel present and refuses a different, hopeful future.
Stylistically very different from each other, the three short films initially seem incoherent or out-of-connect with each other. Familiar Phantoms is an autobiographical account of Sansour’s family told via surrealist filmmaking; As If No Misfortune is an opera of a mother lamenting her and her daughter’s life and future; In Vitro is a dystopian dialogue between two generations of women contending with a collapsed world and traumas of the past held by the body. None of them appear to be stylistically or generically in dialogue with each other, and yet it becomes more apparent as one looks back to the films, that viewing them together is the only way the impact of each can be fully understood.
The crumbling house and dark atmospheric music in Familiar Phantoms bleed seamlessly into the theatrical staging of As If No Misfortune… within old ruins, the over-the-top conventions of the operatic mode of communication and dramatic, striking costumes. The singularity of the mother’s trepidations with the past and fears of the future in As if no Misfortune… are voiced out loud by the two women in In Vitro, each on one side of the coin that questions “how do we, a people who hold and harbour so much pain, move forward into the world?” The thread that weaves these films together then is uncertainty. Uncertainty of the self, of memory, of life as the Palestinian (at times alluded) subjects in the films know it. Memory becomes both hyper-visible and meaningless in the landscape of exile of each film- it is both the jailor and the saviour of the generations of Palestinians across the diaspora- as Sansour and Lind convey to audiences.
However, during the Q&A after the screening, Sansour and Lind stressed that the different genres and styles of the film weren’t simply incongruous for the purpose of exploration of form, but rather to “claim the language of world events and universalise the specific narratives” they were presenting. This “language of world events” they referred to is specifically visible in their use of the opera in As If No Misfortune… The opera here is in conversation with the operas of the world, where a singular character- sung by Nour Darwish- tells a personal story in a genre that is widely recognised as being hyper-dramatic. Based on Gustav Mahler's Kindertotenlieder and the Palestinian traditional song Mashaal, the opera/aria gives us a sound we are familiar with and a narrative we may not be privy to but unravel as the film progresses. All these elements combined give us a film that conveys to us unknown narratives and emotions via known methods and mediums. This blending of elements is consistent across the other 2 shorts as well, with Sansour and Lind emphasising the importance of the films’ forms on their content.
Watching this triple bill in light of it being 400+ days since the beginning of the continued genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and 76 years since the occupation of Palestine, it becomes abundantly clear that engaging with all aspects of the Palestinian community is as important as ever. We must recognise, through films like these, that the voices of Palestinians are loud and clear, and we must heed their words- whether they be of joy and hope, or despair and melancholy. Familiar Phantoms, As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night, and In Vitro are all framed in a bleak and melancholic manner with little room for optimism. However, they never allow the audience to become hopeless in the face of the Palestinians’ resistance to continued oppression and suffering, rather calling us to action. There may be uncertainty within the Palestinian community, with the destruction of their past leading to a rigid hold over the future and a hardly livable present. Yet, Sansour and Lind remind us to never forget who destroyed that past, and how we must continue reaching for a future where Palestine is liberated even if we cannot visualise what that looks like.
Edited by Oisín McGilloway, Editor-in-Chief
Comments