"Nervus Rerum brings visibility to the Jenin [Palestinian refugee] camp, populated by refugees who have no political rights or means of political representation. Yet it does so, strikingly, without positioning the camp’s Palestinians as transparent subjects of a documentary exposé. This refusal to represent the unrepresented delivers us to one particularly arresting aspect of the film: the visual experience of passing through narrow labyrinthine passages of tightly grouped buildings while gaining no information about the camp’s inhabitants—neither from direct testimonials nor descriptive commentary. Nervus Rerum depicts those who live in a political state of exception; but where one would expect anthropological insights and cultural access to Jenin’s inhabitants, there is only blankness and disorientation. In other words, this film is ruled by opacity, by the reverse of transparency, by an obscurity that frustrates knowledge and that assigns to the represented a source of unknowability that is also a sign of potentiality. As suggested in the “Trialogue on Nervus Rerum,” in which Eshun and Sagar discuss the film with film historian Irmgard Emmelhainz, one starting point for their project was “the conundrum of representing Palestine.” What is that conundrum? There are many."
Posted on: Thu, 18 Jul 2013 03:49:39 +0000
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