John Beck,'Beyond the Darkness of the Just Lived Moment,' pp. 156-169 in Bashir Makhoul, ed. Palestinian Video Art: Constellation of the Moving Image. Jerusalem: Al Hoash, 2013.[pre-publication version].

 

Beyond the Darkness of the Just Lived Moment John Beck

To occupy means to take up space or time, though the Latin origin of the word (from occupare: seize) is a reminder that this taking up is more of an acquisitive act than a simple ontological fact. Being preoccupied, by contrast, tends to refer more generally to the condition of being engrossed or otherwise unable to move on to other matters. In Latin, praeoccupare, or to ‘seize beforehand’, suggests something preemptive or anticipatory; to move in advance, to take up space not in reaction to but before some unspecified situation. In the context of Palestine, occupation confirms the word’s meaning as a seizure that takes up space, though occupation does not semantically provide enough room to explain what is excluded through the act. The Palestinian video artists discussed here are preoccupied with occupation, but not just in the straightforward sense of being unable to move beyond the condition of being, as it were, preoccupied (defined by an occupation that has already occurred). In works by Jacqueline Salloum, Tarzan and Arab, and Larissa Sansour, the temporal situation of being ‘seized beforehand’ is taken up as a defining material condition of possibility and as an integral structuring device in videos that directly interrogate the ways in which contemporary mainstream media (Hollywood film, US TV shows, popular music) is already preoccupied with (has seized beforehand) Arab identity, history and politics and continues to take up space

through misrepresentations that legitimate military and police actions led or supported by the United States. By drawing on strategies of appropriation and reuse, these artists foreground the act of seizure as theft (not so much the ‘creative borrowing’ often politely alluded to in less confrontational quarters and more of a smash-andgrab raid) that speaks not only to the circumstances of Palestine and Palestinians but also to issues related to the ownership of cultural production (copyright) and the proprietorial ideological uses to which it is put. The reuse of already existing materials implicitly questions who owns what as well as how meaning might be reconstructed once preoccupied space has been seized. In addition, these artists are preoccupied in the sense that their works are positioned prior to an as yet unspecified future that is signaled through the form of the work itself. The preexisting texts (film clips, music, genre conventions) drawn upon are, paradoxically, made to assume an anticipatory function: as trailer (Salloum), advertising (Tarzan and Arab), or opening credits (Sansour) to features that do not yet (and may never) exist. As such, these works directly engage with the temporal dimension of video and the conventions and promotional apparatus of moving image industries in order to explore not only what has already been shown and said but also what is yet to be seen and heard. There is, then, a beforehand that has been seized by Salloum, Tarzan and Arab, and Sansour out of the clutches of the always already occupied. In this positioning of the preoccupied as projective and prospective rather than that which has been foreclosed the works discussed here ventilate the closed forms of conventional media and imagine openings in what might otherwise be construed as formally and ideologically achieved occupations.

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REEL BAD Planet of the Arabs (2005) is a 9-minute montage by Palestinian-American filmmaker Jacqueline Salloum that collects Hollywood clips from a variety of sources that negatively depict Arabs and Muslims. Structured as a blockbuster movie trailer, Planet of the Arabs was a 2005 Sundance Film Festival selection and won the International Editing Award at the 2005 CinemaTexas Film Festival. The film is as flagrantly aggressive as its source material and is in wide circulation online where it contributes to the endless proliferation of official and unofficial promotional films, trailers, mash-ups, parodies, spoofs, rants, howls and grunts that make up the generic media noise of the twenty-first century. The critical bite of the film and its festival kudos, of course, set Planet of the Arabs apart from the run-ofthe-mill culture-jam, but the immersion of the film into the global media soup is suggestive not only of the way contemporary digital media art is no longer, nor can be, solely situated within institutionally legitimizing frameworks but also of the ambivalent nature of Salloum’s montage, which replicates and revels in the forms of its extravagant vernacular bigotry even as it amplifies the shrill xenophobia on display to a critical pitch. Planet of the Arabs is depressing, outrageous, funny, spectacular, offensive and boring all at once, much like the material it draws upon. The primary objective is to expose long-standing and habitual casual institutionalized racism and its consequences. As a piece of agitprop, Planet of the Arabs is undoubtedly effective and direct. Yet the straightforwardness of the idea and its execution is problematic to the extent that its critical moves have become so commonplace that it is in

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danger of dissolving into the dull hum of appropriation culture. It is this awkward fact, that the most direct mode of critique can also be among the most readily neutralized, that makes Planet of the Arabs intriguing. Part of the reason for its success on the festival circuit is presumably due not only to its technical proficiency but because its devices and strategies have been embraced and normalized to such an extent that they can be appraised and rewarded by experts. While the casual Youtube surfer might be indifferent to the artistic credibility of Planet of the Arabs and read it as one among many polemical cut-ups, among audiences familiar with the history of the avant-garde, Salloum has delivered a relevant and snappy détournement of mainstream studio product which gestures with gratitude toward its radical forebears. Unlike its Dadaist, Situationist, and neo-avant-gardist predecessors, however, not to mention latter-day practitioners like Craig Baldwin, Salloum’s film does not make her footage say things it does not want to say. Rather, Planet of the Arabs says what its sources already say, only louder, more stridently, less adulterated by peripheral plot padding. While it is true that the montage device is to all intents and purposes a safe bet formally, it is the relentless repetition of violent prejudice that keeps the film relevant. In this way, its place among the porn and bigotry online is appropriate and disquieting since Planet of the Arabs hammers away in the same dematerialized realm as all the other opinions, notions, and fantasies given freedom to squat there by internet service providers. This is not to say, though, that Salloum’s film is merely more evidence of the collapse of what little critical leverage contemporary cultural production can

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muster. The tradition that gives rise to a film like Planet of the Arabs and makes it somehow predictable and belated also sustains it as part of an ongoing interrogation of the power of mass media and its depredations. As such, the throwaway tactics of the movie trailer the film adopts – the excessive self-evidence, the clichéd telegraphing of significance, the overbearing stridency of delivery -- are apposite and bear some scrutiny. Against the grain of the film’s ostensible immediacy – of message, of outrage – a slower gathering together of the elements from which it has been pieced together suggests a constellation of interests that pivot not on exhausted and culturally neutralized indignation but instead on the utopian prospect of a main feature that refuses to deliver what the trailer promised. THE MASH-UP Planet of the Arabs emerged out of Salloum’s reading of Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (2001) by Jack Shaheen, a former CBS news consultant on Middle East affairs and Professor Emeritus of Mass Communications at Southern Illinois University. Shaheen has been writing about the stereotyping of Arabs in the US media since the 1970s when he contributed to the Wall Street Journal. Reel Bad Arabs follows previous studies The TV Arab (1984) and Arab and Muslim Stereotyping in American Popular Culture (1997), but the 2001 book inevitably, due to the timing of its publication, gained a visibility far in excess of Shaheen’s earlier work. He provides plot summaries of more than 900 film appearances of Arab characters in the manner of a more conventional film guide. Out of the 900 instances recorded, Shaheen identifies only a dozen positive representations and 50 evenly balanced one.

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Aside from this shocking statistic, the most striking aspect of Reel Bad Arabs is its stubborn and exhaustive documentation of endless Hollywood product, from Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion (1950) to Your Ticket is No Longer Valid (1981), a film also known, appropriately, as A Slow Descent into Hell. A series of appendices provide, among other things, a ‘Best List’, ‘Recommended Films’, a ‘Worst List’, an alphabetical list of ‘Epithets Directed at the Film Arab’, and, as in indication that this is an open-ended, potentially endless project, a list of films for future review. Planet of the Arabs functions as a metonym for Reel Bad Arabs, a small part that stands in for a much more overwhelming body of evidence. Salloum’s film also works as a compressed articulation of what Shaheen describes -a return to the source – as well as, inadvertently, a preview of the more conventional 2006 documentary based on Shaheen’s material directed by Jeremy Earp and Sut Jhally. Along with Earp and Jhally’s Reel Bad Arabs, Planet of the Arabs joins a growing number of films using montage to gather the visual evidence of Hollywood prejudice and misrepresentation. Two films, Victor Masayesva, Jr.’s Imagining Indians (1992) and Reel Injun (2009) by Neil Diamond, Catherine Bainbridge and Jeremiah Hayes, explore the popular iconography of the Native American in Hollywood film; Arthur Dong’s Hollywood Chinese: The Chinese in American Feature Films (2007) makes a similar case for the stereotyping of Asian Americans. In addition, Thom Andersen and Noël Burch’s Red Hollywood (1996) provides extensive documentation of the work of blacklisted filmmakers. In these films, footage is embedded in more conventional documentary structure, framed by interviews and commentary. The final montage sequence of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000), by

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contrast, featuring racist clips from Hollywood features and cartoons from the first half of the twentieth century, is diegetically embedded into a contemporary drama. Adam Curtis’s polemical documentaries, in particular The Power of Nightmares (2004), concerned with the symmetries between Islamic and neocon fundamentalisms, are also full of provocative montage sequences of the kind used in Planet of the Arabs. While these films in different ways frame the archive as primary evidence or exhibits, other works, such as Mark Rappaport’s Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (1992) and From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1995), build narrative directly out of the dynamic juxtaposition of found materials in ways that move beyond the documentary impulse. Using a fictionalized beyond-the-grave narration from actor Eric Farr (playing Hudson) and some extremely careful editing, Rock Hudson’s Home Movies lifts a notvery-concealed gay subtext out of the star’s onscreen career. Rappaport adopts a similar strategy in From the Journals of Jean Seberg, where Mary Beth Hurt plays a Seberg who did not commit suicide commenting on films featuring the real Seberg who did. In Rappaport’s work the archive is reanimated and absorbed into a complex narrative world where there is no obvious division between the fictional and the factual. The fictions of the original features contain performances by the ‘real’ Hudson and Seberg playing a variety of characters, while the actors playing Hudson and Seberg provide ‘documentary’ commentary that may or may not be based on facts about the stars’ lives. Yet because they are patently substitutes for the actual subjects they portray, the actors playing dead actors end up positioning the film clips they discuss as the evidence upon which the ‘documentary’ is built. The layers of performance and substitution allow Rappaport’s films to

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become endowed with their own coherence and narrative logic, one that somehow maintains a fidelity to documentary’s truth-telling function while fusing with the manufactured realities of Hollywood film. Without the evidence provided by the found footage Rappaport’s work would slip into biopic; without the performed narratives the films would remain raw data for documentary. What is most compelling in Rappaport’s work is what it shares with much appropriation-based filmmaking: the capacity of footage to communicate in ways seemingly at odds, often radically so, with the original material’s narrative trajectory. Repurposing material from mainstream entertainment media not only tears apart the illusionistic power of Hollywood ‘realism’ but it can also, as in Dara Birnbaum’s influential early video work Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978-1979), become a thrillingly artificial counterfactual. Birnbaum’s repetition of the spectacular moment of superhero transformation, making a narrative climax into protracted sameness, has become a familiar strategy, such as in Christian Marclay’s Crossfire (2007), an audiovisual installation on four screens which assaults the viewer from every angle with gunfire taken from a number of films. The percussive, relentless sonic violence of Crossfire extrapolates from modern thrillers like Michael Mann’s Heat (1995) – itself fixated on the musical properties of prolonged weapons discharge – by shearing off the surrounding contrapuntal narrative to leave only austere, literal-minded aggression. This decontextualized, repetitive, continuous violent present is the world engineered by Salloum in Planet of the Arabs. THE TRAILER

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With a running time of 9 minutes Planet of the Arabs exceeds the length of conventional movie trailers, which usually last for around two and half minutes (though in recent years trailers have become longer). Using the trailer form, however, enables Salloum’s film to engage with the complex conventions of promotional film narrative and the engineering of expectations that trailers are intended to achieve. As Lisa Kernan has argued, the trailer is both a form of advertising and ‘a unique form of narrative film exhibition, wherein promotional discourse and narrative pleasure are conjoined’ (2004: 1). This combination of persuasion and attraction positions the trailer in a curious relationship with time; the trailer compresses an already-existing film into the promise of a viewing experience yet to come and as such explicitly shows what has already been made even as it withholds full disclosure of the contents of the full feature upon which it relies. The ‘present’ of the trailer is, then, a combination of what-has-been and what-will-be; as Kernan explains, ‘the transformed narrative coherence of this “quotational” world inhabited by spectators of trailers constitutes the diegesis of the promotional film text (7). A successful trailer must not only package its quotations so that the trailer itself engages the viewer, but it must also direct the viewer toward the missing narrative for which the trailer is the emissary. What this suggests in the context of Planet of the Arabs is that the film can be seen not merely as a collection of offensive clips that stand as evidence of institutional prejudice (though it does fulfill that function) but that it also alludes to a future, as-yetunseen narrative that holds out the promise of being an expansive engagement with the unresolved questions the film-as-trailer poses. It is in this sense that Kernan

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sees the trailer as a utopian form inasmuch as it invites the viewer to imagine a future film that will in all likelihood differ from the actual film being advertised. While this works as advertising (the activation of desire) it also opens up the possibility of anticipated outcomes that can include a critical awareness of the limitations of what the trailer promises. While the film industry, Kernan argues, expects that the gaps in the trailer narrative will be filled in by the spectator ‘in habitual ways’, the promise latent in the trailer can also activate what she calls, following Ernst Bloch, an ‘anticipatory consciousness’ as the trailer is invested ‘with our fondest hopes for a movie to come – and at times, for a world to come’ (16). Unexpectedly, then, the unabashedly sensational artifice of the trailer-asadvertising ‘is thickened by the unique capacity of their montage structures to evoke real hopes’ (16). In its relentless rerun of Hollywood prejudice, Planet of the Arabs captures both the contradictory mix of pleasure and resistance experienced while watching the montage (the excitement of fast-moving action and spectacle coupled with the repulsion of witnessing repeated offensive representations) and the future-oriented drive of the trailer form that steers the viewer beyond the confinements of the verbal, physical, and formal violence the montage delivers. Given the rapidity with which Salloum moves through the selected primary material and the capacity of Hollywood violence to almost instantaneously decontextualize itself into spectacle even before it is interrogated by the critical video artist-a-curator, it is hard to see how the trailer as a model for enabling the emergence of an anticipatory consciousness might actually work here. What the dissemination of Planet of the Arabs (not to mention all film trailers nowadays)

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across the internet allows for that was not previously available to audiences is the opportunity for repeated viewing, for deceleration and close examination, much as Salloum has surveyed, selected and torn out of their original contexts the films that comprise her own work. Quotation calls up the work cited and it has never been easier to track down the references. The accelerated force of the trailer can therefore have the brakes applied in the reading as the viewer reverse engineers from the fragments the absent context of which the 9 minute film is the distillation. It is here, in the hermeneutics of what Bloch calls the ‘Not-Yet-Conscious’ (1995: 116; see also Kellner 1997) that the ‘darkness of the just lived moment’ (1995: 193) might be illuminated. PLANET OF THE ARABS The clout delivered in the title of Salloum‘s film relies on the paranoid post-Civil Rights era baggage of the film franchise inaugurated with the 1968 Hollywood adaptation of French author Pierre Boulle’s La planète des singes (1963). Franklin J. Schaffner’s The Planet of the Apes and its four sequels make literal the centuries of American racist nightmares that envisaged an apocalyptic African American uprising (Greene 1999) capable of producing a transmogrified Weltanschauung also antagonistically suggested in the title of Public Enemy’s 1990 album Fear of a Black Planet. Planet of the Arabs continues this combination of racist dread and provocational wish-fulfilment, aligning itself through a simple substitution with science fiction’s strategies of defamiliarisation and estrangement; with Hollywood’s hyperbolic spectacularisation of racist fears; with African American culture’s own deployment of science fiction as a utopian space for alternative futures; and

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with the globalizing expansion of the fears, the hyperbole, the stereotypes, and the consequences. The ‘planet’ speaks to Hollywood’s (and America’s) tendency to universalize local political interests but also to the global reach of Hollywood’s version of geopolitics. Like Piotr Uklanski’s The Nazis (1999), a frieze of 122 head-and-shoulder images of actors from European and American films wearing World War II German and Italian military uniforms, Planet of the Arabs assembles an Alist cast of Hollywood actors and a fair number of alsorans to comprise her army of generals, foot soldiers, agents, mercenaries, guerrillas, freedom fighters, and assorted officials and bit players. This is a studio blockbuster (the film offers a triad of studio idents: 20th Century Fox-Tri-Star-MGM/UA) where the box-office heft of Michael J Fox, Kiefer Sutherland, Jamie Lee Curtis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tommy Lee Jones, Chuck Norris, Danny Devito, the Monkees, Michael Douglas, Robert Vaughn, Lee Marvin, Ralph Richardson, Sam Waterston, Sal Mineo, and Samuel L. Jackson, join forces to fight terror and maintain order in the face of amorphous Arab threat. While many of the films featured are action thrillers of variable quality – Norris and Marvin in The Delta Force (1986), James Cameron’s True Lies (1994), Rules of Engagement (2000) by William Friedkin, Norris again in The Hitman (1991), Top Gun ripoff Into the Sun (1992) – others flesh out a more disturbing pervasiveness, such as the gratuitous Libyan terrorist scene in Back to the Future (1985), camel jokes with Kenny Rogers in The Muppet Show, or Sharon Osborne worrying about her personal security on CNN. Early entries include Chuck Jones cartoon Ali Baba Bunny (1957) and Otto Preminger’s Exodus (1960) but there is notably nothing in Planet of the Arabs made post-9/11. As such, the film is a trailer for the ‘War on Terror’.

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Salloum’s film opens with an aircraft hijacking and establishes the grounds for a terrorist war conducted against the United States. An Arab leader in True Lies explains the double standard: Americans bomb women and children while charging their adversaries with terrorism. Cut to a repeated shot of the violent stabbing of an American soldier. From here the sense of a besieged and vulnerable United States is developed through a sequence that notes attacks on civilians and the ineffectiveness of borders against an indeterminate Arab threat. The dialogue moves from identifying Palestinians, then Libyans, to a generic ‘they’ and ‘them’ as the aggressor. Michael J. Fox has lost his wife in terrorist crossfire between Palestinians and French police (Bright Lights, Big City [1988]) and then, in the next shot, watches his friend murdered by Libyans in Back to the Future. Maintaining continuity through the focus on Fox shows how the distinction between Palestinians and Libyans is largely irrelevant: this is not a conflict over specific political issues but in effect a race war where fine distinctions matter less than the overarching sense of threat from a dark and inscrutable enemy advancing from all sides. As a race war, the following comedic clips, from the Muppet Show (sheiks, camels) and Into the Sun, where the clichés of the Southern redneck are folded into the figure of the stupid Arab mocking captured American airmen by quoting the Loretta Lynn song playing in the background (‘you looking at me, you’re looking at country’), suggest an attempt to deflate fear into contempt. An especially nasty scene follows featuring Chuck Norris delivering a sneering lesson in American payback: ‘Mr Lecombe said for me to tell you, uh, camel jockeys … if you fuck with me I'm gonna cut off your balls and stick ‘em up your ass’ (The Hitman). Ali Baba (‘the mad dog of the Middle East’) barks and the hordes

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descend, on horseback, over walls, literally rising out of the sand, attempting to rape Kathleen Turner. At this point, Planet of the Arabs deploys the first of two chorus-like excerpts from Network (1976), where an angry newsman played by Peter Finch rails on air about the poison of American television. ‘You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here,’ rants Finch to the TV audience: ‘You're beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube. You even fuck like the tube. This is mass madness, you maniacs’. In the context of Salloum’s film the speech plays as a direct critical commentary on the previous four minutes and appears to be a much needed reality check. Yet Network is a complicated film about corporate greed in the American media and what is really feeding the newsreader’s anger is the fact that his network is being sold to Saudi Arabians. Network features prominently in Shaheen’s study (347-9) and Salloum’s use of it in Planet of the Arabs manages a double signal here: Finch’s newscaster is precisely railing against the threat of a planet of the Arabs as the Saudis buy up American interests even as his diatribe is rerouted by Salloum to support her critique of misrepresentation of Arabs in the American media. Planet of the Arabs concludes with another clip of Finch calling upon viewers to turn off their sets: ‘Turn them off in the middle of this sentence I’m speaking to you now. Turn them off!’ Before we turn off, though, after the half-way Network metacommentary Planet of the Arabs returns to the montage, focusing on the Israel-Palestine conflict and an uncontainably irrational Islamic religious extremism. ‘The Arabs are fanatics on the subject of Jewish immigration’, Ralph Richardson urbanely reflects in

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Exodus, the translation of occupation into ‘immigration’ serving to underscore the absurdity of Palestinian outrage. While we are reminded that ‘It's an honor to die for Allah’, Darlanne Fluegel punctures pious idealism with a gesture toward the kind of on-the-ground inequality that so often serves as an alibi for U.S. interventions in the Middle East:

‘In your country you

treat women like camels and send young boys to their deaths in the name of your excuse for a god’. The American response to Islam (announced before a devastating airstrike): ‘Face Mecca, pilgrim’. The final montage, before Peter Finch returns to call for the off switch, is a devastating sequence of verbal and physical retribution. Hostage: ‘I have a very important message for the leaders of the United States and the peoples of the world. You guys ought to nuke this fuckin place off the map.’ Samuel L. Jackson: ‘Yes, goddamn it. Waste the muthafuckers’. This final line, from Rules of Engagement – ‘one of the most blatantly anti-Arab scenarios of all time’ (Shaheen 404) – announces the massacre of over 80 Yemini civilians by US Marines in a sequence that lasts, in the original film, for fifteen minutes. The ferocity of the violence here is then duplicated in Planet of the Arabs with an equally viscous verbal assault from Deterrence that also includes the nuclear option. Why worry about retaliation, the racist speaker concludes, since ‘they're so stone age backwards they probably never even seen a button let alone know how to push one’. Problem solved. There is, then, a plot to Planet of the Arabs despite the fragmentary nature of the footage. Real attacks are cited as the justification for defensive measures against an indeterminate but definitely Arab enemy (motive). Because it is a war, the conventions of patriotic propaganda are engaged as in any other war, the

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enemy caricatured as both stupid and fanatically deadly (characterization). Hostage taking exposes combatants to the intractable beliefs of the adversary (character development, plot tension, and identification of the protagonist with the viewer) that leads to the inescapable and necessary use of excessive force (dénouement). The fact that many familiar Hollywood faces appear in uniform helps normalize the sense that everyone is involved in the struggle (most of the Arab characters are not familiar faces or are actors who usually play villains, such as Henry Silva) and everyone appears to be following the same script. Like any movie trailer, Planet of the Arabs simplifies and compresses but the bare bones of the story are clear to follow, aided by strong soundtrack cues that hold the fragments together and amplify the emotional context. THE SOUNDTRACK As in any promotional video, the soundtrack of Planet of the Arabs is used to maximum dramatic effect. The film opens with a low menacing hum that erupts into an aggressive heavy metal rhythm. The film uses current iterations of heavy metal music (‘death’, ‘black’, ‘thrash’ metal) throughout, its oscillation between anticipatory bass lines and bursts of jagged guitar riffs creating a series of violent waves that heave from pregnant lull to devastating violence. Heavy metal is a favoured dramatic motivator in video games and promotional media and has also become a prominent aspect of psychological warfare on the battlefield in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as a tool used in torture to alienate and terrorize subjects. The articulation of (largely) adolescent white male libidinal energy in heavy metal, its hyperbolic, death-obsessed, cartoon-like

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lyrical content, and its commodified expressions of individual liberty all make the form an apt musical shorthand for U.S. aggression. At the same time, heavy metal retains significant subcultural credibility, its more outré iterations adopted by white working class and other minority groups as a genuinely unrecuperable expression of controlled countercultural violence. It is true that this violence is often inchoate and as likely to involve flirtation with serial killing and Nazi iconography as with grassroots activism and radical politics, but the very indeterminacy of much heavy metal, not to mention its continued ability to outrage the right as well as the left, give the form an ambivalent power within the uncomfortable cultural milieu of Planet of the Arabs. While heavy metal in the film delivers the menace and pace expected from a mainstream terror-themed promotional film, it also works to locate the film in a potentially more indeterminate, oppositional, subcultural space. The opening track used by Salloum is ‘Leave me Alone’ by Texas-based Speedealer, a band with their own Negativland-like history of scrapes with the corporate entertainment industry. Originally named REOSpeedealer, in (perhaps) ironic homage to FM radio stalwarts REO Speedwagon, the band had to abbreviate themselves to Speedealer because of a cease and desist demand from the Speedwagon lawyers. The flatbed truck of the Olds Speed Wagon has become the contemporary connection, the dealer or, with a bit more slippage, the speed-dialler, the instant hook-up merchant. A film like Planet of the Arabs thrives on precisely this kind of misprision, the proliferating associations produced by the accelerated circulation of tropes and messages, where everything collapses into everything else. The insolence of ‘Leave me Alone’ and the other metal tracks used in the

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soundtrack – Slayer’s ‘Skeletons of Society’, ‘Medicated’ by Downthesun, and Spinecast’s ‘Absolute Supremacy’ – is generic enough, though the titles of the songs capture the disturbing hybrid of dejection and hauteur typical of the genre and of the conflicted sensibility captured by the music and transmitted through its use in Salloum’s film. THE DOUBLE Planet of the Arabs imagines a future through the trailer-as-foretaste (or forewarning) that is also a compression of the past history of Euro-American mainstream misrepresentation. However offensive, though, the montage in Planet of the Arabs maintains and amplifies (as trailers do) the energy, excitement, and tension of the big-screen action-adventure movie even as the violence become increasingly predictable and pointless. If there are ways of thinking outside of Hollywood stereotypes Planet of the Arabs does not allow space for these alternatives inside the film; it is in this sense a work reliant upon the forms and conventions it so carefully reconstructs. This ostensibly ‘straight’ appropriation of right-wing Hollywood is a strategy that holds up the offensiveness of the material with an uncomfortable blankness that is never made safe for the viewer through any kind of critical contextualization. In a sense the real fear awakened by Planet of the Arabs is that there is no language outside the hyperbolic syntax of spectacular annihilation. The airlessness of Planet of the Arabs begs the question of what the film is in fact trailing. As a mode of politically engaged video it is in part an advert for the continued relevance of agitprop appropriation and a celebration of the possibilities of counterreading (Zyrd

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2003). It can also, in its relentlessness, be construed as a bleak anticipation of more of the same, a warning of future violence to come. Similarly, as a world constructed solely out of Hollywood misrepresentations, the film might be said to project a coming main feature as locked-down as the trailer, as continuous with the past as the present appears to be. Beyond these disturbing negatives, though, and in line with Kernan’s deployment of Bloch, Planet of the Arabs also posits an end to the trailer-as-perpetual-threat, since the Hollywood engine of fear and paranoia is here driven beyond what little flexibility is may otherwise appear to possess. What is being advertised in Salloum’s film, I think, is the capacity to locate pleasure among the contradictions of the military-entertainment spectacle and even within its most odious manifestations. This critical satisfaction, of grasping and retooling the machinery, is not separate from the fear of ideological airlock but produced out of it, a form of always already compromised fascination with the vocabulary of oppression that must endlessly address its own fitful attempts to find a space for critical purchase. If there is an awkward sense of complicity here, it is replicated in the more prosaic fact that Planet of the Arabs is also an advertisement for Salloum as an ‘emerging’ artist. The festival success of the short film no doubt helped considerably in enabling Salloum to make her first feature, the multi-award winning documentary on Palestinian hip-hop called Slingshot Hip Hop (2008). To be skeptical of career-building, though, carries the argument but a very short distance despite the fact that the combination of ethnic exoticism and critique of Hollywood is likely to play well in the liberal microclimate of the film festival scene. The inside outsider is, indeed, as much as part of the history of

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film culture as the revenge drama or the siege thriller, and the difficulty of living with contradictions is written into the DNA of any artistic project that ever needed funding and an audience. At the same time, though, the complex of cultural codes that contribute to the shaping, not just of the film business but to the construction of the artist, is made intensely visible in the context of works that seek to maintain a plausible criticality athwart the twin global behemoths of the film industry and the art world. Even the descriptors here are suggestive, film unashamedly self-identifying as industrial while art is imagined as less a business and more of an environmental totality. Positioned thus between an industry and a world, between commodity and ontology, ‘advertisements for myself’, to borrow an expression from that old existentialist hustler Norman Mailer, are part of the game within which Salloum’s film operates and through which she and other Palestinian artists are interpellated. Nowhere is the self-promotional dimension to contemporary Palestinian video art more pronounced than in the work of identical twins Ahmed and Mohamed Abu Nasser, Gaza artists who work under the name Tarzan and Arab (nicknames given to them by their father). While Salloum’s film may incidentally serve as a trailer for her future output as a director, for Tarzan and Arab the promise of anticipated features is integral to the project. The slide from ‘Apes’ to ‘Arabs’ in the title of Salloum’s work is a calculated substitution that intensifies the abrasiveness already at work in the way the Planet of the Apes franchise literalizes white racist paranoia; the Ape/Arab association and its colonialist history is also woven into the professional identity of Tarzan and Arab but to the point where real life individuals and dramatis personae are confusingly

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blurred. Tarzan is, of course, the man raised by apes, the hybrid and contradictory civilized-barbarian able to speak to the jungle and the city, the colonized periphery and the imperial centre. As doubles, Tarzan and Arab embody this hybrid identity but also literally split it into two versions of the same: the Ape-man and the Arab, one physically looking just like the other. The infinite regress of this rebounding binary seems as closed as the hermetic vocabulary of insult and aggression seen in Planet of the Arabs, and Tarzan and Arab, in their work and the context within which they work, appears to confirm this sense of enclosure. Locked into life in Gaza, the story the twins tell of their situation is one of cineastes without a cinema but where the idea of film itself, of the films not yet seen or made, become the driver for work made in the absence of experience, equipment or money. Like the soul singer persona Mingering Mike created by Washington D.C teenager Mike Stevens during the 1960s and 1970s, where an illustrious but nonexistent career was painstakingly imagined by an endless crafting of album covers, cardboard discs, promotional materials and a cappella reel-to-reel home taping, Tarzan and Arab have undertaken to construct a career as film directors through manufacturing the apparatus of an industry out of little more than the effulgence of their own dream factory. This is Gazawood, the imaginary and as yet mostly intangible projection of a counter-Hollywood built out of memory, desire, and daily confrontation with the material conditions of occupation. A sequence of twenty or so posters for imaginary films featuring Tarzan and Arab as stars work like Planet of the Arabs as adverts for coming attractions that are also Hollywood-style translations of Israeli Defence Force operations: the ‘films’ are titled after the code-names for military actions such as Summer

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Rain, Sea Breeze, Defensive Shield, and Cast Lead. In Colourful Journey (2010), their first film, the brothers are soldiers stalking each other amidst the rubble of Gaza, a mix of spaghetti western and war thriller played out to the soundtrack from 300, the hyper-stylized 2007 Hollywood depiction of the Battle of Thermopylae between the Spartans and Persians. The use of music from 300 in Colourful Journey is instructive in a number of ways, not least because the former film, about a small patriotic army resisting a huge Persian invasion, enraged many Iranians who saw it as a gross misrepresentation of history and of Persians. Javad Shamaqdari, a cultural advisor to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accused the film of ‘plundering Iran's historic past and insulting this civilization’. The Hollywood film, argued Shamaqdari, was a form of ‘psychological warfare’ against Tehran and its people, a sentiment echoed in the headline in the Iranian newspaper Ayandeh-No which claimed: ‘Hollywood declares war on Iranians’ (Joneidi 2007: online).

As part of a generic

Hollywood imaginary known as ‘the Middle East’, 300, a film offensive to Iranians, is quoted by Tarzan and Arab as a marker in the permanent war (real and psychological) against peoples from that region (Arab, Muslim, or otherwise construed as dangerous) that, as 300 suggests, has very deep historical roots. Colourful Journey’s choice of soundtrack, then, becomes another coded indication of the inescapable ideological continuity written into Hollywood film form. The 300 soundtrack, however, is also apposite for another reason related to Tarzan and Arab’s absorption of conventional tropes: the composer of 300’s music, Tyler Bates, was accused of borrowing heavily (sometimes note for note) from Elliot Goldenthal’s score for Titus (1999), a charge eventually acknowledged by Warner Brothers. The music in Colourful

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Journey, then, is lifted from a film about imperial war that has borrowed its own music from another film about imperial violence: Titus is an adaptation of Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s early and brutal tragedy about a Roman general and based on, among other sources, Ovid and Seneca. The themes and forms of Colourful Journey have been on a colourful journey but the constants are undiminished: power, empire, violence, misrepresentation, and theft. A STRANGER TO MY EYES Stolen soundtracks also play a vital part in Larissa Sansour’s Happy Days (2006), a video that borrows its title and theme song from the longrunning 1970s sitcom set in the longed-for ‘innocence’ of the Midwestern American 1950s. While the familiar theme music plays – the song ‘Happy Days’, written by Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel, best known for ‘Killing Me Softly With His Song’, a hit for Roberta Flack – instead of scenes of Milwaukee high school hijinks, the video features a collage of footage shot in the occupied Palestinian territories. The celebration of domestic security emphasised in the song’s reeling off of the days of the week – ‘Sunday, Monday, happy days / Tuesday, Wednesday, happy days’ – is put to ironic use in the film as the markers of the Palestinian everyday are enumerated: armoured vehicles, checkpoints, the apartheid wall, camels, men in keffiyehs, mosques, tourists photographed with Israeli soldiers, washing lines, street signs, bulldozers, children walking to school. Here the militarised environment is placed as the normative milieu within which everything else carries on as usual. In Happy Days the sitcom, the simple pleasures of ordinary life are offered as the ameliorating agents that dissolve the (largely absent) Cold War context of nuclear threat and the Civil Rights Movement into a pre23

feminist, pre-Vietnam nostalgic imaginary of vanilla harmony. For Sansour, the everyday, while patently shot through with violent menace, is nonetheless allowed to survive as a real site of collective experience and endeavour. The film is prefaced with the statement that ‘Any resemblance to real people or events is fully intentional’, underlining the defiant point that the capacity to continue to live ‘happy days’ in the face of such a massive oppressive restructuring of physical and psychological space through occupation might itself be a primary form of refusal. Sansour herself ‘stars’ in the film, depicted behind the wheel of a car showing her ID at gunpoint: ‘Starring Larissa Sansour as the Palestinian’, along with ‘The Israeli Army’. Among the establishing shots of places and people, Sansour is filmed on a swing, walking along the wall, giving the thumbs up (a fleeting reference to the Fonz, the loveable Italian American hood in the series played by German Jew Henry Winkler), posing with the washing – chirpy, inquisitive, part of the situation. To add to the antic TV-comedy sensibility, movement in the film is very slightly speeded up to give the sequence a level of zaniness in line with the bland uplift of the music. The only thing missing is the laugh track, though this is one element of sitcom convention that is never, in any case, used in opening sequences. A final incidental shot of two cats brawling is also classic sitcom whimsy, but in context it ends the film as a disturbing reminder of the repressed violence (killing me softly) that underpins any playfulness Happy Days might promise. Like Planet of the Arabs and Tarzan and Arab’s film posters, Sansour’s film repositions the paratextual apparatus of popular media – the opening sequence of a TV show – as the text itself. In doing so she, like Salloum and Tarzan and Arab, implies an absent larger context

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that remains unmade, unseen and unseeable, in this case the purported sitcom for which Happy Days is the opening. Like the other works considered here, Happy Days pays close attention to the conventions of the form within which it is working, drawing on the affective cues built in to the promotional and commercial imperatives of popular television. By concentrating on the peripheral, the parts of popular entertainment that are consumed in advance of the main feature, these films call attention not only to the engineered marginality of Palestine and the Palestinian – in fact and through mainstream articulations of neocolonial ideology – but also to the ways in which the compressed summaries of longer narratives attempt to establish the form and tenor of what is to come. If the aim of the movie trailer is to anticipate and govern reception of the feature and the purpose of the opening sequence of a sitcom is to establish situation, tone and character, counter-readings of the body of the text have effectively received a preemptive strike. Yet as Kernan’s understanding of the complex logic of the Hollywood trailer suggests, the necessarily ventilated narrative space of the trailer – and, we might add, the TV show opening sequence, which fulfils to an extent the function of presenting coming attractions – unavoidably leaves room for unexpected and uncontrollable readings that might imagine futures not already written into the script. Making the paratext the text, as Planet of the Arabs and Happy Days do, is in itself a destabilising move, wiping the notion of a main feature that comes after in favour of the preliminary as the thing in itself. What might come after is left hanging but the set-up is there. HAPPY DAYS

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One of the aims of much appropriation art is to release latent signals in the original work through recontextualisation. The proliferation of associations that can be triggered through the splicing of discordant materials is unruly and often uncontrollable. As movie trailers, not to mention most other forms of visual, verbal, and auditory communication, migrate to the internet, the capacity for making connections no longer stops with the producer and no longer remains solely in the mind of the reader or viewer during screening/viewing. The real-time reception of video in these circumstances opens into the information network, allowing for a potentially limitless extrapolation from any given point of entry. The trailer or the opening TVshow sequence, once fleeting and often soon (consciously at any rate) forgotten, can now, like anything else online, be slowed down, taken apart, endlessly repeated. Ironically but not insignificantly, that which was compressed, distilled, and calculated to effect a short sharp shock before disappearing is now open to the slow interpretive unraveling once reserved for spatial modes of communication (books, paintings, buildings). And while this has been possible since the availability of recording devices like audio tape, VCRs, DVDs, and other affordable technologies, the seamlessness of the internet positions the object of analysis within illimitable simultaneous potential contexts. The opening provided by Planet of the Arabs and Happy Days calls up not only the prior texts those films draw upon and reference but all future extrapolations and connections. The troubling lyrics of ‘Killing me Softly with his Song’, in this manner, feed back through Fox and Gimbel’s ‘Happy Days’ to Sansour’s occupied territories. Ostensibly an account of hearing a song that resonates unaccountably with the experience of the listener,

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‘Killing Me Softly’ also speaks of a painful sense of violation perpetrated by an indifferent but manipulative performer who ‘sang as if he knew me / in all my dark despair’ but then ‘looks right through’ the narrator ‘as if I wasn’t there’. As a parable of the affective power of art the song describes not only the strange sense of recognition – ‘the work speaks to me’ is a common enough expression – that often comes with an encounter with art, but also the devastating indifference of the work toward the effects it might produce. This coupling of insight and indifference, of giving form to ‘my life in his words’ and being unprepared to stop despite the effect being a slow murder, gives the song a chilling undertow that was no doubt among the motivations behind the Fugees’ 1996 cover version, the band’s politics signaled by their name, ‘fugee’ being a derogatory term for Haitian American refugees. In addition, in a further iteration of the slipperiness of property rights, Fox and Gimbel have themselves been accused in the past of theft, the original performer of ‘Killing Me Softly’, Lori Lieberman (for whom the song was written) claiming that the idea came from a poem she had written in response to listening to yet another song, ‘Empty Chairs’, written and performed by Don McLean on his American Pie album. With American Pie, of course, the chain comes full circle because the chart-topping single of that name is a song that mourns the loss of the 1950s, the lost Eden of ‘Happy Days’ (song and sitcom) that gives Sansour’s film about an occupied ‘Promised Land’ its critical heft. Who is looking through whom as if they were not there? This kind of riff, activated by Sansour’s film and followed down through the collective data banks of the internet, starts a mode of recombination already at work in films like Planet of the Arabs and Happy Days but nowhere near contained by them. As enablers of Bloch’s

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‘anticipatory consciousness’, Salloum’s and Sansour’s films, and other works like them, operate as open forms for what Kernan calls the trailer’s ‘coming attractions’. It is in this way that the fabricated trailer, sitcom opening, or poster for an imagined blockbuster serves not as a sign of achieved domination but as the preliminary salvo in an as yet unscripted narrative of critical insubordination against forces intent upon looking right through places and people as if they were not there. Indeed, the very idea of a script becomes redundant since the improvised interpretive acts triggered by the ‘preview’ inaugurated by these works of art are not reliant upon the teleological imperatives of any closed narrative structure. Instead, like the trailers that for Kernan instigate dreams of films that they do not endorse because they live solely in the imaginings of the trailer spectator, works like Salloum’s, Sansour’s and Tarzan and Arab’s project a future cinema and a future art – not to mention a future subjectivity and a future terrain -beyond and in defiant opposition to the neocolonial imaginary. Bibliography Bloch, Ernst. 1995. The Principle of Hope: Volume One. Translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight. Cambridge: MIT. !Greene, Eric. 1999. ‘Planet of the Apes’ as American Myth: Race, Politics and Popular Culture. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Joneidi, Majid. 2007. ‘Iranian anger at Hollywood “assault”’. BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6455969 .stm

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Kellner, Douglas. 1997. ‘Ernst Bloch, Utopia and Ideology Critique’, pp. 80-95 in Jamie Owen Daniel and Tom Moylan, eds. Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch. London: Verso. Kernan, Lisa. 2004. Coming Attractions: Reading American Movie Trailers. Austin: University of Texas Press. Shaheen, Jack G. 2001. Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People. Brooklyn: Olive Branch. Uklanski, Piotr. 1999. The Nazis. Zurich: Scalo. Zryd, Michael. 2003. ‘Found Footage Film as Discursive Metahistory: Craig Baldwin's Tribulation 99’. The Moving Image 3(2): 40-61. Filmography 300. Dir. Zack Snyder (2007) Ali Baba Bunny. Dir. Chuck Jones (1957). Back to the Future. Dir. Robert Zemeckis (1985). Bamboozled. Dir. Spike Lee (2000). Bright Lights, Big City. Dir. James Bridges (1988). Colourful Journey. Dir. Tarzan and Arab (2010). Deterrence. Dir. Rod Lurie (1999). Exodus. Dir. Otto Preminger (1960). From the Journals of Jean Seberg. Dir. Mark Rappaport (1995). Happy Days. Dir. Larissa Sansour (2006). Heat. Dir. Michael Mann (1995). Hollywood Chinese: The Chinese in American Feature Films. Dir. Arthur Dong (2007). Imagining Indians. Dir. Victor Masayesva, Jr. (1992). Into the Sun. Dir. Fritz Kiersch (1992). Network. Dir.

Sidney Lumet (1976).

Planet of the Arabs. Dir. Jacqueline Shalloum (2005). Red Hollywood. Dir. Thom Andersen and Noël Burch (1996).

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Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People. Dir. Jeremy Earp and Sut Jhally (2006). Reel Injun. Dir. Neil Diamond, Catherine Bainbridge and Jeremiah Hayes (2009). Rock Hudson’s Home Movies. Dir. Mark Rappaport (1992). Rules of Engagement. Dir. William Friedkin (2000). Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman. Dir. Dara Birnbaum (1978-1979). The Delta Force. Dir. Menahem Golan (1986). The Hitman. Dir. Aaron Norris (1999). The Planet of the Apes. Dir. Franklin J. Schaffner (1968). The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear. Dir. Adam Curtis (2004).

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