European Film Academy (EFA)

What are we actually watching?

What the short films of this year’s EFA selection have in common are the many ways they return to images, be it personal, collective, analogue or digital. By exceeding the role of the historical documents, family photo albums, archived film reels, forgotten photographs, and viral clips from social media become spaces of reinterpretation and, as such, spark up questions of identity, recollection, history and the responsibility of the gaze.

Thus, John Smith, in his documentary essay Being John Smith, uses the fact that he bears the commonest English name to create a self-ironic, yet surprisingly vulnerable, meditation on identity, ageing, and uncertainty, which stems from us or from politics and the state of the world. His witty, self-reflective study proves that the master of the British experimental film remains in peak artistic form.

In Miranda Pannel’s experimental Man Number 4, Smith’s voice returns in a different role, since his second-person narration takes us through a photograph from the occupied Gaza. The unclear pixels slowly reveal an eerie concreteness. It is not the disclosure that creates suspense, but the painful anticipation of the moment when the reality of genocide and occupation will become forever present in our minds. The question of what it is that we are watching grows into a shocking contemplation about the responsibility of looking and about what it means to remain a mere spectator.

Still other films from the selection expand the question of looking to that of historical recollection. City of Poets, for example, uses archival photographs and personal memory to draft a melancholy parable about war, while The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing turns 16-mm shots of Palestinian wildflowers from the time of the British occupation of Palestine into a rebellion against cultural erasure. The peaceful images of the landscape first seduce the viewer with their beauty, then reveal the colonial gaze, which surveys the land while erasing its inhabitants. The narrator’s lines, therefore, persistently invoke what the archive doesn’t show – violence, displacement, and today’s Palestine.

It isn’t coincidental that Palestine returns with the film selection in various ways – either as the main topic, a political parole or a brief poster in the background of a scene. Along with the metaphor of Iran in the City of Poets, it reveals that personal stories hardly ever exist separate from history. Although the selected films range from documentaries and experimental films to fiction (L’Avance, a thriller on mourning and capitalisation of art), they are joined by the belief that images are never neutral since they can witness, erase, seduce, or return voices to those having lost theirs. They invite the viewer to gaze upon even those notions which the images themselves cannot tell.

Iva Katušin