Still life [electronic resource] / directed by Diana Allan.

Still Life is the first sequence in a triptych of portraits that explores the mediations of memory among three generations of Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon. It considers how a series of photos brought to Lebanon by Said Otruk, an elderly Palestinian fisherman from Acre, mediate both his pre...

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Bibliographic Details
Online Access: Online Access (via Alexander Street Press)
Other Authors: Allan, Diana (Diana Keown) (Director)
Format: Electronic Video
Language:Arabic
Published: Watertown, MA : Documentary Educational Resources (DER), 2007.
Series:Ethnographic video online, volume 2.
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Description
Summary:Still Life is the first sequence in a triptych of portraits that explores the mediations of memory among three generations of Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon. It considers how a series of photos brought to Lebanon by Said Otruk, an elderly Palestinian fisherman from Acre, mediate both his present experience and recollections of his life in Palestine before 1948. We see how the reality represented in these images has become conflated with them; Said repeatedly misremembers the number of his fishing boat and his age when he left, and when he describes photos of Acre's waterfront as capturing the golden age, he seems to be gesturing as much at the splendid figure of his own youth as at the halcyon days of pre-48 Palestine. Rather than being a straightforward expository narrative, or an act of witness of political solidarity, the film is a meditation on the dislocations of memory, the effects of aging and forgetfulness, and the recollection of youthful vitality; the loss of Palestine is lyrically convergent with the felt loss of this vitality. The two portraits that complete the triptych examine spatial and ritual mediations of memory.
Item Description:Title from resource description page (viewed Feb. 6, 2014)
Physical Description:1 online resource (26 min.)
Playing Time:00:25:34
Language:This edition in Arabic with English subtitles.
Reproduction Note:Electronic reproduction.
Date/Time and Place of an Event Note:Recorded in Lebanon in 2007.