Gaza on Screen
Gaza’s long association with resistance and humanitarian need has generated a complex and ever-shifting range of visual material, comprising not just news reports and documentaries, but also essay, experimental, and fiction films, militant videos, and solidarity images. Contributors to Gaza on Screen, who include scholars and Gazan filmmakers, explore the practice, production, and impact of film and videos from and about the Gaza Strip. Conceptualizing screens—both large and small—as tools for mediation that are laden with power, the volume explores Gazan film and video in relation to humanitarianism and human rights, care, community, environment, mobility and confinement, and decolonization. The volume includes visual material ranging from solidarity broadcasts on Lebanese television, mid-twentieth-century British Pathé newsreels, and fiction films to breaking news, visuals of contemporary militant resistance, documentaries, and found footage films, arguing for a visual ecosystem in which differing types of film and video affect and inform each other. Throughout, Gaza on Screen demonstrates that screens shape and sustain relationships between Gaza and the world, and help to sustain the possibility of a different future.
Contributors. Nayrouz Abu Hatoum, Shahd Abusalama, Samirah Alkassim, Basma Alsharif, Hadeel Assali, Azza El-Hassan, Hatim El-Hibri, Mohamed Jabaly, Ahmed Mansour, Arab Nasser, Tarzan Nasser, Kamran Rastegar, Viviane Saglier, Abdelsalam Shehada, Yaron Shemer, Rebecca L. Stein, Helga Tawil-Souri, Shaira Vadasaria, Nadia Yaqub
“Gaza on Screen is a groundbreaking text that considers Gaza filmmaking, cinema, and visual production. Its contributors include key Palestinian, especially Gazan, thinkers and artists. The collection offers original, deeply engaging, and often captivating conversations and analysis.” — Frances S. Hasso, author of Buried in the Red Dirt: Race, Reproduction, and Death in Modern Palestine
“In Gaza on Screen, Nadia Yaqub brings together thinkers and practitioners in urgent meditations and conversations about media, screen theory, politics—indeed, about life—that will leave you sometimes shaken but also, even in these dark times, hopeful. This is a generous book, one that mobilizes rigorous thinking in the service of hearing, seeing, sharing, and acknowledging—of what we might call active screening—with profound lessons for anyone interested in contemporary visual culture.” — James Schamus, Professor of Professional Practice in Film, Columbia University
