Video

Al Yaoum (This Day)

Akram Zaatari

2003, 87:00 minutes, Colour/B&W, Arabic & Eng

TAPECODE 406.11

The outcome of a three-year research on the circulation of images in the Middle East, This Day is at once an extroverted voyage in geography and an introverted voyage in memory through the recording of the everyday. It uses video and photography to communicate the states of mobility and closure in the contemporary divided geography of the region. It starts in the ever-changing the desert where, presumably, Arab civilization(s) originate, and where a historian, Jibrail Jabbur, photographed a woman holding a jar on her head in the fifties, in a village on the edge of the Syrian Desert. The video soon becomes a re-construction of a desert landscapes inhabited with Jabbur's favorite characters of the desert.

This Day is like an image-lab, where the video maker studies the rushes of his initial inquiry against photographs of that geography to depart and explore the video maker's immediate environment monitoring key urban elements in post-war Beirut. Major circulation arteries, traffic lights, urban reconstruction, and flight circulation over the city become main elements in a present loaded with memory of a past war. In his own workspace, the video maker revisits the first images, notes and sound recordings from the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, contrasted with other invasive images, in an attempt to understand the mechanism of image production in the state of war. In the lingering context of the Arab-Israeli conflict, invasions proceed through the bias of military songs, propaganda images, forced closures and divisions, they find in television and the Internet their only means to circulate.

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