Following their presentations during Archival Constellations 2017, Subversive Film invited the Mosireen collective to a conversation that engages two separate revolutionary times – the Palestinian revolutionary period (1968–82) and the Egyptian Revolution in 2011 – and pedagogical strategies developed during the two revolutionary contexts for teaching filmmaking. The conversation was published as a supplement to “The Syllabus”, an ongoing publication project by Subversive Film, which focuses on an unpublished manuscript from the 1970s by a Palestinian cinematographer and revolutionary, Hani Joharieh, in which he drafted a manual for teaching cinematography. In 2011 the Mosireen collective produced and taught a syllabus during the Egyptian Revolution on filmmaking and street media. This panel continues their attempt to compare the pedagogical methodologies employed at two separate revolutionary moments, it addresses potential intersections between past and present, the filmmaker as revolutionary, and the role of archival practices. While Subversive Film questions such practices by exploring research and production strategies of already existing material, the Mosireen collective deals with preserving material they were involved in producing. In this light, the panel will present the online “858.MA An Archive of Resistance”, which makes public 858 hours of indexed, time-stamped video material along with thousands of photographs and documents gathered since 2011. Much of its footage is being made public for the first time – raw, unedited footage shot by dozens of people involved in the struggle. Building the 858 archive meant wrestling with questions related to security, timing, and ownership; battling nostalgia, making sense of an event the collective had lived through while watching it from a distance; searching for ways to keep this massive trove of material alive, to counter the state’s narrative and preserve collective memory.
Subversive Film, formed in 2011, is a cinema research and production collective that aims to cast new light upon historic works related to Palestine and the region, to engender support for film preservation, and to investigate archival practices and effects. Projects to explore this cine-historic field include digitally reissuing previously-overlooked films, curating rare film screening cycles, and subtitling rediscovered films.
Mosireen is a media collective formed during the Egyptian revolution. From 2011-2014 it held a space in downtown Cairo as a revolutionary activist hub dedicated to supporting and producing citizen media – including publishing videos, providing training, technical support, campaign support, equipment, screenings, and events, alongside hosting an extensive archive of footage from the revolution.
All panels, talks, and presentations in English.
