Staying
On Filmmaker in Focus: Basma al-Sharif at Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, 7 - 10 March 2024
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A single shot holds as my lasting impression of this programme. For three, perhaps four minutes, a handheld camera casts its view steadily outwards from a moving car. The car goes forwards, the shot plays in reverse. Within the frame we see a number of other frames, from the passenger seat's perspective: the front window casts out onto a wide-angle of disappearing dusted landscapes; the side and rearview mirrors shoot back onto a road that rushes towards us. The surroundings hurtle forwards and backwards with equal momentum, producing the nauseating feeling of moving while staying still. The sensation is reminiscent of that induced by the Shepard scale—an auditory illusion in which a tone seems to continually ascend or descend in pitch, while ultimately getting no lower or higher. Intensity rises but nothing changes. The listener is trapped in a continuous and unbearable present.
Al-Sharif’s work in many ways locks the viewer in such ceaseless, uneasy momentums, in a way that reaches beyond her position as a stateless, nomadic Palestinian—an identity impelled into ceaseless collisions with past and future. It is a study of happening: the feeling that one is static, a passive object, while something bigger, with more will and agency than you, happens. Something beyond your grasp or control.
During the In-focus conversation, Al-Sharif spoke of a crisis of confidence she endured on a previous occasion of watching her films side by side, realising that she had made the same film half a dozen times over. Returning to the same shot, and same editing techniques. Fittingly, I now find myself unable to remember which film this shot was part of. Ouroboros? Renée’s Room? Or did I see it before, somewhere else?
Later in the event, there is a discussion about flattery—how attending to someone's work with a compliment is to invoke a dead end, a closure, a stopping. “The compliment is the opposite of an adventure together.” I am glad for BFMAF’s insistence on using this In-focus not to flatter, but to get in the car—allowing Al-Sharifs body of work to set multiform windows out onto the current crisis, and us to journey through a troubled landscape together.