In 1968, a group of young Palestinian filmmakers decided to establish a film unit affiliated with the Palestinian Revolution active in Amman, Jordan. The Palestine Film Unit (PFU) worked with Al-Fatah, one of the PLO’s factions. The PFU furnished the revolution with a cinematic vocabulary, and addressed the decades-long dilemma of invisibility. Eventually, the work of the unit played a major role in Palestinian revolutionary cinema. This presentation tracks the life and work of the PFU and its members as an example of a militant cinema practice in the 1960’s and ‘70’s, when filmmakers believed cinema could change the world.

Subversive Film is a cinema research and production initiative that aims to cast new light on historical works related to Palestine and the region; extend support for film preservation; and investigate archival practices and its effects. Other projects developed by Subversive Film to explore this field include the digital re-issuing of previously overlooked films, curating rare film screening cycles, and subtitling rediscovered films. Subversive Film was formed in 2011 and is based in Ramallah and London.

As the Gulf War was raging, on the 4^th of July, 1991, in a brasserie on Place de la Bastille in Paris, seminal Cahiers du Cinéma critic and passionate cinephile, Serge Daney and Palestinian historian and writer, Elias Sanbar, are meeting to engage in a conversation about images, art and the possibility of dialogue transgressing difference and conflict. The encounter was the idea of the two filmmakers, in reaction to Daney’s observation that a dialogue between him and his Arab friends seemed no longer possible. Looking at one another’s personal photographs, a cordial and intimate exchange emerges.

The screening will be followed with a conversation between Simone Bitton and Elias Sanbar.

The conversation will be followed by the signing of Les Absents, a book of photographs by Bruno Fert and text by Elias Sanbar.

Simone Bitton was born in Morocco in 1955, she lives between Paris, Rabat and Jerusalem. She has directed more than twenty films and documentary series for cinema and television. Bitton’s practice has been very versatile, ranging from archival montage, poetic essay films, intimate portraits of artists, or investigative documentary, but her political engagement with the history, culture and present-day reality of the Middle East and North African regions is salient. The series she directed, Les grandes voix de la Chanson Arabe (1990), and the two-episode films Palestine, the story of a Land (1993) are reference works that have been broadcast several times and distributed in several countries, more than 20 years after their release. The Wall (2004) and Rachel (2009) received several awards and were released in theaters in several countries. Bitton teaches at the University Paris 8, and is a member of the Ateliers Varan.

Conversation: Elias Sanbar & Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard was born in Paris in 1930. A filmmaker, scriptwriter, producer and novelist, he is also a film critic and theoretician. In 1959 his first feature film, A Bout de souffle, opened the way for the Nouvelle Vague. He directed several films in the sixties including Le Petit soldat (1960), Le Mépris (1963), Alphaville (1965), Pierrot le fou (1965), La Chinoise (1967)… In the wake of the May 1968 protests, he and Jean-Pierre Gorin endeavoured to create political cinema, producing their films under the collective Groupe Dziga Vertov. In 1970, Godard visited Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon, to make a film. The film, titled Jusqu’à la victoire (Until Victory), remained unfinished until 1974 when Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville re-used the footage they had previously recorded in their film Ici and Ailleurs. 

Elias Sanbar was born in Haïfa in 1947, less than a year later, because of the Nakba, his family was forced into exile in Lebanon. Like thousands of his generational peers, he joined the ranks of the Palestinian resistance after the June 1967 Arab disaster. Writer, historian and peace activist, Elias Sanbar is an eminent Arab and francophone intellectual, who for the past forty years, has been tirelessly invested in spreading understanding of Palestine, both in the fields of political and cultural action. His publications are a repository of Palestinian collective memory, to cite a few, Palestine 1948, l’expulsion (1984), Le Bien des Absents (2001), Figures du Palestinien (2004), Dictionnaire amoureux de la Palestine (2010), La Palestine expliquée à tout le monde (2014). Sanbar translated to French the majesterial œuvre of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1942-2008), with whom he shared a close friendship. He has collaborated with distinguished intellectuals like Gilles Deleuze, and filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, and the publisher Jérôme Lindon who housed the Revue d’Etudes Palestiniennes in 1981, of which Sanbar was chief-editor for more than 25 years. Elias Sanbar is a member of the Palestinian National Council since 1988. He was a member of the Palestinian delegation at the peace negotiations in Madrid (1991), and in Washington (1992-1993), he also headed the Delegation for Refugees from 1993 to 1997. Since 2006, he has been Palestine’s Ambassador and Permanent Delegate at the UNESCO. He has led the campaign for Palestine’s admission to UNESCO and the registration of Bethlehem as World Heritage site.

Screening: Here and Elsewhere

France, 1974, Color, 53 minutes. In French

Written, Directed and Edited by: Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville.

By Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville (France, 1974, 53 min)

Here: a typical French family sitting in front of its television. Elsewhere: Palestinian combatants filmed through their everyday life, training and death. In 1974, Jean-Luc Godard used footing shot four years earlier in Jordan and reinterpreted it to reflect a multi-layered manipulation of reality.

In his feature-length film, Mohanad Yaqubi untangles the fraught history of his homeland, with a remarkable precision and grace using found footage, much of it newly discovered, to retrace Palestinians’ struggle for self-determination and dignity. The film is centered on the Palestine Film Unit, a group founded in the 1960s that saw itself as the cinematic front of the Palestinian movement. The PFU shared kinship with other politically engaged artistic movements, such as Third Cinema. Yaqubi revisits Jean-Luc Godard's Here and Elsewhere (also referring to the original title of Godard's documentary, Until Victory) and draws the film full circle with contemporary reality of Palestine.

Mohanad Yaqubi is a filmmaker, producer, and one of the founders of the Ramallah-based production outfit, Idioms Film. He also teaches Film Studies at the International Art Academy in Palestine. Yaqubi is also one of the founders of the research and curatorial collective Subversive Films, that focuses on militant film practices. Yaqubi’s filmography as a producer includes the narrative short Pink Bullet (directed by Ramzi Hazboun), and as co-producer the narrative feature Habibi (directed by Susan Youssef, 2010) and the short narrative Though I Know the River is Dry (directed by Omar R. Hamilton, 2012) and the documentary feature Infiltrators (directed by Khaled Jarrar, 2013). In 2013, Yaqubi initiated and produced Suspended Time, an anthology that reflects on 20 years after the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords, and includes nine filmmakers. His latest film No Exit, (written with Omar Kheiry), premiered at the Dubai International Film Festival in 2015. The feature film Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory made its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in the fall of 2016.

Followed by a discussion with Mohanad Yaqubi and Jean-Pierre Rehm.

After completing studies in Philosophy, Jean-Pierre Rehm has taught history, theory of art and film. He has curated exhibitions, authored monographs of artists and filmmakers, and collaborated to the Cahiers du Cinéma. Since 2002, he has been the director of FIDMarseille.

A train enters a station, the traffic around a street market, a caravan of camels, furtive glances… An edited montage of footage by the Lumière brothers in Palestine in 1896.

Home Movies Gaza (HD Video - 2013 - duration 24:08)

O, Persecuted (HD video - 2014 - duration 11:38)

By Basma Alsharif

Home Movies Gaza introduces us to the Gaza Strip as a microcosm for the failure of civilization. In an attempt to describe the everyday of a place that struggles for the most basic of human rights, this vid- eo claims a perspective from within the domestic spaces of a territory that is complicated, derelict, and altogether impossible to separate from its political identity. 

O, Persecuted turns the act of restoring Kassem Hawal’s 1974 Palestinian Militant film, Our Small Houses, into a performance possible only through film. One that involves speed, bodies, and the movement of the past into a future that collides ideology with escapism.

Basma Alsharif is an artist/and filmmaker born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents, raised between France and the US. She has a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Basma developed her practice nomadically between Chicago, Cairo, Beirut, Sharjah, Amman, the Gaza Strip and Paris and is now based in Los Angeles. She works between cinema and installation and centers on the human condition in relation to shifting geopolitical landscapes and natural environments. Major exhibitions include: the forthcoming Whitney Biennial, Le Prix Découverte Rencontres d'Arles, les Modules at the Palais de Tokyo, Here and Elsewhere at the New Museum, the Jerusalem Show, Yamagata Documentary Film Festival, the Berlinale, the Sharjah Biennial, Videobrasil, and Manifesta 8. Basma is represented by Galerie Imane Farés in Paris and distributed by Video Data Bank in Chicago and Arsenal in Berlin.

• François Hartog

Times of the museum

During the last forty years, the museum is probably the main successful and changing institution. How could our experiences concerning the time shed new lights on our understanding of this major phenomenon? How can we move from a museum born during the French Revolution, aimed to create a space withdrawn from time, to a museum in nowadays trying in every way to integrate the present and create events?

François Hartog is historian and Director of Studies since 1987. He firstly taught Greek history at the Universities of Strasbourg and in Metz later on.

Elected to the administration and scientific council of the school from 2000 to 2004, he was also a member of the Bureau (Jacques Revel was the president). He was the Director of the Louis-Gernet center of compared researches upon former societies (The current ANIHMA center), founded by Jean-Pierre Vernant and led by Pierre Vidal-Naquet for a long time. Combining the anthropology approaches and the instruments referring to the intellectual history, his thoughts among history are based on flashbacks between the ancient times and the modern world, between the ancient and modern experiences over time.

President : Marc-Olivier Gonseth, musée d’ethnographie de Neuchâtel, Suisse

Mediator : Sylvia Girel, Université Aix-Marseille

Speakers :

• Jean-Roch Bouiller, conservateur chargé de l’art contemporain au MuCEM

• Denis Chevallier, conservateur général, responsable du département de la Recherche et de l’Enseignement du MuCEM

• Thierry Fabre, responsable du département du développement culturel et des relations internationales du MuCEM

• Aude Fanlo, chargée de mission au département de la Recherche et de l’Enseignement du MuCEM

• Emilie Girard, conservatrice et responsable du CCR (Centre de conservation et de ressources) du MuCEM

• Zeev Gourarier, directeur scientifique et des collections du MuCEM

• Cécile Dumoulin, responsable du département des publics du MuCEM
   

What place should museums hold in the world today: what should be their scientific, cultural and political policies – broadly defined?

From unbiased neutrality all the way to activism and even ideology and propaganda, what are the choices that museums have, depending on the area, the communities and individuals involved? Should these museums be allowed to treat any subject? How free and how daring do they allow themselves to be? Are there instances of censorship or self-censorship?

Summaries

• Marie-Paule Jungblunt

The social role of history museums

By comparing an “activist” exhibition (“Crimes de sang. Une exposition sur la vie”” at the Luxembourg history museum, 2010) and a “witness” exhibition (“Coupable. Crimes et châtiments”, at the history museum of Bâle, 2012/2013), this communication proposes to explore the possibilities and pitfalls inherent to the two approaches. It will also address the matter of the curator’s profile, due to the redefinition of the social role of the museum.

• Jean-Marc Blais

From the Canadian Museum of Civilizations to the Canadian Museum of History

As the museum’s mission is changing, this presentation will highlight how it goes about adapting its programming in order to set contemporary issues in a broader context. These mutations are carried out through new research, collection development and exhibitions strategies.

• Luc Gruson

The museum and society: should social demands affect the offer? The case of the Museum of the History of Immigration

From its creation, the CNHI did not conceive of its scientific and cultural program as a mere policy but as a deliberate interaction with social expectations. How does this connection with civil society work out in a public institution, which is also a national museum? How should the history of immigration be told without erasing the diversity, complexity and grey areas of the individual stories, those of individuals, families and groups? How should local reality be taken into account?

• Annie Héritier

Censorship and self-censorship of contemporary art in museums

Museums embody openness, while censorship closes off: the boundary between the two should be impenetrable. Despite the paradox, French museum authorities have begun to breach that line. Some French museums have revealed, through their activities and the ensuing administrative - or political – reactions, that although they delight the public, they are also strictly supervised, sometimes even forbidden. Censorship seems to be at work when it is not superseded by the museum authorities’ self-censorship. The jurist has to ponder an antagonism: while the artist intends to show the disorder of the world, thus disturbing the established order, the politician sets out to organize the world and calls the artist to order. How should we view these decisions, which play on their impact on the public and its relation with the works? Should we remain neutral and talk about control, administrative police measures? Or should we follow the always dangerous path of censorship?

• Philippos Mazarakis-Ainian

The exhibition “Imagining the Balkans”: a very contemporary old story, now a tool to reexamine one’s neighbors and self

UNESCO’s collaborative exhibition on the history of Balkan identity brought together the national museums of the area in order to bring down regional ideological barriers. The project, jointly designed by 12 museums, managed to tell a story where political and military antagonisms are pushed back and appear as the consequence of common socio-economic and cultural processes.

• Marzia Varutti

Between silence and activism: the museum’s role in the face of contested claims to indigenous recognition in Taiwan

For decades, Taiwan’s Pingpu communities have been struggling to secure official recognition from the Taiwanese government. This communication aims to contribute to the reflection on the museum’s sociopolitical role as a witness, actor, or activist, starting from a critical analysis of the role Taiwanese museums play in this ongoing debate.

• Roger Mayou

The place of testimony in witness museums

How original can a museum about society and history be in the age of the internet and real-time information? As a place of knowledge and reflection, the MICR uses, among other things, testimonies and interactive features to reflect the contemporary as neither institutional nor propagandist, but as a help to understand the world.

• Anneken Appel Laursen

The case of Ulrik Szkobel: a homeless at the museum

Den Gamle By (The Old Town) is an open-air museum showing Danish urban development. Since 2011 it has also served as a local museum for Aarhus. A strategy has consequently been developed, in which the museum proactively meets with local communities, listening to messages about their life and where they live.  This was unexpectedly challenged in 2012: a homeless man approached the museum, wanting to show his home in the museum grounds, to draw attention to conditions the homeless live under. The museum acquired a shed, where the man lived; he set it up and moved in. Our showing of this aspect of society was seen without the usual prejudice. The project has given rise to reflection about the essence of inclusion, and who in fact was included by whom. At the beginning we considered whether the museum had gone too far in the name of inclusion – that we were putting a live person on show? In the process we discovered that the public met the homeless man eye to eye, and with respect, and we began to consider whether the project had an effect in society. Seen in its social context, the project appears as part of a movement towards less prejudice and more openness towards people in need. As a museum in society, we can and must use our framework to set up meetings between people who are not equals.

Window, mirror, screen, and showcase: in order to reflect contemporary societies, museums put objects in and out of context.

However, the contemporary’s proximity to us, chronologically, emotionally, and symbolically, means that museums need to review their practices. How is this proximity expressed through architectural, display and museum design choices?

Should we attempt to explain, and aim at an unattainable objectivity, or settle for sensitive immersion, which would foster an illusion of free interpretation?

Summaries

• Gian Luca Basso Peressut

Scenography and architecture of War museums and memorials

When it is not considered as a mere military matter, but rather as part of the political, economic and cultural history of nations, war is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. It offers several - sometimes incompatible and often controversial - points of view, which should be interpreted and represented in relation to an idea of history in the broad sense, which raises many questions. Within contemporary societies, the process of selecting and reorganizing historical data are at the heart of the construction of a shared history, although with a critical eye, it is associated with the most difficult and painful events.
With the tools and means at their disposal (exhibits, scenography, architecture), museums dedicated to - contemporary - war history must raise awareness through a “memory policy” that, without making sacred nor popularizing, must involve all cultural institutions, including those devoted to the education of younger generations. As the last witnesses of history are passing away, as memories dim and are altered, war events get increasingly intertwined with their historical representations, particularly in museums, and preserving those memories becomes increasingly crucial, lest the knowledge they represent is lost to the present and the future.

• Jorge Wagensberg

The topicality of the ideological debate in the museum of the future

As a rule, museums avoid inconsistencies. But why should the scientific debate be hidden from the visitors? How should contradictions and paradoxes be treated in a museum? The Time museum’s project in Montevideo (Uruguay) is a good source of examples.

• Christian Block

The  « Mémoire de corps. Ados à corps perdus » exhibition at the Musée d’Aquitaine

Launched in 2003, the « Mémoire de corps» project has become a unique cultural and therapeutic experience. It is the result of the unlikely association of the Musée d’Aquitaine and the Pôle Aquitain de l’Adolescent. Their realizations were unveiled in 2006 through an important exhibition about anorexia entitled: « Mémoire de corps. Ados à corps perdus ».

• Sonia Hamzaoui

How contemporary should the traditional be? The case of Kesra, a village in Tunisia

Conceiving of an ethnographic museum about the contemporary within a traditional village, closed to modernity and resistant to change; introducing modern museographic concepts at odds with the suspicious and conservative nature of the inhabitants; getting them involved in the different stages of the creation of the museum and entrusting them with its management are challenges that need to be addressed in order to promote culture and heritage conservation in a destitute area.

• Burçak Madran

The challenges of the contemporary in museology and in museography: the case of the Diyarbakir City Museum in Turkey

Diyarbakır is an 8000 years old city where heritage sites have always been largely confined to within the great city walls, which bears the marks of the numerous conflicts, diasporas, immigrations and assimilations that combine to make the place far from ideal for the preservation of the material evidence of the collective memory formed by several communities. Consequently, the museum project has to “reinvent the contemporary” in order to visualize and tell this shared history, to both Diyarbakır’s inhabitants and visitors. 

• Thierry Ollat

• Philippe Peltier

Aboriginal art: the secret and the public between the contemporary and the traditional

In 1971, a few « elders » from the Papunyan community of the Central Australian desert started telling their ancestral stories – some of which are secret - to white people through paintings. This new practice has been polemical. This communication will succinctly go back over the history of the debates and then analyze the transition from the private to the public sphere, and its impact on the organization of international exhibitions.

• Shelly Shenhav - Keller

The Poetics and Politics in Ethnographic and Civilization Museums 

There is no doubt that ethnographic and civilization museums in the post-modern world have been undergoing an identity crisis. Some researches were hurry to declare that these museums are no more than dead storehouses. Their claims were based on the idea that there is no reason, need, priority and authority for "us" to present and represent the "other". In those cultural shrines of colonialism the objects were stood metonymically for the distant "others", places and cultures.
As a result of the post-colonial era, ideas of multiculturalism, politics of identity and post-structuralist reflexivity have emerged in the academic world and spread in the intellectual discourses that have penetrated, to the museum world, as well.
The MuCEM, the museum that this symposium is taking place, is an evident fact and an answer to the relevant perception of seeing our current world.
The aim of this paper is to focus and reflect mainly on the ethical raison d'être of these museums spaces nowadays in our globalized, virtual and uncertain world and to concentrate on the obstacles, responsibilities and challenges that we have to deal with in the present, especially for the future.

In my opinion, the way of looking at the past material cultures and especially dealing with contemporary objects is not universal. Different missions of conserving, exhibiting, presenting, representing, educating and especially empowering are needed in varied societies.  The western culture and the European world are facing other questions and dilemmas than other cultures in other places.
In this paper I would like to borrow Clifford James's term - "contact zones"(1) and to claim that museums milieus are contemporary contact zones of objects, people, ideology, unity, diversity, past, present, poetics and politics. I will concentrate on few examples from current projects and exhibitions in few ethnographic and heritage centers in few countries, which will clarify the complexity of these issues