Educational Media Reviews Online

The laudably challenging Resistance[s] consists of eight distinct efforts to foster greater complexity of cultural awareness through decidedly unconventional uses of the expressive resources unique to the film and video medium. Most of the selections both formally and thematically reflect the inter-continental backgrounds and multi-cultural identities of their creators, thereby facilitating further reflection on how, in each particular instance, the aesthetic and cultural dimensions interact.

In Dansons Moscow-born Zoulikha Bouabdellah celebrates the duality of her Algerian and French identity by framing her midriff as she ties an assortment of cloths in the colors of the French flag around her waist, and then belly-dances to the French national anthem. Taysir Batniji's sharply absorbing Transit consists of a series of furtively shot photographs taken while en route from Egypt to his birthplace in the Gaza Strip. The photos grimly capture the rigors of discomfort and uncertainty faced by those waiting in the transit zone of Rafah. Morocco-born Mounir Fatmi's Dieu Me Pardonne is a hallucinatory and murkily psychological assemblage of morphing themes, images, and sounds skillfully organized around deftly obscure evocations of female sexuality, footage of contemporary political violence, mass public disorder, a Western female dancer, electronic medical images and a host of other allusive visual items enriching the sense of purposefully associative tumult. Dubai-born Lamya Gargash's suggestively elliptical Wet Tiles uses a variety of techniques to visually evoke the affective interiority of a young woman apparently being prepared for an arranged marriage. In Iraqi-born and Chicago-based film artist Usama Alshaibi's exuberant Alla Akbar intricate black-and-white geometrical Islamic patterns spin to the rhythms of zestful Arab music, creating a successive kaleidoscopic effusion of visual combinations. Canadian-based Lebanese multi-media artist Jayce Salloum's grim and contemplative Untitled Part 3B: (As If) Beauty Never Ends… poetically memorializes the 1982 massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. In voiceover, a Palestinian refugee details how the ruins of his destroyed home recount to him the slaughter of his neighbors by Israeli forces as video of images of corpses are juxtaposed, intermingled and overlapped with idyllic images of slowly blooming orchids, fish and water. Featuring scenes of Algerian women tending various aspects of domestic life, Paris-born and based Frédérique Devaux's K3 (Les Femmes) recalls, through her manual application of scratches and punctuating tints upon the film, American avant-gardist Stan Brakhage. Lebanese director Wael Noureddine's half-hour-long Ca sera Beau – From Beirut with Love is an insistently probing assemblage of jarringly divergent impressions of Beirut in the weeks following the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri on February 14, 2005. Early on, Noureddine's camera roves through the smoldering carnage wrought by the explosion, and the rest of the film seems to offer itself as an impressionistic record of sharply disparate elements of society held in limbo by the menacing presence of military forces and the recollection of past violence eloquently suggested by recurring shots of unreconstructed architecture pitted with bullet holes.

Featured languages include English, Arabic and French, with subtitles available in English, French, German and Arabic. Resistance[s] is recommended for most college-level media collections, especially those serving film studies programs.

The pair of short films by Maurice Lemaitre--a luminary of the French Lettrism movement in avant-garde cinema since the early 1950s--less recognizably repays the attention it seems to demand than does the more accessibly challenging Resistance[s] collection, and can be recommended without reservation only for collections already holding work from the earlier and more widely influential 1920s- and 30s-era of French avant-garde cinema inspired by Dada-ism and Surrealism, the predecessor movements in reaction to which Lettrism emerged in the 1940s. Provocatively billed as “a chronicle of the fantasies and dreams of women in avant-garde contemporary cinema,” Our Stars is a dreamy collage of women’s faces over which Lemaitre has painted, tinted, and added layers of distortion while peppering the imagery with occasional words--both spoken and silently subtitled--out of synch with what is visually presented. The purpose of such disjunction is apparently to enable the women to express themselves without inhibition through the anonymity thus established. Subtitled “A Lesson in Completist Philosophy for Young Children,” The Little God is a children’s story about the inscrutability of name-giving told through successive and faintly overlapping units of text in different fonts and styles of presentation (which recalls the Lettrists’ shift from the semantic content of words and letters to their physical and symbolic properties and associations).

The DVD also includes a ten minute interview with Lemaitre and a biography. The subtitles are fixed. Recommended for media collections meeting the conditions indicated above and those serving film studies programs.