Unseaming images: the limits and possibilities for reconfiguring albums of complicity

Abstract

In this article I inquire whether counter-archival strategies used in the documentary film The Village Under the Forest (Grunebaum and Kaplan 2013) might risk failure as a condition of their deployment. My discussion tracks the question of complicity and counter-archival strategy through consideration of the repurposing of personal photographs of travel to Israel in the film. During the states of emergency in 1980s South Africa, my travel photographs represented my desire to affiliate to Israel and its promise to the Jewish Diaspora to belong to its polity. In the film's visual matrix, these political claims are reconfigured. They are also ‘cut into’ and over footage and voice-overs of interviews with Palestinians. While these editing choices enable the photographs’ earlier meanings to be ‘unseamed’, they firstly raise the question: What limitations were encountered in the repurposing of my photographs towards offering an account of complicity? While the repurposed images interrupt the apparent ‘seamlessness’ of my earlier ideological affiliations to Israel, use of the travel photographs in the film may also contribute towards creating a narrative in which Palestinians are (re) displaced; instrumentalised within an interpretative framework that explores complicity with their displacement, yet places complicity as the central narrative. Secondly, I ask what is displaced of South Africa in the film, given that the photos were taken during the 1980s? Here the possibilities for my repurposed travel album photographs to open different ethical relations and political visions than those asserted prior to their insertion in the film are countered by another limitation: if a counter-archive of complicity is to be assembled as a simultaneous account of the conditions of possibility for its becoming, then the risk of failure may constitute a necessary outcome in accounting for complicity.

Keywords:

• apartheid
• complicity
• counter-archive
• documentary film
• Israel
• Nakba
• Palestine

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Heidi Grunebaum

Heidi Grunebaum is affiliated to the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape