Kamal Aljafari, Port of Memory. France/Germany/UAE/Palestine, 2009.
In the state of siege, time becomes place
Fossilized in its eternity
In the state of siege, place becomes time
Lagging behind its yesterday and its tomorrow
—Mahmoud Darwish, “State of Siege”
Kamal Aljafari’s film Port of Memory (2009) opens with a long tracking shot of a grand, decaying house at twilight. The camera lingers on the skin of this structure that bears traces of other times and previous inhabitations. The footage feels like a memorial for a building that may not live much longer: we see a floorboard of what was once a balcony, recesses where there were stairs, and the remnants of plaster crenellations above cinder-blocked windows. Aljafari uses these buildings and streets of Jaffa as a frame against and within which his character’s actions are set. The film pivots around the narrative of a shrinking city and its spectral inhabitants whose lives are inextricably tied to these spaces. The film brings to mind Freud’s writing on The Uncanny in which he quotes Jetsch doubting “whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate.”[1] Port of Memory distances itself from conventional filmic narratives of Palestinian subjects by meditating on the state of Palestinians within Israel; it also departs from dominant spectacular representations by focusing on the minutiae of everyday life. The filmmaker’s relationship to the subjects in the film is never made explicit—the characters are Aljafari’s extended family—underscoring his resistance to the documentary format in dealing with his subject matter. Port of Memory thus blurs the line between fiction and non-fiction, offering a collage of staging and restaging, pre-existing archival footage and new footage.