Audio transcription
For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.
John Quackenbush 0:00
December 1, 2017. The Harvard Film Archive screened Ouroboros. This is the audio recording of the introduction and the discussion that followed. Participating are HFA director Haden Guest and filmmaker Basma Alsharif.
Haden Guest 0:22
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Haden Guest. I'm Director of the Harvard Film Archive. And I want to thank you for being here as we welcome filmmaker and visual artist Basma Alsharif to present and speak about her first feature film, Ouroboros. Alsharif has been working for many years with the moving image, driven by a concern to understand contested landscapes and memories, most often of her ancestral home of Palestine. Those of you who were here last night, and know something of the inspiration for tonight's film, and the way that it winds its backwards and spiraling path through the imaginations of Pasolini, Carlo Levi, and of course, Alsharif's own imagination of displacement, exile, and the tragic inheritance of trauma. Ouroboros is a willfully obscure film that moves and means differently, as signaled by the remarkable opening shot. Yet it is a film fully accessible as a lush and languid mood piece, an environment, a cinematic trance, an evocation of déjà vu. It is also a film that makes clear Alsharif's interest in landscape, and her affinity with a number of contemporary filmmakers, who are exploring various modes of landscape cinema, among them many associated with CalArts, such as James Benning, Sharon Lockhart, Lee Anne Schmitt among them. I'm very glad to have the creator of tonight's film here to say a few words of introduction, to join me in a conversation after the screening, which will also include participation from you, our audience. I want to acknowledge and thank the partnership that we joined, together with the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. I want to thank Daisy Nam, especially, whose idea it was to bring Basma Alsharif for a two-night program. And I also want to thank the, thank the Carpenter Center's director, Dan Byers, for his enthusiastic support of this program. I need to thank, as well, the generous support of the Film Study Center. I'd like to ask everybody to please turn off any electronic devices, cell phones, etc., that you have on me. And please join me now in giving a rousing welcome to Basma Alsharif.
2:32
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Basma Alsharif 2:42
Thanks a lot for that really generous introduction. It actually makes me feel like there's not much left to say, which is great, and a gift, actually, to receive, as a filmmaker and artist. I want to thank you all for coming, or maybe coming again tonight, if you were here last night. I'm most probably nervous around you. Because you've probably heard me talk up a big game. So I'm really curious to hear what your thoughts are on the film and hope that you'll stick around afterwards and that we can have a discussion. I'm, it, as Haden said, this is my first feature film and it was very much an experiment, made out of what felt like a necessity, is willfully not super legible, as a refusal to sort of describe a political situation that has been going on my entire life, my parents and my grandparents' lives. And to have it be sort of removed from its isolation and to think of, and I'm talking about the occupation of Palestine, and to have it be woven into other sites, other cultures, other histories, and to see what happens. So yeah, thank you for, for coming, and I look forward to a great discussion afterwards, hopefully.
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John Quackenbush 4:00
And now, Haden Guest.
Haden Guest 4:04
Please join me in welcoming back Basma Alsharif!
4:06
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Haden Guest 4:14
And before taking questions from the audience, I thought I would begin with a few of my own. And I alluded in my opening remarks to the importance of landscape to your films, not only this one, but to earlier works as well. And I was wondering if we could speak, though, about landscape in Ouroboros. You begin, of course in Gaza, and we see these war-scarred landscapes; landscapes marked with the memory of war. And then we go backwards. We travel to these other places, places also loaded with memories. We're in Los Angeles, we hear Mexican songs, we see Hollywood theater. Italy with Carlo Levi. And at the same time, these are also landscapes that I know have, are sites that have importance to you, personally, France, Palestine. So I was wondering if you could help us just start to orient ourselves, if you will, within this particular set of landscapes?
Basma Alsharif 5:20
Yeah. I think that's the question that gets asked the most. Like, why these particular three landscapes? And I've come to say that a lot that it could have been, apart from Gaza, it could have been any other number of landscapes in relation. And actually, it was when I started writing it. I was thinking about Greece, and I was thinking about South America, and other places that have, I don't know, complicated histories or presents. And in making the film, a lot of the decisions were made based on kind of collaborations with people. And so as much as it's my own kind of biography of growing up in France, or my connection to Palestine, but I, in the end, decided on those landscapes based on kind of collaborations with people. I mean, it's definitely still my film. But, for example, France comes out of meeting a woman that's in that part of the film, who was this completely strange character who had studied in Estonia, and then traveled to Palestine for I don't know what reason, and then at the time of the film was actually repainting or restoring frescoes in churches outside of Egypt. And I met her sort of through other friends, and then found out that her family had inherited this castle, and went to visit ,and just thought, this is a completely absurd, like situation. And in one sense, it's completely normal, like, okay, family gets, you know, inherits this through family lineage. But also just, I think I was baffled, or kind of struck by the possibility that a 13th-century castle could still be so preserved, and that this kind of a Peter Pan-ish character was like, in it by herself, because her family's like, oh, it's too much trouble to keep, you know, stay down here all the time, and it's cold. So we just stay in Paris. And I thought, okay, I'm definitely filming here. And with her, who's not an actress, who is also an artist, who was a bit disillusioned, I think. And so I really, I just felt like I wanted to work with people who I had a connection to, that would sort of be in conversation with the film and lead the kind of scenes that we would shoot. So that's one sort of answer. Because I, I also kind of approached this film, knowing very precisely what I wanted, but also wanted to leave it open to change, based on my collaboration with people and their interaction and their presence in the film. And so that's one thing. And then Italy was very much, I mean, when I started writing the film, I wanted this kind of like weird character that is hard to place. I thought of Diego, who is a very dear friend of mine, and also an artist, and not an actor. And, and, of course, because I was thinking about Pasolini, and Carlo Levi, I thought, oh god, he's like, perfect for it. And he's definitely gonna, I mean, if he's the vehicle that we use to kind of move through the film, I think he's kind of perfect, because we have no idea what he is. Even in person, like, as a, as a friend, I think, he’s someone who’s kind of hard to understand, and has a strange relationship to Italy, and to other people, I think. So, yeah. So it's just to say that I thought of the landscapes as characters. And that the characters were means of being in those spaces.
Haden Guest
With that in mind, and, you know, this explanation, if you will, for why these particular places were chosen, I think it's interesting, but at the same time, we're left with what we have on screen. And what we have on screen does, in fact, it's this, the resonances of these landscapes, the way in which oftentimes we're seeing figures within the landscapes. The way in which there seems to be this idea of the memory of a landscape, the sort of history of a place. You have, you know, the Native American filmmaker Sky Hopinka speaking over American landscape. So there's a sense, in a way, of this kind of topographical perspective in your film that's suggesting, hinting at layers, right? Constantly below the surface, and sort of challenging us to listen to those, to hear them. And it seems one way in which those resonances come about is through, and actually layering of those landscapes on one another, right? So yesterday, you spoke a bit about Pasolini and his project, for instance, to try to both return to the past and mark the distance from the past by understanding the landscapes of Palestine, and then the displacement of those landscapes onto Italy. And I was wondering, in terms of thinking about these layers of history, of memory, it's like, how much, was this sort of in mind as you worked? Beginning with these, again, these highly charged images of Gaza, and this desire that you had to, say, to not literalize that, but to actually think of it differently.
Basma Alsharif
I mean, yeah, that feels super-connected to my perspective and my biography. Because I think I don't, I mean, I spoke about this yesterday, that I don't have a national identity, and that I, in a lot of my work, I am trying to make that a perspective through which other people can also feel like this sort of multiple perspective viewing of an, of a space, or an, or of an experience. And I think something that I've, that I've noticed, or why I say I don't have a national identity is because I think I also, like, experience, I never experience a place as a single place. Like I always, it's always compared, or it's, it's always like I'm seeing to two or three places at once, even when I'm in one place, and connecting different histories. And I think, as a Palestinian, I feel like we come to, and I think this is a common experience for Palestinians, is to try to find, or maybe people who have generally experienced conflict, is that you try to find similarities in other situations, and you pick up on that in very particular ways. I think being in the United States, the civil rights movement always felt really similar to the Resistance, and thinking about Native Americans, and thinking, you know, like fascism in Italy, like I think, I always, I'm always seeing other landscapes onto.
Haden Guest 11:29
Those patterns, right.
Basma Alsharif 11:30
Um hmm. Yeah, I think it's a reassuring thing, when you say like, oh, this has happened before, or is going to happen again. This isn't isolated. And what happened in Palestine isn't so special, actually. It happens in a lot of places. Has happened, will happen. And so I think I try to make work that is that way. And that hopefully goes beyond me and my perspective. I think that's the challenge, is that sometimes I can't tell how much a piece pushes people away, because the references are so personal. And because my aim is very much to be able to pull someone into something that they're not necessarily familiar with, or interested in, but then, through a kind of more visceral experience, start to maybe get close to what, what the idea is, or what the thing is that I'm trying to communicate, which I think I'm also trying to figure out. But it's very much about sort of manipulating people's perception, and memory, and the way the images function, and being aware that something is happening, and still believing that it's not, or something? You know, like just really playing with time. And I think, looking at landscape, actually, or nature, which happens a lot in my work, kind of lends itself to that.
Haden Guest 12:45
Well, this playing with time, there's this constant, I love the way, in those scenes in the Los Angeles house, you're within that same house, there seems to be different, that small space, different sort of temporal modes, different events and memories happening at once. And there's this sense of sort of paradoxical and inverse movement and displacement throughout the film. Most forcibly, and I think, remarkably, through that backwards, those backward movements, which both seem to suggest a sort of return of sorts, this sort of, perhaps a sort of a memory, a trauma that brings you back and back. But then there's also the sense, it's almost like this gravitational pull, like, you know, that people are pulling, and like, are being sucked out by some sort of force. And you know, when you have the woman going through the house, like, touching everything, there is a sense too. I was wondering if you could maybe speak about this, this, this movement, this pull, this sort of something that, this backwards movement that suggests a larger force at work. Because I think you're really good at not overusing this, and not making it, because I think it could easily become a kind of gimmick, if you will. But it's, so, I was wondering if you could speak perhaps about some of your thoughts about this movement, and also the challenges, right, and risks, in doing something like this so overtly?
Basma Alsharif 14:09
Yeah. I mean, that's one thing that, I think, making a longer film, I kind of didn't anticipate. Because it definitely comes out of things that I've done in the past in my work. And then suddenly, when I saw it in a longer format, I started to question that a lot, that it would just become gimmicky, or that you would almost stop paying attention because you knew what the trick was, and this sort of thing. And I think what became the bigger challenge was the thing that was the purpose for making the film, was making all of these different sites and histories kind of collapse into each other. And that really, I really needed formal elements. Like I depended on formal elements in order to connect these different sites. And I, there was also about a year and a half between half of, one half of the film and the other, which was a big challenge, I think. Not just in terms of like, continuity, or what the actors looked like, but, but just in terms of where my own, yeah, where my head space was. The things I was interested in had shifted, and the world had shifted. And so I, I really was struggling to kind of control this, like, material, which was also kind of really locked down in a particular way, and to sustain that for a long time. And I think it wasn't necessarily my go-to to have so much of the film in reverse. But I began to feel like there needed to be this sense that even if we were moving forward, we were going backwards at the same time. That there was that, there was no beginning and end, there was just this, like, loop. And that we would be aware of that through these different kind of chapters, and these different locations, and the repetition of certain things. So I kind of, I feel like I tried a lot of different things. I even tried to cut the film, not so, in such separate sections, but to have them sort of more blended, and to have that effect of going in reverse still happening. And I think it became really clear that that was the sort of most powerful gesture, was to, because I think for me, it's like, I mean, I watched the opening sequence for myself probably like 20 or 30 times to, before deciding to use it in reverse, in order to decide, like, figure out whether, even if I knew if it was going in reverse, if it still felt like it was going forward. And it did. And so I felt like, okay, this will work if I, if I do that. And then I need to sort of pick other moments in the film, which are really important to have moving backwards for me. And hopefully, then for my audience. But I wanted to say that I think I also connected it to other moves. I feel like repeating very similar kinds of images, in more subtle ways, was a way to have those spaces blend, and also feel like we're not going forward in them. Yeah.
Haden Guest 16:54
Let's see if there are questions or comments from our attentive audience. Let's start with the gentleman in the plaid shirt with his hand raised, and there's a microphone coming over to you right now.
Audience 1 17:05
Thank you. Basma, it was a beautiful film, I'm very grateful that you showed it. It was a very internationalist film, which I think to me is, speaks to how I view the struggle for Palestinian solidarity and liberation as well. And actually, dovetailing on the question about the backward motion. When I traveled to Gaza in 2009, to deliver medical supplies there, one of the things that struck me about seeing Gaza City was what it could have been, so to speak. Or imagining, had it not been occupied and destroyed, all of that, that it could be an incredible city, you know, like a Venice, you know, of the Middle East, and so on. But instead, it's something else. And the inverse motion, and the different scenes and the way they connected, kind of reminded me of that, that memory of imagining what things could have been, because of these sort of unique histories. But, and so I want you to comment on that. And, but I'm also curious, you know, when I got there, it, well, it took a lot to get into Gaza. So I'm wondering how, like, sort of logistically, you worked that out? Did you go in through Tel Aviv? Or, we had to go through Rafah, so I'm not sure how you arranged that. But I also was curious about whether you, even though you, you resist, like, something overtly political, whether you connect, you know, your work, and how you go about promoting it to, you know, like a movement for a boycott, divestment, and sanctions and, and that sort of thing.
Basma Alsharif 19:11
So my, I have a particular situation with the Gaza Strip, which is that I have a Palestinian Authority passport and a Gaza ID, which has actually meant that it's illegal for me to be anywhere except Gaza. So I can sort of go in easily as long as, and this is a condition that started about 10 years ago, or a policy, let's say, that started about 10 years ago, which coincides with all of these wars that have happened, and is a very strategic strategy. It's strategic to sort of disconnect that territory, I think, from the rest of Palestine, Israel. So it means that I can go in. I can't go through Tel Aviv anymore, which I used to be able to go to. But even then I would receive a permit that would say you could go only from Tel Aviv Airport, from Ben Gurion Airport, to the Gaza border, the North one. And then you, so you're not allowed anywhere else, and we could, I mean, previously, when things were okay, we were able to sort of travel around. But in the last 10 years, I haven't been able to. And so I usually go through Egypt, through Sinai and the Rafah border. And it's usually not complicated, because I have a Gaza ID, so I can get in. But for the film, I had shot a film there before. I made a short video work there in 2013 that I shot myself. And I think my experience of doing that made me feel like, it's really tricky for me to film this. It's the only work previous to that I'd actually shot in Palestine, though a lot of my work is based on my connection to that place, or about that place, and has taken images from Palestine. But it's actually the only work I've made directly inside. And it's, I think, really different from a lot of my work, because it's very hard for me to create that distance when I'm there shooting it. And, and so when I decided to make this, and I knew that I, I sort of wanted drone shots, and Steadicam shots, and all this, which is not something I know how to do, first of all, I decided that I also wasn't going to be there for the shooting. And I worked with a Palestinian producer based in Ramallah, who sort of had a contact with a media company that was shooting stuff for the news using drone cameras and had Steadicams and all this. And so we decided that, and I had wanted also the Gaza part to be the final, the last shoot. So I would shoot everything, and then I would shoot Gaza, and sort of know what I wanted from it. And so I kind of remotely directed everything, which for me played into having a majority of that footage shot by drone cameras. And so, and knowing Gaza and the territory really well, and the house is my family's house, I was able to kind of, like, write a shot list, basically, of the things that I wanted, and the specific streets I wanted filmed, and how high, and at what angle, and all these things. And that we just kept going back and forth, so they would just, like, feed me the footage that they were shooting, and then I would, I don't know, correct it, or change it, and then edit it. So it was in the process of actually starting to edit the film that we were still shooting Gaza. And it was interesting, because I, I think working, I had worked with a news media agency before, about 10 years before. And I, it's something that I find, like, really complicated, actually, the work that's done there. Because there's this almost, there's this fixation, because it's kind of like the only, I don't know what to call it, market, or like way to make money in Gaza. I mean, it's in extreme poverty, as I guess you know, if you've gone in, and with more than 70% living below the poverty line. And so actually, the only way to make money is to, like, record a lot of violent imagery and sell it to, to news, to news stations. And so there were a lot of, so there's a lot of people who are trained really well to do this. But they, it's such a weirdly exploitative thing, that I wanted to also access, and to access at a distance, so that it would have this sort of cool, kind of emotionless, like empty or sterile, I don't know what to call it. Like something that was clearly distant than the rest of the film, which was all shot on 16 millimeter. But yeah, I think that, initially, I was really like, no, I should be there for the shooting of the house. And that woman is someone I know very well, and I, and it's a quite sensitive sort of thing that I asked her to do. And I felt like there's something wrong with doing that. But I was like, but there is something wrong. And that's what I'm trying to portray in the film, just to have this kind of really distant perspective, and, and not be able, being really able to access this place, and to have it feel like it's in this isolated sort of bubble that exists outside of time, or something. And so, yeah, that's sort of how it worked out.
Haden Guest 23:52
Yes, let's take a question up here, Steven. Thank you.
Audience 2 23:59
Yes, I was, I was interested in your, the way you related the film to literature, and your choices of literature. Christ Stopped at Eboli, Joseph Conrad, Shakespeare. It wasn't?
Basma Alsharif 24:20
There was no Shakespeare.
Audience 2 24:21
Oh. Maybe I, perhaps I just saw him on the shelf, and he wasn't...
Basma Alsharif 24:25
That's right. Yeah, that's true. Yeah.
Audience 2 24:27
Well, I'm just curious about your choices of literature, and what they mean to you personally, and how they, I guess, intersect with your experience. And I guess about your thoughts on the connection between writing and the filmmaking process, two different mediums.
Basma Alsharif 24:45
Yeah, I think, actually, about writing in film as a kind of, as another image, as another… something that has equal weight to the image. So for me, they're not actually separate. And I think that images, that words can do things that images can do as well. And so I try to work with that as much as I can. I think in my previous work, definitely in this one, and I think everything, you know, like sound, language, all of that, is another image, another thing that sort of affects the way that we perceive something. And so it's a really integral part of my process. And I think in a lot of the references in, or the texts that are used in this, were texts that like, the Conrad is actually a book that I really hate. And like, I really don't like Heart of Darkness. I think it's a really complicated, weird book. And I think he's got much better writing. But I, but with that, I really, I think, for me, it was the connection to sort of who is telling a contested history, and how it's understood. And to have it sort of be just kind of displaced in this weird sense. I mean, I think, maybe revealing a lot about my intention, but I think with the film, I really wanted to feel like everything was sort of disconnected. Everything, everybody was like, people were disconnected from what they were saying, from the landscapes they were in, from time, from space, in some way. And so I felt like Conrad sort of that, this sort of ending of the book is, is for me, the really, I don't know, it brought it together? And Carlo Levi I talked about a bit yesterday, because he, I stumbled upon the book, sort of backwards, because it became much more important than Pasolini, in a way. The landscape that I'm shooting in is the same that he used in the Gospel According to St. Matthew in place of Palestine. But then I found out about Carlo Levi, who I'd never heard about. And out of total curiosity, I read the book, and I felt like it was describing Gaza today, and was completely mesmerized by it. And so I felt like it was important to bring his voice, and to, I think, also in the work that I make, there're always these, like, references that I know only certain people in an audience will recognize. And so like, if I show the work, I showed the work in a private screening in Egypt recently, and the song that plays in Arabic, everybody was like, oh, [?UNKNOWN?]. Like they knew immediately who it was, and had a really different connection to it, where I think, you know, other audiences might be like, oh, yeah, I have no idea. And I think it was the same with Carlo Levi. Like, when I showed the film in Milan, I felt like people were like, you know, very familiar with him, and had a different connection. And a lot of people know Matera, and where those scenes were shot, or know the character, these sorts of things. So I think, in that sense, like literature maybe also works the same way. That it will reach certain audiences who will have a much deeper connection than other people. Yeah.
Haden Guest 27:39
Any other questions or comments? Oh, yes, right here.
Audience 3 27:50
I wonder, how do you describe the reference to the Dixie song that is sung by this, what appeared to be an African American, from the United States? I mean, how do you connect that? What is the reference there?
Basma Alsharif 28:09
That, I feel, so for me, actually, that whole scene is like, the kind of the most unresolved one of the film. It's the most, it's the one that's the hardest to figure out, I think, and it's definitely the one that I put the most ideas into. And maybe that's because America is super-layered, and I wanted to bring in all these different voices. But in constructing that scene, I decided that I would access, like, Hollywood actors, or people working in Hollywood. And so I made casting calls and asked people who were specifically, also, typically cast as, like Mexicans, or Native Americans or, or just for being Black. And, and chose three that ended up kind of being in the Mojave section that happens after. Because I just kind of wanted to fill a room that would show certain parts of the American population, and the guy who sings Dixie, that sort of happened afterwards. But he's a very good friend of mine, he's not an actor. And we were talking about the film as I was writing it, and I was saying that I was trying to figure out how to kind of plant something really violent in the middle of it that would just be banal, just sort of be like, like, we don't know what to do with it. Or that would be treated, not that it's banal, but that it would be treated like sort of an afterthought, or ignored, or just be this like horror in the middle of the room. And it was actually he who suggested that you should let me sing Dixie in the middle of your scene. And I was like, okay, I don't know that I want to do that, because I don't know that I can defend such a thing. And he was like, you know, put your money where your mouth is. Like put something uncomfortable. You're already digging into all these other histories that are not your own and, and that you find links with. And so we talked about it a lot, and then I also didn't know if he could sing, so I had him sing. And, and we set up this scene which was kind of like set up to be sort of like an audition. And
Haden Guest 30:05
A script reading.
Basma Alsharif 30:06
Yeah, exactly. And they're actually reading, like, from Arab folktales. And there are, so all, there are all these other layers to it. And, that was, for sure, the kind of sequence that was the longest to edit, that took the longest, Because I really, I myself was uncomfortable, not because it is violent, actually, as a scene, but because I didn't know how to treat it. I didn't know how clear to make what his, you know, there's, there was a lot more going on when we filmed it. There were a lot, like a lot more dialogue and things that sort of contextualized him as a character. And I realized that I was really afraid to have him in the film, but that I wanted to figure out how to do it. And actually, a scene that seemed really insignificant, and that was done to sort of warm up, like, with these actors, I also have never directed actors, and they’re, and so it was really strange to sort of ask them not to be actors, because they're not, or not to be characters. And so we filmed this scene where I asked Coleman, the man who sings Dixie, to kind of like look through the window, so that maybe I would use it as a way to say that we're, it's not just me who wants to put this song, it's also him, like he wants to be in the film in this way. And, and I, you know, initially I thought it was kind of a stupid idea, but then I ended up thinking, no, I want this, the awareness that he's looking at himself. And I'm not sure that it translates, but that's what I ended up with.
Haden Guest
Are there any other questions or comments? Because if not, I'm gonna ask you to join me in thanking Basma Alsharif for this wonderful evening!
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