Pary El-Qalqili: Speak image, speak

How to narrate one’s own history if it is erased, distorted, and silenced? How to speak up if your voice is taken as a threat?

Palestinian history is largely ignored by the German public. After the attack by Palestinian assassins at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, Arabs were generally regarded as a security risk for the Federal Republic of Germany. The Aliens Act, which facilitated deportations, was tightened. In addition, Palestinian associations and organizations were banned. Several hundred Arabs were deported in the weeks following the attack. Palestinians in particular were interrogated and kept under secret service surveillance. There is no visual narrative on the aftermath of the Olympics attack on Palestinian life in Germany, no oral history of the deportations, no pictures of the event in the archives. Neither the criminalization of Palestinian resistance and the surveillance are publicly documented, nor the deportations. As a result of the persecution, the first generation of Palestinians in diaspora still does not talk about their political activities in the 1970s, neither in public nor in private.

Whereas Palestinian past and present face invisibility, the figure of the Palestinian receives hypervisibility as the embodiment of potential threat: in the media it’s often portrayed as the prototype of the terrorist, as aggressive demonstrator, as anti-Semite or as criminal clan member. It overlaps with the figure of the Arab, the Muslim and the Oriental, in which colonial gaze regimes continue to operate. The film “Speak Image, Speak” sets out to interrupt, interrogate, and object dominant image politics that degrade, demonize, and dehumanize Palestinians. In ten chapters—The Orient, Work, Desire, Threat, Danger, Humiliation, Shame, Resilience, Grief, Death —the film narrates and dissects these visual fantasies.