Atonal Cinema

Robert G. White is a lecturer in Media and Communication at Kingston University, UK. His research explores the intersection of film, critical theory and geopolitics. He is the co-editor of Spaces of Crisis and Critique: Heterotopias Beyond Foucault (Bloomsbury, 2018). His research has also been published in Film Criticism, RCL and the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies.

• Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1: Between Here and Elsewhere: Godard, Genet and the resistance of image in contemporary Palestinian Cinema Chapter 2: Between Presence and Absence: Remnants and revenants in the Cinema of the Interior Chapter 3: Between Diaspora and Exile: Palestine, Chile and the cinema of Miguel Littín Chapter 4: Between Basilicata and Bethlehem: Pasolini, Palestine and the non-European Chapter 5: Towards a post-Palestinian Cinema: Imagining states of being beyond the status quo EndnotesBibliographyIndex

Using Edward Said's writings about music and exile to launch a theorization about the contrapuntal voice in Palestinian diasporic cinema, this book calls into question the very terms of the diasporic and exilic in the Palestinian context. Robert G. White’s rigorous yet easy to read prose is deeply informed by the preceding and current literature on Palestinian cinema, the history of Palestine, and the history of modern philosophy to the present, while maintaining a critical eye on the dissonance and gaps between this latter field and his objects of study. Within the pages of one book, we journey from Said’s responses to Jean Mohr’s photographs about Palestinian refugees in After the Last Sky to Godard's and Genet's critical works on the Palestinian revolution, and Pasolini's essay film, Sopralluoghi in Palestine [Location Scouting in Palestine], to place in relief the films of the pre-Nakba Palestinian/Chilean Miguel Littin, and the films of Elia Suleiman, Kamal Aljafari, Mohaned Yaqubi, Ayreen Anastas and Basma Alsharif. White's assertion that the contrapuntal voice and the “resistance of image” distinguishing these filmmakers challenges the history and concept of partition in Palestine-Israel and fills a gap in contemporary studies of Palestinian cinema.