Lost and Found in Israeli Footage: Kamal Aljafari's “Jaffa Trilogy” and the Productive Violation of the Colonial Visual Archive

This chapter explores the potentiality involved in manipulating the colonial Israeli cinematic archive, exploring Kamal Aljafari’s three mesmerizing essay-films: The Roof (2006, 61 minutes), Port of Memory (2009, 62 minutes), and Recollection (2015, 70 minutes). Taken together, these films, while seemingly adhering to documentary practices by cinematically capturing the destruction of the social and spatial-urban condition of Palestinian life in Jaffa, are more accurately a cinematic investigation of the image archive of Jaffa. By recycling and manipulating footage from Israeli films that visually eliminate Palestinians, Aljafari proposes a model of political and aesthetic intervention that exposes the failure of the settler-colonial fantasy to do away with the natives. In the archival imagination of Aljafari’s films, the Palestinian natives “return” from the place of elimination, from the past, to achieve what Aljafari calls “cinematic justice.”