What were the starting points and initial ideas behind For Cultural Purposes Only?
All my films have made use of archive film. Until now I’d taken for granted a superfluity of film imagery and had unquestioningly believed that if I searched hard enough I would always be able to obtain the image I looked for. I thought of myself as a benign recycler of culture. It never crossed my mind that there were images I could not see.When I heard the story of the loss of the Palestinian Film Archive in the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982, it made me pause. Where I had been used to teasing apart the dominance in culture of self same images, it was salutary to think of a culture that did not have access to the same scope and diversity of images. It made me reconsider the value of image and to think to what extent the cinematic image helps shape cultural memory. This was the starting point for the film.
Could you maybe share an important/funny/moving/surprising anecdote related to the making-of the film?
The most important moment for me in the making of this film came when we interviewed Khadijeh Habashneh. She was the archivist of the film archive and also a wonderful filmmaker in her own right. When she spoke she was careful to point out that the important thing about the Palestinian films made during this period was not that they were lost but that they had been made, that they existed at all. It was a key moment for me, a reminder to dispense with the easy sentiment of loss and nostalgia and to generate an energy in the film which promoted the drive to make work rather than dwell on passivity and loss. Khadijeh reminded me that the action of making, the filmmaker’s response to the immediate, is ultimately more vital than a film’s preservation.
What do you do when not making films?
It’s hard to remember! This film was pretty all-consuming to make. I do also curate artist film screenings and am training to be a psychotherapist.
What would you like to say to your audience before seeing For Cultural Purposes Only?
I consciously decided to work in a much more collaborative way than I usually do on this project. I wanted to acknowledge the collective model of filmmaking that the Palestinian filmmakers of the 70s employed. To introduce the film I’d want to pay tribute to the wonderful artists who worked on this film and to celebrate the proper cultural exchange that this enabled. It’s hard to really understand what’s happening in the world of cinema unless you’re lucky enough to annually attend great film festivals like Rotterdam.Making this film has enriched my understanding of cinema. The search for the lost films introduced me to filmmakers, artists and films that have renewed my faith in what cinema should do and why film should be made.
What are you currently working on or planning at the moment?
I’m currently researching two projects: one about the British film star Diana Dors and her early career at Rank Studios. Again I’m looking at image but this time still image and the way Dors’ image as a starlet was modulated and promoted. She very early understood how to take control of this process and I want to look at the difference between images which are complicit and images which exploit. The other project is a cold war spy film, about spying as voyeurism and about spying as revelation. It is a way of looking at the past to understand
what’s happening now in our surveillance world.