in Unmade Film, ed. Uriel Orlow (Zurich: edition fink, 2013)
“By the end of the [1948] war,” writes Walid Khalidi in All That Remains, “hundreds of entire villages had not only been depopulated but obliterated… travellers of Israeli roads and highways can see traces of their presence that would escape the notice of the casual passer-by: a fenced-in area – often surmounting a gentle hill – of olive and other fruit trees left untended, of cactus hedges and domesticated plants run wild. Now and then a few crumbled houses are left standing, a neglected mosque or church, collapsing walls along the ghost of a village lane, but in the vast majority of cases, all that remains is a scattering of stones and rubble across a forgotten landscape.”
Enter Uriel Orlow’s multipartite Unmade Film. This impossible film – this not-yet-made film, this fragmented film that never fully becomes one, despite its “plan” to do so – has been emerging over an extended and ongoing period of research and production that excavates multiple narratives and layered meanings that converge in Deir Yassin. Yet by never actually being realised, Orlow’s Unmade Film reconstructs a narrative of space, time and historical blind spots that adds layers of unsettled new meaning to questions of subconscious pain, trauma and suffering in the contexts of obliterated geo-histories.