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— a: The profile of the Forgiving,
exemplarily of Jesus Christ (“If someone strikes you on
one cheek, turn to him the other also” [Luke 6:29]; “Anyone
who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven…”
[Matthew 12:32]; cf. Luke 12:10).
Gilles Deleuze: “When a part of the body has had to sacrifice
most of its motoricity in order to become the support for organs
of reception, the principle feature of these will now only be
tendencies to movement or micro-movements which are capable
of entering into intensive series… The face is this organ-carrying
plate of nerves which has sacrificed most of its global mobility
and which gathers or expresses in a free way all kinds of tiny
local movements which the rest of the body usually keeps hidden.”
(Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, pp. 87-88). God the
Father has no face, since He is all action, not passive at all—the
One Who is pure action expresses Himself other than through
a face. On the other hand, even before Jesus Christ, the Son
of God, turned the other cheek, his absence of ressentiment,
his magnanimity was clear from the absence of any micro-movements
and twitchings in his cheeks, eyes, and lips on being slapped.
Thus, he too in a way did not have a face even though he was
incarnated. If one considers that Jesus Christ was ever so faintly
resentful, and thus that he had a face, then we should see the
one who turned the other cheek in profile prior to his resurrection
(it is peculiar that this is rarely the case), but frontally
once resurrected: indeed, exemplarily in the icons, Jesus Christ,
the Resurrection and the Life, not subject or no longer subject
to over-turns, and consequently not needing a name, virtually
incarnates frontality as such, and is therefore nameless.
— b: The profile of the Unforgiving, of the double,
who when slapped turns his or her other cheek only because
it is the cheek of the other, the aggressor’s cheek
(so that the same way when I “plunge my sword, with
brute ferocity, repeatedly through and through his bosom,”
or shoot him, I will discover with consternation and horror,
for example in a mirror or by the pain I feel and my tottering
gait, that I have stabbed myself not my double [Poe’s
William Wilson: “in my death, see by this image,
which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself”],
the moment I, who had been keeping a low profile
ever since my encounter with the double, slap the double on
the cheek he or she has turned, I feel the pain of having
slapped myself, until readying myself to slap him or her I
have the expression less of anger as of dread).
2: a concise biographical sketch
Jalal Toufic is a writer, film
theorist, and video artist. He is the author of Distracted
(Station Hill, 1991; 2nd ed., Tuumba, 2003), (Vampires):
An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (Station Hill,
1993; 2nd ed., Post-Apollo, 2003), Over-Sensitivity
(Sun & Moon, 1996), Forthcoming (Atelos, 2000), and
Undying Love, or Love Dies (Post-Apollo, 2002). His videos
and mixed media works have been presented in North America,
Brazil, the Middle East and Europe, most recently at the 16th
International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam (IDFA) in
a “Focus Jalal Toufic” program. He co-edited the special Discourse
issue Gilles Deleuze: A Reason to Believe in this World,
and edited the special Discourse issues Middle
Eastern Films Before Thy Gaze Returns to Thee and
Mortals to Death. Toufic has taught at the University
of California at Berkeley, California Institute of the Arts,
USC, and, in Amsterdam, DasArts and the Rijksakademie.
Should I have two profiles then,
as a writer and as a video maker? Nota bene by the
film theorist regarding the writer and the video maker:
My texts and videos do not try to accomplish the same thing,
but complement each other. In my books I am interested in
discontinuity both in form (my book Distracted is
clearly aphoristic) and content (for instance I have written
on the affinity between the atomists of Islam, for example
al-Ashâ‘ira, and cinema, where the appearance
of motion results from the projection of film stills at a
rate of 24 frames per second [in the silent era the rate of
projection was often 18 frames per second]). But in my videos,
I mainly work with (Bergsonian) duration (for instance the
twenty-minute-long shot of the car drive in ‘Âshûrâ’:
This Blood Spilled in My Veins, the ten-minute-long shot
of the slaughter of two sheep and of the second cow in The
Sleep of Reason: This Blood Spilled in My Veins, and
the twelve-minute-long shot of my brother’s son sleeping
in A Special Effect Termed “Time”; or, Filming
Death at Work) and would like to achieve the basic continuity
of a Taoist calligrapher or painter, i.e. have the chi
(vital breath/original energy) not interrupted even when there
are, exceptionally, cuts, for example between different scenes.
Moreover, while I am an aphoristic writer, I am not a short
film/video maker, i.e., one who, like Artavazd Peleshian (The
Seasons, 29 minutes), Brothers Quay (Rehearsals for
Extinct Anatomies, 14 minutes), Kubelka, Jan Svankmajer
(Dimensions of Dialogue, 12 minutes) can, to paraphrase
Nietzsche, show in ten minutes what everyone shows in a feature-length
film or video—what everyone does not show in
a feature-length film or video; generally, the longer my video,
the more substantial it is. With the exception of my book
(Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film,
where it was a matter of dispersing the universe since it
was turning into a paranoid one, in my other books I am trying
to build a universe, and thus feel affined to Paul Klee’s
“Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes
visible” (“Creative Credo,” in The Thinking
Eye). The moment one succeeds in building a universe,
it detaches from this world, somewhat like the baby universes
of cosmology. But in my video works, I do not have the impulse
and aim to produce autonomous works, to try to create a universe,
but want my videos to be, as Deleuze wrote, “reasons
to believe in this world.” While I have tended
to be concerned with the creation of aesthetic facts in my
books, I have not tried to do the same in my essayistic documentary
videos—notwithstanding that the creation of aesthetic
facts can happen in both fiction films and documentary films—but
tried rather to document certain worldly facts while making
sure to subtract all that is customarily added to make the
viewer see only certain parts of the referential image, i.e.
all that is added in order to subtract from the image, for
example the voice-over (I also try to avoid non-diegetic special
effects [speeded motion, etc.] and music partly because they
imply that reality is not intense enough on its own). With
the rapid advances in digital simulation and virtual reality,
when we encounter reality—in the sense of the actual
as opposed to simulations—at all, it will increasingly
strike us as the Lacanian Real.
“Toufic is at
the core of a small but staunch group of Beiruti artists who
have — collectively and separately — made a strong
case for there being an intellectually rigorous, critically
engaged, and ultra-contemporary platform for cultural practice
developing in Lebanon and in the region. Toufic has been instrumental
not only as an artist in his own right but also as an instigator
or catalyst, someone known to push his colleagues and students
to create better, more complex, and more probing work.…
Toufic is one of the most active and ambitious figures in
the Arab world who — book by book — has endeavored
to sculpt a critical, theoretical language of the Arab world.”
The Daily Star, Lebanon, 21 August 2004
Focus Jalal Toufic:
Irruptions of the Real: With a modest retrospective,
IDFA pays homage to the many-sided writer, film theoretician
and video artist Jalal Toufic. Although much of his work has
political overtones – rather inevitable, being a Lebanese
artist and son of an Iraqi father and a Palestinian mother
– the philosophical reflections, the humour and the
curiosity about all facets of life are the most distinctive
characteristics of his short video films. Toufic’s subjects
range from sleeplessness (Phantom Beirut: A Tribute to
Ghassan Salhab, 2002) and torn election posters (the
humorous Saving Face, 2003) to the dead and undead
(The Sleep of Reason: This Blood Spilled in My Veins,
2002).
16th International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam
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