Middle Eastern Films Before Thy Gaze Returns to Thee—in Less than 1/24 of a Second

An Ash‘arite theologian or an Ibn al-Arabi disciple, who believed in the ever-renewed creation of a world that is not self-sufficient, could, indeed might have said the same words through which, for different reasons, the woman of Duras’ film Le Camion avers the end of the ostensibly continuing world: “Look at the end of the world, all the time, at every second, everywhere.”

Discontinuity, whether stylistic or thematic, is encountered throughout my books. In Distracted, it is encountered in the form of aphorisms separated by blanks. In (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film, it is encountered in the manner of the (quantum) tunneling of the undead and teleportation, as well as the “counterintuitive” side effect of these, motionlessness in the absence of any discernable barrier (“One of the tolls for tunneling or teleportation, by means of which one moves through [or finds oneself to the other side of] perceptible barriers, is that unexpected, invisible obstacles will spring up everywhere, resulting in motionlessness where there is no discernable barrier. Many of these barriers will be objects that for no apparent reason cannot be removed, objects that put one in a trance, depriving one of one’s motor ability”); over-turns; and the empty space-time zones of the labyrinth, which produce lapses not merely of consciousness but also, more radically, of being. In Over-Sensitivity, it is encountered in the guise of the ahistorical fully-formed unworldly entities that irrupt in radical closures, and the empty space-time zones in the realm of altered movement, body, silence, music, space and time into which dance projects a subtle version of the dancer. And here, it is encountered mainly in the mode of the atomistic temporality of Islam according to the theology of the Ash‘arites and the sufism of Ibn al-‘Arabī.

Robert S. Fisher, Walter van Emde Boas, Warren Blume, Christian Elger, Pierre Genton, Phillip Lee, and Jerome Engel, Jr., “Epileptic Seizures and Epilepsy: Definitions Proposed by the International League Against Epilepsy (ILAE) and the International Bureau for Epilepsy (IBE),” Epilepsia 46, no. 4 (2005): 470–472.

Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 242–247: “It has been observed that if its [the bee’s

Zen master Hakuin Zenji: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

In Ash‘arite atomism, atoms revert back to nothingness because the accident of duration (baqā’) imparted to them by God does not subsist for longer than an instant.

While for Bergson, the philosopher of duration, an atom, like whatever “is not a center of indetermination,” is subject to a necessity “which obliges it to act through every one of its points upon all the points of all other images, to transmit the whole of what it receives, to oppose to every action an equal and contrary reaction, to be, in short, merely a road by which pass, in every direction, the modifications propagated throughout the immensity of the universe” (Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and William Scott Palmer [New York: Zone Books, 1988], 36), in a conception of recurrent appearance, disappearance, then appearance of entities, including atoms, the atom recurrently faces away from the linear “action” toward nothingness/the Being who recurrently creates it.

According to quantum physics, the indivisible unit of time should be reached at the Planck time: 5.391 06 (32) x 10⁻⁴⁴ s.

Revenants: creatures who have the presumption to themselves settle an outstanding symbolic debt, not leaving it to (the exoteric) God to do that on the Day of Judgment.

Why is it that nowhere in the New Testament is there an incident where Christ—who heals the possessed and resurrects the dead—meets a revenant and commands him or her either to come back fully to life or to die until the Day of Judgment?

T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, with an introduction by Angus Calder (London: Wordsworth Editions, 1997), 22–23.

In some other Muslim miniatures, what may appear, color-wise, to be an unrealistic depiction of an earthly body is actually either a realistic presentation of an Imaginal World (‘ālam al-khayāl) embodied spirit or Intelligence or a realistic depiction of an earthly body tinged by the various colored photisms that Sufis perceive in a suprasensuous manner as they progress along the spiritual path (to the state in which they perceive the black light [nūr-e siyāh]).

The separation and independence of dance, music and design, but also of the dance phrases performed by the different dancers or groups of dancers, that is, of what would traditionally be viewed as the components of an organic artwork of dance, in the collaborative work of Cage and Cunningham; as well as the separation and independence of words and images in the work of a number of avant-garde filmmakers and theater artists, for instance in Robert Wilson’s theater production of Hamletmachine and in Duras’ film Agatha, should in principle not be difficult to appreciate for someone who has an affinity with or subscribes to the occasionalist standpoint of the Ash‘arites or indeed of the mutakallimīn in general, where the different accidents that adhere to the bodies and atoms are independent of each other and of the latter.

Here’s a suggested question to some future interviewer: “If so, Jalal, why are at least some Muslim filmmakers to explore and experiment with this mode of temporality and linkage that is akin to the medium of cinema at the level of the basic apparatus, if the occasionalism connected to this temporality and mode of linking, with its denial of a nature in favor of a custom of God, is alien to reflexivity?”

The differentiation between the Kūfic script, which with its rectilinear and angular forms and its monumentality was up to the twelfth century the only script utilized in epigraphic decoration, and the cursive Naskhī script, especially the thuluth variant, which, except for certain titles, replaced Kūfic almost completely from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, shows that Muslim artists were at one level quite sensitive to the different characteristics and properties of various styles, media and materials. But this discernment of the difference of the various styles, media, and materials—and who could possibly be more sensitive than artists to the difference of styles and materials?—had to yield to their implicit more basic view of the lack of proper nature and characteristics of entities.

“The moment of its [the Queen of Sheba’s throne’s] disappearance from its place is the same as its presence with Solomon, by virtue of the renewal of creation …. Therefore do not say ‘then,’ which implies a lapse of time, for the word thumma in Arabic implies a process of cause and effect in specific situations, as the poet says, ‘Like the quivering of the spear, then it shook.’ Now the time of its quivering is the same as that of its shaking. He says ‘then,’ although there is no lapse of time. Similarly with the renewal of creation … the moment of the nonexistence of a thing is the very moment of the existence of its like …” Ibn Al ‘Arabi, The Bezels of Wisdom, translated and introduced by R. W. Austin, preface by Titus Burckhardt (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 193.

In Robbe-Grillet’s L’Immortelle, whose events take place in Turkey, there is a resonance between two sorts of appearances out of nothing: one in the set radical closure, that of Lale; and one implied by the arabesques, that of ever-renewed creation.

François Cheng, Empty and Full: The Language of Chinese Painting, trans. Michael H. Kohn (Boston: Shambhala, 1994), 76–77.

“The imaginal faculty (al-quwwat al-mutakhayyila) and the World of Imagination … is the closest thing to a denotation (dalāla) of the Real. For the Real is ‘the First and the Last, the Manifest and the Nonmanifest’ (Koran 57:3). Abū Sa‘īd al-Kharrāz was asked, ‘Through what have you known God?’ He answered, ‘Through the fact that He brings opposites together.’ Then he recited this Koranic verse.” William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-ʻArabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989), 115.

Qur’ān 27:90: “You see the mountains—you think them firm, yet they move like clouds.”

Or was it really Khadir, or else the angel Gabriel assuming the form of Āṣif b. Barkhayā?

Ibn Al ‘Arabi, The Bezels of Wisdom, 193.

Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 71.

Can one say: is unique what can be replaced only by itself? One should go further: is unique, and thus irreplaceable, that which cannot be replaced even by himself/herself.

What is itself can afford associations away from itself, for example, metaphors; but what is ontologically not itself but only like itself cannot afford such associations, since its singularity consists in this: that the creatural association it induces is first and foremost to itself.

Sohrab Shahid Saless’ Still Life (1974) is another film that should not, for other reasons, be viewed as a capitulation of the cinematic to painting. It is rather, along with Paradjanov’s Sayat Nova, one of the greatest films of the Middle East and Transcaucasia; one could give it an alternate, cinematic title derived from Beckett: Stirrings Still—Life.

Cf. Sergei Eisenstein: “It is a weird and wonderful feat to have written a pamphlet on something that in reality does not exist. There is, for example, no such thing as a cinema without cinematography. And yet the author [Naum Kaufman] of the pamphlet &leftbracket;Japanese Cinema (Moscow, 1929)&rightbracket; preceding this essay has contrived to write a book about the cinema of a country that has no cinematography. About the cinema of a country that has, in its culture, an infinite number of cinematographic traits, strewn everywhere with the sole exception of—its cinema. This essay is on the cinematographic traits of Japanese culture that lie outside the Japanese cinema.… Cinematography is, first and foremost, montage.… The Japanese cinema is completely unaware of montage. Nevertheless the principle of montage can be identified as the basic element of Japanese representational culture.” Film Form and The Film Sense, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda &leftbracket;New York, Meridian Books, 1957&rightbracket;, 28.

Al-Azhar University objected to Youssef Chahine’s first version of the script of The Emigrant because the protagonist was ostensibly modeled on and represented the prophet Joseph. When Chahine filmed an apparently insufficiently revised version and screened it in Egypt, he was soon taken to court and his film was pulled from theaters pending the court’s decision. The film was subsequently rereleased after Chahine won his appeal (given the widespread degeneracy in Egyptian culture around the time of the release of the film, I was not that surprised that the uproar in certain Egyptian circles was all about the possible transgression of the prohibition of the representation of a Qur’ānic prophet, in other words, that none of it was over the crassness with which ancient Egypt was shown).

In this bigoted age of religious and ethnic civil wars, whether in Transcaucasia, between Armenia and Azerbaijan, or elsewhere, it is salutary to have the example of Paradjanov, this Armenian born in Tbilisi, Georgia, who, from Sayat Nova onward, created the films to which (many) Muslim filmmakers, including Azerbaijani ones, feel most affined.