On Discomfort & Empathy in Rosalind Nashashibi’s Electrical Gaza (2015)

by: Minou Norouzi , October 5, 2023

There is a prevailing desire for the documentary to be useful as a change-making, campaigning, political tool. Historically, this expectation is entangled with the culture of engendering empathy in viewers in the hope that this will give rise to political action helping create a more just, equitable world. In what follows, I examine the 2017 Turner Prize nominated film Electrical Gaza (2015) directed by British-Palestinian artist-filmmaker Rosalind Nashashibi, produced by Kate Parker and with Emma Dalesman as the director of photography. I pay particular attention to the historical fault lines of the documentary and its aspiration to be of socio-political use. I do so to discover what this can tell us about fault lines to come in the broader fields of the visual arts where empathy too has experienced a renaissance in recent years as a thing of the moment.

To solicit empathy in viewers, I propose, is to embed into the work an error of cinematic language. And this error, I suggest, may negatively impact on the political efficacy of the work. But what if we were to reframe the desire for an engagement through empathy and cast our sight towards discomfort as an ethical relation? The labour of discomfort, writes feminist theorist Tina Campt, demands of viewers to ‘transform this discomfort into something different—something reparative’ (2021: 169). This essay examines the political dimension of Electrical Gaza, for some discomforting to watch because of the apparently dissociative, unsympathetic, or ambivalent ways with which Nashashibi may appear to be dealing with the injustices surrounding the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The essence of the work and the core of my argument is the empathic representation of those affected by economic, political, or social injustices is intentionally omitted. Nashashibi bypasses the dramatic plotting that viewers are normally accustomed in social-issue documentaries to engage viewers otherwise. I argue with Electrical Gaza and for discomfort as a form of ethical labour that circumvents the possibility of empathic identification with suffering as a redemptive act for viewers (Campt 2021; Norouzi 2018).

Electrical Gaza was commissioned by the Trustees of the Imperial War Museum in London and shot in Gaza at the onset of the 2014 conflict known as Operation Protective Edge. Filmed in just one week, the film presents a calm, ambivalent observation of life in the Gaza Strip before and in between violent conflicts. It would be tempting to say the film is devoid of a point of view and therefore objectifies reality, but just the opposite could be argued. This essay argues that the politics of the film can be located precisely in the ambivalent timbre of the observational footage. Initially the apparent ambivalence (defined here as the film’s failure to articulate an expected pro-Palestinian adversarial position) may be experienced by viewers as discomforting. The discomfort arises from viewers’ knowledge of Gaza as a tense geopolitical context. Understandably viewers may expect an adversarial position regarding the well-known Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The impression that the filmmaker may be objectifying the real, too, arises from the aforementioned ambivalence. [1] But the objectification, I argue, and its discomfort are the outcome of the film’s refusal to deliver catastrophe and must be read as intentional. Nashashibi refuses to engage viewers with representations of suffering of the distant (Palestinian) others and offers a visual counter-narrative to Palestinian lives that are otherwise handled in news media and documentaries as ‘humanitarian commodities’ (Rangan 2017). The absence of images of catastrophe, I argue omitting what the filmmaker and scholar Poojan Rangan calls ‘images of immediacy’ rips from viewers the redemptive potential inherent in their empathic engagement with suffering (2017: 11). This can be experienced by viewers as discomforting and objectifying because such modes of looking and witnessing do not solicit emotions from viewers. By insisting on its objectifying gaze Electrical Gaza begins to renegotiate its position on the agencies of onscreen others and the ethics of their reception in ways that are novel. As others have argued, not only are such non-interventionist approaches to filmmaking possible, they are also essential to critically addressing the consumption habits of viewers in an effort to bring about a ‘fully self-conscious audience’ aware of itself and their complicity in so-called world-making (Godmilow 2001: np). This essay grapples with the challenges of developing viewing cultures that avoid the historical pitfalls of soliciting empathy. Where empathic engagement has intentionally been avoided, I suggest welcoming discomforting viewing experiences as a means to reanimate the political potential of documentary and artists’ moving image practices.

The Pleasure of the Real & Its Intended Processes of Co-creation

One way of approaching Electrical Gaza and Nashashibi’s films more broadly is through the prism of documentary or ethnographic observation given that the act of looking and recording as an outward-reaching act is a large part of Nashashibi’s method. But it is by no means the only way to read her films. Nashashibi mostly shoots on 16mm film stock creating the conditions for contemplative pacing and often adds an exacting sound design to her works. These sound elements collide with the analogue source material to conjure a visceral, physical viewing experience. The real world out there comes into sensuous contact with viewers’ equally real internal worlds.

At Filmn your Life with Fashion, a cinema retrospective of Nashashibi’s films I helped organise [2], the artist spoke of the burden of the classic documentary mode and its desire for a ‘human element.’ For Nashashibi the desire to get to know a community through its story ‘got in the way of looking’ (Norouzi, Nashashibi & Kidner 2017: np). Instead, Nashashibi pursues a ‘self-referential’ approach as she calls it, otherwise known as the self-reflexive mode in the documentary field. Electrical Gaza, she says, illustrates a feeling; her feeling of being there. As viewers, we are invited to simply look with Nashashibi, or alongside her, and this is privileged over and above forms of cinematic expression that might follow a narrative or adversarial trajectory. To echo the writer and critic Erika Balsom, in doing so these kinds of films create for viewers ‘a time and space of attunement in which a durational encounter with alterity and contingency can occur, with no secure meaning assured’ (2017: np).

Nashashibi indeed avoids the tenor of advocacy viewers may expect from documentary works. Her films tackle diverse contexts, from a Scottish ballet school to the Gaza Strip and she often works in closed communities, be they an extended family living in one house or a crew of men on a cargo ship. Her films share attentiveness to the pleasure of simply looking, the representation of which is not preoccupied with securing meaning but remains opaque. This can be discomforting to some viewers, especially when the topic of exploration is as politically contested as is the question of justice relating to Palestine and Palestinian people. But Electrical Gaza requires a suspension of the expectant impulse for it to make visible, inform, educate, and campaign to give space to ‘the pleasure of the real’ as it communicates itself on its own terms (Nashashibi in Brebenel, Norouzi, and Perneczky 2017). The film’s narrative opacity can be understood as a very well-articulated inaccessibility that may indeed be discomforting. Its internal logic demands work; the film invites viewers to complete it with their participation. Said differently, the film can only be completed with the images viewers bring to the viewing experience. Or, as Balsom puts it, with the viewer’s ‘labour of associative thought’ (2017: np). In other words, it is precisely through the narrative opacity experienced as discomforting objectification that viewers may begin to locate their positions of looking and reading images alongside the filmmaker. This intended process of co-creation, it is hoped, opens to viewers the possibility of reflecting on their position of safety as viewers and the complicity in so-called world-making that accompanies this process. Questions may surface. What is my role and what are my obligations as a film viewer? While scholarship on the ethics of documentary filmmaking and art production tend to circle around examining the ethical responsibilities of filmmakers or artists, I turn now to the critical questions concerning the ethical obligation of viewers.

The Suspension of Self-interest as a Political Advocate: Looking Away

In her essay ‘The Unwar Film,’ film scholar Alisa Lebow develops the novel category by the same name. Accordingly, unwar films expose the ‘unnoticed, the invisibles, the overlooked that war produces, rather than its “main attraction.”’ These films are, as Lebow puts it, ‘a “slip” [of the tongue] in the general narrative of war’ (2015: 463). Electrical Gaza can easily be categorised as such. Showing ambivalent scenes of everyday life in the Gaza Strip, the film partakes in such a ‘slip’ refusing to engage viewers with well-worn images of war and suffering. This places the ethical obligation of reading and interpreting the images in direct relation to viewers responsibilities towards the conditions that produce the lives depicted. In short, the film circumvents empathic engagement and therefore reignites the political timbre of the documentary. This approach to filmmaking and film viewing requires the suspension of self-interest as a political advocate; s/he/they who speak for the other. The positions of agency and reception can therefore be renegotiated. This recalibration in the relationship between on-screen others and viewers, I argue, can bring about a renewed political dimension to filmmaking and film viewing. But why is such recalibration needed?

What is too easily assumed about the documentary method is that documentary films are by default of political use. The raison d’être of the traditional documentary is that it ‘acts,’ is politically enacted, that the documentary has political agency, that it can mobilise. This raison d’être becomes a grave error of thought surrounding documentary culture especially where it relates to the relationships between on-screen others and viewers. I see this error expressed through cinematic language. Amongst other things, its vocabulary includes the error of seeking empathic identification in viewers as a means of political activism. It is expressed, too, in viewers and critics’ expectations of what a documentary or work of art ought to do (politically). In contrast, artist-made documentaries such as Electrical Gaza tend to avoid engaging viewers empathically. Does the refusal to engage in the expected ways hold greater promise in reframing the politics of documentary cinema? What can be achieved by ‘looking away from the main event’ (Lebow 2015: 463), from suffering, war or other known terrains of injustice?

As mentioned earlier, Electrical Gaza was commissioned by the UK’s Imperial War Museum. The remit for its collection is to explore ‘the impact of contemporary conflict on people’s lives’ (IWMC Rosalind Nashashibi Press Release 2015). Given this remit, Nashashibi’s film would at first appear a docile depiction of the ongoing hostilities and their impact on the lives of Gazans. There are few overt signs of reoccurring wars, which viewers will know have challenged the place and its people since the Six Day War of 1967. Little reminds us of Gaza’s occupation until 2005, and the State of Israel’s continuing control over Gaza’s airspace, waters, borders, or the continuing tensions with Hamas. Wherein then lies the impact of Electrical Gaza?

Its power, I argue, resides in the subtle ways with which image and sound work against expectations. There is no monologue, no dialogue, no protest, no campaigning, no visible resistance. Little of what is seen offers any remembrance of the on-going conflict and intermittent wars. We see men chatting in Arabic (no translation is offered), the preparation of falafel wraps, ordinary life observed from a passing car. Footage of a gated border, busy with people locked in, or expectant of departure are some of the reoccurring pointers towards the conditions of life in the region. Enigmatic images of kids and horses in the sea, too, provide a clue. The quotidian quality of these images is made extraordinary by the associations viewers may bring to the film. In short, looking away from the ‘main event’, from war and suffering can bring about viewer participation. For example, I recall an incident that circulated through news media in July 2014.

Shortly after Nashashibi’s recordings of beachside idyll, four Palestinian boys aged between nine and eleven were killed at a beach in a missile attack by the Israel Defence Force. The incident was witnessed by a number of international news organisations stationed at a nearby hotel. Journalists found themselves within two to three hundred meters viewing distance from the incident. Images of the beach and the blood drenched survivors, including two teenage boys and two adults, circulated widely that summer of 2014. What haunts Nashashibi’s gently acquiescent images of the coast is contingent on my knowledge of the subsequent missile attack entangled with images of the news event, and any number of other images, some associated, some historical, others personal or imagined which reside in my thinking and which I bring to the film. Arriving in Europe from revolutionary Iran in the late 1970s, my own early life was defined by war and upheaval. Yet, I was not able to reconcile the news images I encountered in my new home with the place we had left as a family. Europe, it seemed to my childhood eyes, was constructing an image of a place entirely partial to its own agenda, whilst floating in my head were the attendant images of ordinary life in a place that was going through a revolution followed by violent conflict in the Iran-Iraq war between 1980–1988, but where life likewise continued almost as normal. Yes, there were days we could not go to school. There were explosions and gunshots at night, uncertainty, fear, instability, a one-party rule. But impressions of these tense circumstances sit amongst a greater collection of mental images of day-to-day social scenes: eating, celebrating, going to school, feeding the hobo cat we had adopted but who, as was local custom at the time, was not living indoors with us. In short, family life continued. What Nashashibi shows powerfully, and what I argue is the core of her political expression in this film, is her insistence on quotidian images. The politics of the piece is expressed in the palpable dissonance where expectations of catastrophe, of war and suffering are not met. Instead, viewers are confronted with a casual, ambivalent depiction of life in the Gaza Strip. Notions of the roles of documentary and ethnographic film as a political advocate or interlocutor are disrupted. And this provokes questions not just about the filmmaker’s intention but more significantly it unsettles how we conceive our roles as viewers or critics.

My assertion is that in light of said dissonance, questions about the responsibilities of art and ethical conducts that underpin artistic practices and which are often directed at filmmakers and artists can be transformed into questions about the obligations of viewers. In the post-screening discussion of the already mentioned retrospective screening of Nashashibi’s work, curator and critic Dan Kidner made the playful demand: ‘We must talk about politics, Rosie.’ Nashashibi stood her ground with the defence that the experiential already contains politics. The often-cited French philosopher Jaques Ranciére’s definition of aesthetics would support this view. Aesthetics, he writes, is ‘the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience. It is a delimitation of (…) spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience’ (2013: 13). The locus of political expression in Electrical Gaza is precisely its ambivalent observations of quotidian life that make viewers uncomfortable—perhaps even bored. This, I argue, forces viewers to turn inward for answers. What is my role here as a viewer? Why am I discomforted by images of Palestinian joy? Put simply, Nashashibi’s is an observation that dignifies those on screen, and specifically Palestinian or Arab ‘Others’ with a wider spectrum of life experiences than that of the ‘wretched,’ oppressed, subordinate to white or European privilege. The labour of empathic engagement that viewers are accustomed to remains unfulfilled, catastrophe and suffering were not delivered as expected. Soliciting discomfort, then, rather than empathy, has the potential to dismantle the relationship between the viewer and the viewed (Campt 2021; Norouzi 2018). Received in this way, the film acquires a highly political dimension.

The Discomforts of Objectification

There are still other ways to locate the politics within Electrical Gaza when delving deeper into the analysis of its form, in particular the use of sound and its aforementioned discord with the images and the ways this discord may be experienced as discomforting objectification. Before illustrating how this manifest in the film, I’ll say a little about objectification.

Divorced from its day-to-day negative connotation, objectification can be thought of as making something, or someone, an object of one’s perception as a starting point from which to explore the complex relationship between self and world, or self and other. I am interested in how the discomfort produced by objectification as an aesthetic method can work against the viewer’s identification-impulse as an act of surrogacy over the elements contained within the documentary or moving image work. This method, I argue, works against empathic identification and forces upon the viewer the issue of their complicity in the process of objectification through the very act of viewing. Nashashibi’s film Electrical Gaza, I suggest, and the discomfort generated through objectification is a more potent response politically and ethically. This can clear the way for a different kind of political engagement.

A concrete example of how this comes to the fore in Electrical Gaza is the way Nashashibi uses the sound of her own breath. Hovering at some distance like a pregnant cloud formation, the inclusion of breath hints awkwardly at Nashashibi’s presence, or a presence. It is not important to know it is the filmmaker’s own breath, as it functions to point towards the peculiar proximity of things amongst other things disrupting what would otherwise be a purely visual study in the tradition of observational documentary or ethnographic film. We never actually see anyone taking the kind of deliberate breaths we hear. This draws attention to a suggested relation through a sonic discord.

On the one hand, the breath planted in Electrical Gaza’s soundscape gives the impression of a disembodied sound-object removed from the context that generate the images we see. It is not a field recording and it is not diegetic. The discord between image and sound creates distance. On the other hand, the breath is also audibly close in its sonic quality hinting at a nearby presence. We might read it as an involved or an involving relation between the observer and the observed. The use of breath feels assured in its position as subject, yet it may be discomfortingly perceived as a dislocated object because the sound we hear is audibly dislocated from the scene where the actual breathing took place. The inclusion of the disembodied breath would seem unusual for a documentary or ethnographic work. It is dubbed rather than being part of the scenes during which it appears. As artifice or invention it could then be read as an embodied reminder of presence and proximity. It makes sense to therefore considered it a variant in a plenitude of available modalities of looking at and knowing about the world (Dattatreyan & Marrero-Guillamón 2019) involving both distance and proximity. In other words, whilst the images operate at some remove, the peculiar use of breath returns us to a kind of presencing suggested by the artist and filmmaker Hito Steyerl. Such practices, Steyerl points out, can be about “actualising” or ‘presencing and thus transforming the social, historical and also material relations, which determine things’ (2006: np). So actualised, through this occasional pulse-like sound of breath, the film reaches out to involve the viewer. In doing so, Electrical Gaza implicitly draws viewers closer to the historical relation to Gaza, albeit in discomforting ways. This occasions a different kind of reading. Perhaps more concretely expressed, for me, the breath acts as a potent visceral marker of aliveness.

Black Studies scholar Ashton T. Crawley’s inspired text Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility helps illuminate the process of breathing as an aesthetic production and how this can disrupt normative, white, totalising accounts of history and knowledge production (2017: 43). Breath as an ‘intentioned performance of breathing,’ Crawley writes, ‘produces an otherwise-than-history, one not dependent upon Newtonian physics of smooth, linear, contained time and space, but a performance of breathing and its eclipse as the hallucination of life and love in the face of the project of the plentitude of gratuitous violence and violation’ (2017: 75). Breath and breathing are then an utterance of possibilities that are otherwise. These possibilities, Crawley writes are on-going movements that announce ‘what there is’ amongst everything that we can detect with our sensuous capacities (2017: 2). Conceived in this way, Nashashibi’s breath communicates the paradox of both proximity and distance to Gaza as a contested site with all its attendant mental and physical images of suffering that viewers may hold. A complexity emerges from this duality and from Nashashibi’s particular use of breath that may suggest the aliveness mentioned earlier. That is, the feeling of being there, of Nashashibi’s bodily presence in relation to the things and people she films. And with that in mind, the use of breath here offers perhaps the most affirmative political statement not often made about Gaza and Gazans: ‘Alive, still alive’. Or as a Filipino greeting goes: ‘Breathing, still breathing’. [3]

What prevents such a reading to be more widespread are epistemic theories of how to do politics with the documentary, ethnographic film, or art practice. Their representational ethics continue to be rather entangled with the prevailing idea of the medium carrying ‘information about a group of powerless people to another group addressed as socially powerful’ (Rosler 2004: 179). Nashashibi’s film completely circumvents this hierarchy disrupting normative approaches to how knowledge (about Gaza and Gazans) is produced. A final example from Electrical Gaza demonstrates such an intervention into said hierarchy.

A group of men are gathered in a lounge and are conversing in Arabic. As there are no subtitled translations offered, as a viewer I come to reflect on both the men’s ambivalence toward Nashashibi, as well as the filmmaker’s ambivalence towards me, the viewer, in not offering any translations. The distance, discord and attendant discomfort produced by this do not just emanate from Nashashibi, but it is expressed in the disinterest of the so-called observed towards the observer. The men’s indifference to the camera and to Nashashibi’s presence could be read as an articulation of agency. Here, the group of Gazans are not powerless people seen merely through the lens of Israeli oppression. They appear instead as an egalitarian social group looking inwards, occupied with themselves. This invites yet another reading concerning the discords between sound and image. The sporadic inclusion of a sound as intimate as the filmmaker’s own breath may not be a simplistic reminder of presence of an ‘other.’ It may function as a powerful, and perhaps for some a discomforting expression of what the contradictions arising from imagined proximity and perceived distance may look and feel like. The paradox of Nashashibi’s breath is suggestive of the need for a reconfigured relationship, one that moves from feelings of responsibility towards an ethics of obligation.

The basic act of responsibility, and empathy as an ethical relation are normally understood as thinking of others. But there are fault lines in this kind of empathic engagement, a form of perceived closeness presumed to manifest of ethics. In contrast, an ethics of obligation is not about thinking for the other or about the other. This mode of thinking, it would seem to me, constitutes a kind of self-appointed surrogacy that has us stuck in the performance of ethical principles rather than an ethics that is alive, lived in a space between here and there, me and you, between the filmmaker and the screen space, between images and viewers. The space, or the distance between ‘I’ and the ‘other’ or between the here and elsewhere then opens up productively. We are forced to ask, what do we do with this space; how do we move within it? Such practices are expressions of ontological closeness that as the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy puts it ‘emphasises the distancing it opens up’ (2000: 5). Nashashibi expresses a coalition of singularities denoting both proximity and distance and this may suggest a privileging of solidarity in the face of political, social, racial stratification. The purpose of my analysis here of Rosalind Nashashibi’s very particular use of breath in Electrical Gaza was to establish the ways in which the aliveness of the breath makes apparent an embodied relation. Nashashibi, a subject who makes of herself a disembodied object through the dubbing of the sound of her breath, brings to the fore the imposed division between the burdened categories of self and other.

Regardless of how we encounter onscreen others, one crucial but perhaps overlooked aspect seems very clear to me: it is a relation that is always already fully enacted before we may be cognisant of that relation, before we may be able to define it, before we may be able to speak of it.

In conclusion, what I hope to have articulated is the egalitarian configuration of Electrical Gaza in the composition of the distance and proximity it creates to the so-called real. In doing so, the film offers the objectified ‘other’ the dignity of a wider perspective whilst it robs viewers of their belief in an exceptional status as the arbiters of how politics is done in the context of documentary filmmaking or artistic production. This is occasioned by entirely circumventing the routine solicitation of the viewer’s empathic identification, and therefore not meeting viewers’ expectations of the ethical labour one would normally invest in a film that makes visible the social conditions surrounding political conflict. This ethical labour of empathic engagement normally consists of bringing viewers closer to or stimulating the empathic identification with onscreen suffering. In short, empathic identification is what produces the false impression of a viewer’s proximity to the real. But viewing Electrical Gaza demands a different kind of labour. I may feel that there is work still to be done because I bring to the film knowledge of violent conflict that remains unfulfilled. Hence, redemptive ‘“mourning” opportunities’ are disrupted (Godmilow 1999: np). The resulting discomfort is the outcome of the distance Nashashibi creates with the lack of (empathic) fulfilment provided for viewers. This circumvents an imagined closeness or proximity to suffering that is otherwise part and parcel of empathic identification. Viewers may experience this as the real being objectified. But whose reality is being offended, whose ethical boundaries are being crossed? I suggest it is the viewers’ while the dignities of the on-screen others are maintained. Following this logic, if we were to think of the discomforting objectification as a critical aesthetic method, we may have a chance to manifest expanded viewing cultures that are more trusting and better attuned to the agency others on screen, and in life.

Notes: 

[1] To objectify the real here means to think of the social world as a material that is put in the service of art making.

[2] Nashashibi’s films are mostly short in duration and are rarely encountered together in the cinema. Often commissioned by arts institutions, they are usually shown as single-channel installations in museums or art galleries.

[3] I’m grateful to my colleague Chris Wright for this analogy.

Acknowledgements: 

This article is a revision of an earlier version titled ‘The Pleasure of the Real: The incalculably far and the very near Electrical Gaza (2015)’ in Object Documentary: The Ethics of the Documentary Encounter Reframed (Norouzi 2018). Revisions were made in the framework of the project ‘Revolutionary Patience: Migrant Perspectives on Doing Politics with the Documentary’, a multi-year practice-research project supported by Kone Foundation, 2021-2024, grant number 202012980.