{"id":4647,"title":"Occupied Territories: Mapping the Transgressions of Cultural Terrain - an interview/essay with Jayce Salloum and Molly Hankwitz","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/occupied-territories-mapping-transgressions-cultural-terrain-interviewessay-jayce-salloum-and-molly","version":"4c9282e51036157558b6680bdca6da840656fd6fbbf52646362ab4a11d40c2a8","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:00.9241378+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Jayce Salloum"}],"authorKeys":["Salloum, Jayce"],"subjects":["Interviews"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publication","value":"Framework","url":null},{"label":"Publisher","value":"Wayne State University Press","url":null},{"label":"Date","value":"Fall 2002","url":null},{"label":"Place","value":"Detroit, Michigan","url":null},{"label":"Volume","value":"Vol. 43","url":null},{"label":"Issue","value":"No. 2","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC1800","url":null},{"label":"Interviewee","value":"Jayce Salloum","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Occupied Territories: Mapping the Transgressions of Cultural Terrain - an interview/essay with Jayce Salloum and Molly Hankwitz.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/occupied-territories-mapping-transgressions-cultural-terrain-interviewessay-jayce-salloum-and-molly.","publication":"Jayce Salloum. Occupied Territories: Mapping the Transgressions of Cultural Terrain - an interview/essay with Jayce Salloum and Molly Hankwitz. Framework. vol. 43, no. 2. Wayne State University Press. Fall 2002.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/4647.ris"},"links":[],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":38304},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":764}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"Occupied Territories (1) Molly Hankwitz: As a video artist/cultural producer who has worked on a specific geographic region of the globe, the Middle East, the politics of representation in general, and the representation of resistance in South Lebanon specifically, can you discuss issues of representation with respect to your work which specifically deal with the subject of resistance and who would you most like your videotapes to be affecting and why? Jayce Salloum: Perhaps it\u0027s best to talk about this in terms of process. The process of producing and the process of viewing/reading or the reception of the material in an experiential sense. At times this work does feel like intervention, or prodding, poking with a stick, pushing or tugging at something, like seams and creases, or disjoints and fissures. I\u0027d love to think of these as cracks in the underbelly or an implosion of the stereotypes, the conventions, but that may be wishful thinking. Intervention does not have to start out as a obvious public act, but in a psychological sense something has to take place within the viewer/reader. Somewhere in the midst of this transaction the work serves as a means of exchange. Redefinition is possible on some scale at least within the work itself and the various discursive activities that take place around it. Maybe the most we can hope for is some type of lasting effect in our community, whatever community that is, and that in itself may take all of our energies. I think of what I\u0027m doing as rather obscure and provisional, the years it takes to get a project off the ground and out there takes such a toll that one has to be making it for oneself first, and then for a small circle of friends and colleagues expanding outward, occasionally growing exponentially. This has happened with some of the videotapes and within other activist/cultural communities. Any \u0027audience\u0027 beyond the immediate one is a rather amorphous object to predict, so I set up the work to be \u0027read\u0027 on different levels by different viewers, at times in different languages, and sometimes through the structure and familiarity of content, specific audiences would have over others. I always try to construct an active audience, not providing easy answers or passive information as pabulum, but often aiming to provoke, producing a \u0027productive frustration\u0027 in the viewer where the viewers are responsible for how they\u0027re perceiving, or at least raising questions about the baggage they\u0027ve brought to the work and the responses they have within a very particular/problematized \u0027field\u0027 or set of inquiries. I\u0027m not into this knee-jerk game of show and tell PBS (public television) style. I don\u0027t think \u0027understanding\u0027 is possible, or that the \u0027subject\u0027 can ever be \u0027known\u0027, as far as the western viewer understanding the other culture. The most we can hope for is a kind of empathy, an awareness of the situation on the ground and some sense of the subjectivities at stake. This is both a visual/aural sense as well as a sense of the political/subjective positions. I am still asked about balance and objectivity, as if there is a place where context is equivocal or there is a parity of voices and access to an audience. This question is not only naive, (often times the work isn\u0027t shown because of the overt politics of the tapes or because programmers can\u0027t find an opposing voice to \u0027balance\u0027 it out), it also betrays a very narrow and simplistic understanding of media. There is no such thing as \u0027objectivity\u0027 in this domain, you have to look to and through the subjective for whatever \u0027truths\u0027 you find. Balance has to be looked at in a greater context than what you are seeing in one particular moment. We forget there is a whole history of misinformation, misrepresentation and blatant lies accepted as \u0027truths\u0027 here in this country and others like it, especially considering the history of the Middle East, and the more recent Israeli and other western aggressions there. So there is no one privileged audience but many corresponding or parallel audiences having various accesses to the work. Because the tapes are constructed in a manner that lends themselves a discursive reading, referencing a ground, a history of social acts and reconstruction, I am not worried that they could be taken out of context or dematerialized. Their arguments are self-contained. They\u0027re meant to be effective both conceptually and physically, at times actually working with the equilibrium, the visceral and emotional conditions of the viewer, always though with a direct connection to the perception, the reading of the representation, the history of that representation and the questions raised herein. As a general paradigm \u0027resistance\u0027 could be thought of as a key, the underlying precept to the impetus of my work. There are many different forms of resistance, on the ground, in the political arena, in social and cultural relations/positionings and productions, they all must play a role. In the work I\u0027ve produced there is not only \u0027resistance\u0027 being represented, for instance, the resistance to the occupation of South Lebanon by the Israeli Army, the resistance to the continuity of misrepresentation, and resistance to the use of Lebanon as a product/subject and \u0027laboratory\u0027 for the West (in the testing of new \u0026 banned warfare technology, the \u0027coverage\u0027 by writers, journalists, travelers and \u0027experts\u0027, and as a case study for social/cultural studies)-- but \u0027resistance\u0027 is also being (re)produced structurally, formally, and ideologically in the pieces themselves albeit in a much different capacity. One way or another these productions are a type of resistance, a part of a greater movement, and though limited in its means it still plays a role. It correlates to other work on the ground or groundwork by engaging and one would hope mobilizing a viewer/reader through the agency that the work demands. I work hard to create an audience, a circulation for my work by making it known to all types of institutions, grass roots organizations, cultural clubs, societies, cinemas, and galleries, through to universities, film/video festivals, and museums. In attending many of my screenings, literally hundreds, I engage the audience directly, and try to invite them into the intricacies and context of the work, this closeness allows for a concrete dialogue to develop with reality checks of various sorts along the way. To know that one\u0027s work can have an impact, an apparent domino effect and actually affect concrete catalytic change in someone\u0027s life is enough motivation to keep one going. I have heard that (Talaeen a Junuub) Up to the South. (2) did realize some of its ambitions in this regard. MH: Will you discuss some of the critical mediations you employed when you went into Lebanon, viewing it as a site of experience and \u0027documentary\u0027 production? How did your methodology change, either by necessity or intellectual decision? Can you discuss this specifically, especially with regard to ...Up to the South, (This is Not Beirut)/ There was and there was not , (3) and your new work which includes material on Soha Beschara? JS: My methodology is constantly being reinvented, through the production and conceptualizing of each project I try to develop an approach specific to those sets of terms and experiences. Video does have constants though, its mediating properties. These are often mixed up with the properties of language. Video is not a \u0027language\u0027, it may have elements of language, but this is subject to misreading when the two semantic vocabularies are talked about in an overly simplified notion of \u0027video as language\u0027. Going into Lebanon there was plenty of conceptual baggage (not to mention over half a ton of video equipment) that I was bringing along for better or worse. There was also the \u0027tools\u0027 of the process, the syntax structure or editing system and the critique inherent in it, the methodology of research, the shooting mannerisms, the collecting of appropriated footage, the intricate obsessive logging of all, the refining and slicing up of the material, building of sequences, the rejoining, the deliberate weaving and layering, the conceptual and physical shifting, the building of narrative through recurrent images and metaphors, the spreading out of narrative, fragmenting it in continuous and discontinuous threads, the use of disjunctive video and audio elements, the matching \u0026 mismatching and editing of audio from material recorded and gathered, the use of text in titles, subtitles, inter titles \u0026 headlines, the lack of easy monikers, the use of visual and aural jokes, using laughter as a critical tool, the suspension of belief, the ending of information, the insistence on moments of pleasure and the production of frustration. These are all elements or \u0022nuances\u0022 if you like, that I had been developing in my work in video and other media since 1978. In Muqaddimah Li-Nihayat Jidal (Introduction to the End of an Argument) Speaking for oneself .../Speaking for others... (4) I was able to direct these elements at a specific political situation regarding the construction of the \u0027Arab\u0027 in the media and the representations of the Middle East, Arab culture and the Palestinian people produced by the West. Initially this project had started out as something very different from the way it ended up. In 1988 I went to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and spent a few weeks recording Palestinian accounts of the occupation both inside and outside the \u0027Green Line\u0027 and following an NBC news crew around to different locations in the middle of this \u0027eye witness\u0027 tour with educational and religious leaders from Houston, Texas. This was shortly after the beginning of the \u0027first\u0027 Intifada (Dec. 8, 1987). After spending three weeks in Beirut on my way back to California I still was trying to figure out what to do with the forty plus hours I had recorded. I was adamant that I wanted to do something completely different than the works with appropriated TV footage I had done before (\u0022In the Absence of Heroes..\u0022 Warfare; A case for context, 105:00, 1984, and \u0022The Ascent of Man..\u0022 Parts I-III, 23:00, 1985-87), partly because it was too labor intensive and partly because I thought that this type of material warranted a different approach. While I was mulling this over I finished a short videotape in California, \u0027Once You\u0027ve Shot the Gun You Can\u0027t Stop the Bullet\u0027, 8:00, 1988, which combined footage from travels through sixteen different countries, including my hometown, and my mother pointing to our place on the map, to watching the \u0027Cosby\u0027 show in Beirut. The tape tackled the idea of distance and alienation in moving through cultures and personal relationships and the space, the separation that always remains. It turned out to be a blend of my older style of quick editing with some of the techniques I was to use subsequently in Lebanon when working with longer first person accounts. Right after finishing this tape, I moved to New York, thinking what I wanted to do with the material collected in the Occupied Territories was to produce a piece stringing together stories of life under Israeli occupation. I started looking for someone to work with to do the translations and to help make sense out of the material, ideally someone both inside and outside of the culture. After meeting with several Palestinians living in New York who were involved in the media community I decided to work with Elia Suleiman, and after much discussion and negotiation I agreed to turn this tape into a collaboration using my material as found footage, together with appropriated footage ranging from Lumiere\u0027s depictions of Egypt, through Valentino, Elmer Fudd, Exodus, Elvis in \u0027Harem Scarum\u0027 etc. up to the \u0027Raiders of the Lost Arc\u0027 and \u0027Nightline\u0027. I dreaded the thought of once again coming face to face with volumes of television and movie material but was reconciled to the fact that before one could make any more representations of/from the Midd","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":38304,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}