Credits Included: A Video in Red and Green
Friday 14 June 2024, at 19:30
The screening of Credits Included: A Video in Red and Green by Jalal Toufic is part of a longer film program of Home Works 9 by Ashkal Alwan.
Credits Included: A Video in Red and Green
Dir. Jalal Toufic, 1995
42’, Lebanon
In Arabic and English, with English subtitles
Credits Included: A Video on Red and Green implies a withdrawal of tradition (Maqãm Kurd played by Munir Bashir is listed in the video’s credits but is not part of its sound track- I would find it legitimate were the holder of the copyright to this music work to demand a fee) past a surpassing disaster, the fifteen-year Lebanese civil-war compounded by an Israeli invasion; produces completed crossword puzzles with subsisting blank spaces, implying that the shattered shop signs with various ostensibly absent letters may have turned into lipograms, which should then be added to Arabic dictionaries, at least those edited in Lebanon; and uses fiction to document psychotic perturbations in and outside mental hospitals.
Jalal Toufic is a thinker and a mortal to death. He was born in 1962 in Beirut or Baghdad and died before dying in in 1989 in Evanston, Illinois. He is the author of more than 10 books, among which, What Was I Thinking? (e-flux journal-Sternberg Press, 2017), The Dancer’s Two Bodies (Sharjah Art Foundation, 2015), and Forthcoming (2nd ed., e-flux journal-Sternberg Press, 2014). He has made over 10 films, which include essay films and conceptual films; short films (7 minutes, 8 minutes, etc.), and “inhumanely” long films (72 hours, 50 hours); films that he shot and films in which all the images are from movies by other directors (Hitchcock, Sokurov, Bergman, etc.). His films and artworks have been shown at the Sharjah Biennials 6,10 and 11, and the 9th Shanghai Bienniale, the 5th Guanzhou Triennial, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou, MoMA PS1, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, ZKM, MAXXI, FKA Witte de With, ICA (London), etc. He was Director of the School of Visual Arts at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (Alba) from 2015 to 2018. He is currently Professor of Film Studies at the American University in Cairo.
