This project deals with image-political and film-theoretical notions along various forms of absence of images. These include cinematographic images and photographs that are lost or destroyed, images that are unavailable due to denied access, or film projects that could not be realized for various reasons.

In the conflict-laden region of Lebanon and Palestine, image production and audiovisual heritage have been exposed to political oppression, seizure, and destruction throughout the past decades. In light of this as well as the (neglected) official engagement with past and present (armed) conflict, filmmakers, visual artists, curators, researchers, and institutional initiatives keep intervening and developing counter-strategies to point out gaps, to respond to the missing, or to give space to absent as well as to reappropriated or reconquered images (within new films, installations, web projects, digital archives, etc.). The aesthetic approaches by filmmakers and video artists raise the following questions i.a.: How can film as an audiovisual medium that usually pursues strategies of making something visible through depicting and displaying deal with the unavailability of images, i.e. with lost footage? Which transformations take place when audio/visual material returns after a period of absence and is reused as found footage (e.g. the militant/”third” cinema of the ’70s)? Former absence or oppression remain inscribed in recirculating images, and archival fragments, remnants, and scattered memories or imaginations of missing images instigate new narratives of the unredeemed, stolen, and reclaimed. In their absence as well as return the images demand responsibility and challenge the present, as when (absent) moving images keep resonating and witness those formerly border-crossing alliances, which they had performed in supporting the Palestinian revolution around the ’70s.

The project thus not only aims to interrogate film historiography regarding mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, but enters film history through its gaps, traces, blank spaces, and echoes. In dealing with artistic historiographical image practices that are confronted with a broken thread of history, it explores dissonant narratives and contested amnesia in Lebanon and Palestine from the perspective of transdisciplinary film studies. To investigate diverse aesthetics of absence it intertwines concepts of political philosophy, postcolonial theory, theory of visual culture, and film analysis with the investigation of concrete circumstances of the lack or loss of audiovisual heritage. Thus, it contributes to the cultural analytical discourse on the relation of image and violence within a sociopolitical context, and in conjunction with the political and ethical notion of in/visibility.