This project studied the Palestinian historical memory as reflected in Palestinian cinema. Researchers Nurith Gertz (Sapir College, Head, Dept. of Culture Studies, Emeritus Professor, Open University of Israel and Tel Aviv University) and George Khleifi (Palestinian Film Director; formerly, Al Quds University) examined the way in which this cinema stems from the traumas of the past, in particular the 1948 Nakba (catastrophy). It analyzed the methods by which the past was constructed and processed, by way of addressing time and through the depiction of space.
The study points out that propagandistic documentary cinema of the 1970s shaped an abstract structure that reconstructed, in different variations, the defeat of 1948.
In the 1980s, Palestinian films worked through the traumatic structure of time by focusing on natural, local space, from which it attempted to build a different time continuum - a day-to-day, slow, protracted time, which is lived in different localities by different classes, genders, ethnic groups, etc. The findings attempt to demonstrate the way these films create the appearance of a vast, immense Palestinian country.
The researchers determined that the cinema of the 1970s and 1980s may still be described as a post-traumatic one: this is a cinema that refers to the trauma of 1948 as an event that lasts into the present. However, the choice of daily life, real scenes and diverse identities also contributes in the cinema of the 1980s, to a process of working through and coping with the trauma.
The study describes the Palestinian cinema of the 1990s as articulating two clashing trends: reviving the traumatic events and the past that preceded them and working through the trauma. It does so by deconstructing both national stories, that of the cyclical time and that of the local space.
The researchers have published their work under the title "Landscape in the Mist" (Indiana University Press).