This article examines Palestinian temporality through archival images, tracing the ongoing Nakba as a perpetual waiting and displacement. Juxtaposing past and present footage, it explores how images resonate across time in haunting repetition, foregrounding the ethical responsibility of reactivating the archive amid present catastrophe, while confronting the limits of representation.
“We wait and wait for a long time, from ’48 until now.” Taken from an interview with the young Yasser Arafat and chosen as the opening words of this video, this sentence captures something essential about the Palestinian temporal condition: a seemingly never-ending state of waiting: for the return of refugees, for the end of occupation, for ceasefire, for liberation. This ongoing catastrophe, mentioned in the title of the piece, is also known as the “ongoing Nakba” (
This condition, and the essay films that explore it through archival material were supposed to constitute the main subject of my video essay, following the original research for my master’s thesis. I thought that travelling to the other side of the world in June of 2025 to participate in the “Reframing the Argument” videographic workshop at the University of Notre Dame alongside other graduate students would be beneficial for the project, allowing me enough emotional and physical space to engage critically with my own research themes. The distance, however, did the opposite. Sitting on Notre Dame’s beautiful campus, conversing with my brilliant peers about editing techniques and career goals, I often found myself overwhelmed with one pressing question: how can anyone possibly think of anything other than Gaza?
While abstract concepts such as “the archive” or “the image” felt empty and meaningless in the face of this very much non-abstract human tragedy, the immediacy and simultaneity of the crisis in Gaza still echoed through the archival essay films I was working on, which drew largely on materials from the 1960s and 1970s. The chosen audio clip, for example, reflects the Palestinian temporal condition to a harrowingly relevant degree in the present day. Referring to 1948 and filmed in the 1970s, the video’s audio was incorporated as archival material in Mohanad Yaqubi’s essay film
Older archival footage is gradually replaced by full-screen contemporary footage to represent not just the breaking point in my video, but also the beginning of my own shift in focus: my reframed argument. Following Susan Harewood (2020), I could not allow the images to remain an object of abstract historical fascination alone. Instead, by mixing the present into the past and vice versa, I seek to reactivate the archive as a site of ethical responsibility, where urgent political realities reverberate and can be made to resonate within the present ongoing crisis.
The grid, inspired by the works and mentorship of Barbara Zecchi, seemed like the perfect tool to create a fittingly-chaotic visual density, spreading out images of Palestinian history simultaneously rather than linearly, formally showcasing the repetitive reality of oppression and resistance. Instead of a neatly symmetrical grid, I ultimately chose to offset it, cutting off some images while inevitably prioritizing others, to place greater emphasis on multiplicity rather than comparison, heightening the sense of chaos over organization and creating an uncanny impression.
As the images change, another soundtrack fades in: the unnerving electronic-noise remix of Tembeka Ngcukaitobi’s statement regarding Israel’s genocidal intent during the Gaza war—itself an audial piece of archival material taken from the documented proceedings at South Africa’s genocide case against Israel (United Nations). The images of the present superimpose onto their past counterparts, only to recede again into their more familiar incarnation as a news feed (another type of grid on its own). It, too, depicts images of harrowing destruction, all blended into one indistinguishable flood of text and imagery: an overwhelming, helpless torrent of despair. What is the time of these remediated images? Have we seen these images before? Will we see them again? Are they all deemed to be reduced to a tiny thumbnail illustrating a news story? Who are they depicting, and where are they now? Can their image ever truly capture who they are and what they have been through? The answer to that final question, even for the most enthusiastic of video essayists, I imagine, would be “no.” This is where my attempt at videographically tracing human tragedy fails, and the only solution is to present no image at all. The black screen is accompanied by the voice of Palestinian poet Areej Kaoud addressing us directly. Her reflective, poetic tone is borrowed here as a comment on both reality and its representation, on the unrepresentable anguish that remains off-frame.
I am deeply thankful to the “Reframing the Argument” workshop participants and organizers for enabling the creation of this piece.
Harewood, Susan. “
Sayigh, Rosemary. “
United Nations. “
Rotem Sudman is a Master’s student, teaching assistant, and research assistant at the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television, Tel Aviv University, studying in the school’s honors track. She is currently completing their thesis on archival essay films and Palestinian temporality.
Rotem Sudman’s impressive video essay interrogates a timeline held together by the impossibility of being anything other than an eternal repetition. Images become archives of a simultaneity that has always, and forever will, reify the same tragedy. Sudman’s creation—of remarkable theoretical and critical depth—deserves special praise for the way it touches, by evoking with desperate concreteness the misfortunes of Palestine, the now fragile veins of a world moving in the uncertain light of the twilight of ideas, at the borders of an ever-spreading darkness of conscience.
To see in order to feel, to feel in order to see. The spoken words become echoes of individual dramas that merge into a collective tragedy, in the long progression of an endless waiting. Old footage is arranged in visual grids that confer upon the narrative its intimate and unmistakable meaning: the evocation of sameness, from 1948 to today. Chaos and unease, as the author herself emphasizes, are embedded in the polyphony of uttered sounds that infiltrate everywhere, compelling the viewer to listen as they are swept away through the recesses of vision.
Technically impeccable, Sudman’s work is at once a testimony of a “before” that never becomes “after” and a quiet despair incapable of appeasement.
Three frames are juxtaposed in the insistent rhythm of the narrative.
Does a “right time” exist? Rotem Sudman asks—asks us—over the course of four explosive minutes and a half: to watch Palestine suffer, live, die? Black-and-white images stand alongside color ones in the muffled texture of memory. Human beings chase one another, contending for space within the images projected on a black screen—a backdrop for a stage of desire and encounter, of tears and melancholy, even of dance that frees from the weight of unbearable decades.
Girls drawing, boys playing. Boys writing, girls coloring. Sheets filled with vivid, sunlit strokes alongside the dark marks of horror that innocent little hands denounce. A fleeting glance directed toward us who watch, as they sketch a round dance, amid smiles perhaps already lost. The eye runs and struggles to keep pace with the progression of visual tableaux that halt, assemble, and disassemble—stealing hopes, promising an end to a pain that never comes, invoking release from suffering.
All around, rotating rubble—visual fields that force our hollow pupils to fix upon destruction. Stone specters, motionless, pin to history the void of absences that, a moment before, were presences; they point back, amid laundry still clinging to what remains of a home, to the invisible regret of a present stripped and violated. The frames merge into a single frame that has overtaken the entire scene, overlapping the black backdrop. Devastation seizes itself from bottom to top, shifting left to right, right to left. The ruins of the heart, the tears of the soul. Clippings of news from the Internet, a syncopated chronology of events that have seemed to us almost unreal.
Out of the abyss comes the warning of Areej Kaoud, Palestinian poet: freedom, she reminds us—before our astonished gaze upon the darkened screen—is not desire, but promise.
Rotem Sudman’s videographic essay offers a formally rigorous and ethically attentive meditation on Palestinian temporality, articulated through the recursive activation of archival images and sounds. Rather than treating the archive as a stable historical repository, the video insists on its unsettling permeability, allowing past and present to bleed into one another in a way that powerfully figures the Nakba not as a closed event but as an ongoing condition of waiting, repetition, and displacement.
One of the work’s central achievements lies in its refusal of linear progression. The use of the grid—deliberately offset, partial, and uneven—does not invite comparison so much as overwhelm, producing an affective density that mirrors the accumulation of unresolved violence across decades. This visual strategy is complemented by a carefully layered sound design, in which archival speech, contemporary testimony, and electronic distortion resonate across temporal registers, underscoring the haunting familiarity of the images and the exhaustion of their repetition.
Crucially, the essay does not claim representational mastery over its subject. Instead, it foregrounds the ethical limits of videographic practice itself. The eventual turn toward opacity and absence—the withdrawal of images in favor of a black screen and poetic address—registers not as failure, but as a considered ethical gesture, acknowledging what cannot and should not be made fully visible. In this sense, the work productively aligns videographic scholarship with responsibility rather than revelation.
Sudman’s essay advances videographic studies by showing how formal experimentation can register historical urgency without collapsing into didacticism. By mobilizing the archive to stage an encounter with the limits of representation, the work positions videographic practice as a critical space where historical persistence, ethical unease, and present catastrophe remain productively unresolved.
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The author has no competing interests to declare.