Recurrence, Refusal, Return: On the Political Life of Images

Across screenings, close readings, and discussion, the evening school interrogates the militant image as a form that persists across eras and technologies. We will examine: 

• How militant cinema of the long ’70s forged a visual vocabulary of liberation, pedagogy, and collective will. 
• How today’s dispersed, phone-shot videos, emerging from sites of struggle—urgent, shaky, unmediated—inherit and fracture that legacy. 
• How archives become battlegrounds, where preservation is a direct act of resistance against colonial and state erasure. 
• How images produced under catastrophe operate across the affective terrains of responsibility, complicity, and disavowal 
• What kinds of action—or refusal—images provoke when the realities they depict exceed the limits of representation. 

Shilleh’s practice within Subversive Film foregrounds the image not as ornament or metaphor but as material evidence, historical pressure, and political demand. Rather than treating past militant films as artifacts, we will consider their recurring structures—classrooms, campfires, alleyways, ghostly drives through ruined landscapes—and how these motifs return today, stripped of nostalgia, sharpened by ongoing violence. 

This evening school suspends closure, opening a space to stay with what remains unsettled in and around the image. It is a working space: for confronting the instability of ‘seeing’ and ‘witnessing,’ for understanding how images circulate and are weaponized, and for tracing the movement from a distanced exposure to images toward solidarities that act, support, and commit.