In The Loop of History is an archival essay about images, nationhood, and oppression and how history is manufactured to continually return to a mythical past.
Using archival footage from films (educational, propaganda, home movies) about Palestine/Israel, it reflects upon the narratives of nationhood and its dependence upon images.
From biblical to recent history, Israel’s identity is constructed around a never-ending loop where the ideology of return is centered around the return of a mythical past; in other words, the past is ever-present and memory an artificial creation.
“My film is a cocktail of various archive films that I have collected about Palestine and Israel,” the filmmaker Adam Kossoff told The Palestine Chronicle.
“It could be called a ‘‘mash-up’, as I have cut and played around with the clips to show how Israel has promoted and portrayed itself in films, whether they be home movies, educational movies, newsreels, and so on. The clips are cut together in a playful and visual way with a certain amount of irony and humor,” Kossoff added.
My main thematic concern was to show how Israel always returns to the past to promote a view of itself that is based on a self-aggrandized myth, biblical but with more recent claims of how Israel has ‘Europeanized’ a ‘land that was nothing but sand…’”
(The Palestine Chronicle)
