Radical Closure

Akram Zaatari considers the idea of closure, both physical and symbolic, in the Middle East as a product of the increasingly pervasive militarization of public life and its attendant mechanisms of segmentation and restriction via borders and checkpoints.  In an attempt to situate the videos in Radical Closure within a broader historical context, Zaatari references Jean-Luc Godard’s questioning of the theatricality commonly employed in the articulation of the discourse of resistance and Harun Farocki’s examination of the use of military footage during televised news casts as examples of ways that the filmmakers in Radical Closure combat this militarization and its use of rhetoric by critically interrogating its techniques for politicizing the image.