An Unusual Summer

According to film theorist Jonathan Rozenkranz, in 1953—well before Ampex released videotape technology in 1956—a prison in Houston, United States, had already installed cameras in several corners of its facility, from the cell blocks to the guard posts. This method of live transmission was reportedly used to raise the alarm quickly in the event of a riot, to help the police reduce the number of patrols required, and—ironically—to prevent police brutality against prisoners. Not unlike the logic of the surveillance cameras we now encounter on almost every street corner, CCTV was from the outset quite explicitly designed for detailed monitoring. The difference is that, at this early stage, there was no data-storage technology. Surveillance, therefore, still took place in real time. In Videographic Cinema, Rozenkranz positions this episode as an origin story for CCTV within the history of monitoring and surveillance—one that matters to him because its initial function, at least in theory, allowed the watcher to also be watched. This aspect is often forgotten in contemporary surveillance regimes, where those who watch are no longer in a position to be watched back, as surveillance systems can be altered or manipulated by those in power.

Kamal Aljafari’s An Unusual Summer operates according to a logic similar to that of CCTV’s early history. The film takes place in small corner of Ramla—a city that, after 1948, became part of the State of Israel following the expulsion of Palestinians—where a surveillance camera has been situated and is operating. It observes a situation in which an entity wielding excessive control (the Israeli state) monitors its people, while simultaneously looking back at the changes and daily life registered within a neighbourhood in the summer of 2006. In the film, the accumulation of surveillance footage is subverted into what can be read as a mnemonic device. It organises and “unworks the subject through the possibility that the past can be replayed, summoned, and “proven” through the video image—or, in Bernard Stiegler’s terms, as prosthetic memory: memory externalised into a technical support, in this case CCTV.

The film begins with a memory produced by accident. Exasperated by repeated acts of vandalism, Aljafari’s father decides to install a camera to record what happens at a street corner in Ramla—precisely where his car is parked—in order to find out who has been damaging it. Without realising it, rather than simply using the surveillance apparatus as a tool for investigation and observation, he creates a kind of memory machine: the camera records a range of seemingly mundane activities in a Ramla neighbourhood often described by Israeli authorities as a ghetto—a label the filmmaker himself rejects.

In pixels that bleed into one another, Palestinian bodies going about their everyday lives merge with the arid streetscape, a patch of greenery behind rows of parked cars, and plastic bags drifting through the air. Aljafari occasionally performs extreme digital zooms on footage that is already low-resolution, leaving us with only a faint movement in a sea of pixels—turning his neighbours into images whose identities, and whose relations to the camera’s installer, are difficult to discern. We learn the names of those who pass by only through intertitles that provide their identities. Behind them are caught brief glimpses of life: a taxi driver not wearing a uniform, a cat indifferent to everything around it, someone carrying flowers, and, of course, the man who mischievously throws stones at the camera installer’s car. All these lives are captured by a static camera, alongside the flow of cars passing on the adjacent road.

At one moment, an intertitle states that a man is running, yet at the same time, within the image, I think I can make out the outline of a tank behind him (though I may be mistaken). There is always something in the background. In surveillance footage, every gesture seems to carry its own narrative, thick with suspense. Alongside this, we sense the intensity experienced by those who pass in front of the camera—the knowledge that the Israeli state can arrive at any moment and seize what they have. For that reason, the surveillance camera installed by Aljafari’s father ultimately produces images that monitor the monitor—or, at the very least, expose the power relations that make such monitoring possible.

If the images already speak at length, another element that feels equally crucial to me is the film’s sound design, constructed through a highly tactile foley approach, with close, immersive, proximity sound. Every touch of a hand on the automobile lands sharply and loudly, every footstep—whether on soil or sand—registers in fine detail. In this film, sound transmits its own narrative dimension, as if reminding us that what we are watching is not merely cold CCTV footage, but a life that once existed—busy, social, and warm. Surveillance cameras with long durations are often treated as near-scientific apparatuses: methods of observation limited by a static frame. The immersive soundscape added to this film breaks open that limitation, conjuring another atmosphere and an imagination of a lively, bustling corner of Ramla.

The assemblage of surveillance footage and rich sound design—augmented by music, commentary from Aljafari’s niece, and intertitles that open up wider ways of reading the world of the residents on the street corner where Aljafari’s father lives—is stitched together and developed poetically by Aljafari into a tribute to his family, and simultaneously a political gesture to maintain a Palestinian identity that grows ever more blurred, dissolved, and vulnerable to disappearance within the image.