A Magical Substance Flows into Me

The film traces ethnomusicologist Robert Lachmann’s legacy in 1930s Palestine as the filmmaker visits diverse communities across historical Palestine today. Through conversations on music, memory and endangered traditions, interwoven with intimate family scenes, it excavates contested histories, language, desire, listening, and the politics of impossibility shaping the Palestinian landscape.

Jumana Manna: ‘One of my interests in music is precisely the ambiguity. I find it to be both dangerous and also celebratory and transcendental. It carries a lot of potential. Music can be a place to transcend identities and affiliations, geographies and temporalities. But it can also be used, and it has historically been used, to strengthen feelings of collective identity that are based on exclusion of “the other”, based on who doesn’t figure into that collective identity. I’m interested in this double bind or dual potentiality of music. I think music can both hide and reveal politics [...] If memory is a symbolic representation of the past, embedded in a set of practices and affiliations, I think that musical memory is the most libidinal form of it. It’s something that is deeply ingrained in your body. [...] I am interested in what kind of memory lies in the senses, if it’s accessed through audio, through touch, or through smell. Jean-Luc Nancy talks about the difference between listening and seeing. He talks about listening as making-resonant, whilst seeing is about making-evident. When you make something evident you see it, but it’s something that is outside of you, you witness it in front of you. When you hear something you have to understand it because it’s going into you, it’s becoming a part of you. Listening collapses this division of self and other, or of singular and plural, or inside and outside.’– Excerpted from Katie Guggenheim, ‘Chisenhale Interviews: Jumana Manna’, Chisenhale Gallery, September 2015.