Celluloid Liberation Front

Abu Dhabi 2011

I started writing about films because the mere act of watching felt somehow incomplete. We find film criticism a more engrossing way to experience spectatorship ; a more proactive form of spect-actorship as we like to call it. In its toothless manifestations film criticism is degraded to a normative and prescriptive act which is boring and didactic. At its best film criticism becomes an additional asset to movie-going, it turns into a place of meaningful confrontation as opposed to passive consumption. A good film critic rescues a film from the ghetto of entertainment to project it into the wider narrative of social life. Cinema encompasses - mirroring yet hijacking - the vast spectrum of the human experience, from cruel commercial manipulation to the mutinous joy of creative dissent. To write about cinema then is to engage with the surrounding world even if the very act of watching implies a certain degree of isolation from it. Writing reclaims this isolation via a discursive engagement with readers and, in our case, allows us to articulate thoughts that if expressed in verbal forms are often way less clear and elaborate.

Almost all the current cultural production is nothing but (and could not be otherwise) intertextuality, a synthesis of different cultural products, and it would be pretentious to claim to be The Author of something. We cannot say we are the authors of anything because we are the authors of everything. I do not use my proper name, but I do use my multiple name that acknowledges the cultural background — which is of a collective nature — influencing my contribution to history. To assume the multiple name is to access the different spheres of communication, hence diversifying the tactics of cultural struggle. The proper name is the heirloom of a centralized society that no longer exists. The dominant system imposed me a proper name which I expropriated reclaiming my identity back in the form of Celluloid Liberation Front.