Issue 34
Notebook

An Infinity of Tactics. Hussein Shariffe’s archive in motion

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  • Erica Carter,
  • Laurence Kent
Erica Carter
King's College London
Bio
Laurence Kent
King's College London
Bio

Published 2022-07-01

Keywords

  • Hussein Shariffe,
  • Living archive,
  • Unfinished film,
  • Deixis,
  • Sudanese film,
  • Exile,
  • Diaspora.
    • ...More
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Copyright (c) 2022 L'Atalante. Journal of film studies

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Abstract

The filmmaker, artist and poet Hussein Shariffe died in Egyptian exile in 2005. This article centres on attempts since that date to retrieve, archive, and recirculate his extant film works. It presents a film artist whose oeuvre is at once singular in its visual and aural language, resonant of specifically Sudanese histories of an exile and diaspora cinema of mobility, and productive of an archive practice whose point of departure is the very transience of its most cherished objects. We discuss in this context the state of incompletion in which many of his films remain suspended, and analyse curatorial approaches that unlock the potential of such unfinished works to unlock the unrealised potentials of Shariffe’s dispersed and exilic archive. We further outline our plans for an open source archive of Shariffe’s film oeuvre. That archive remains under construction at the time of writing—so this article itself, analogously to Shariffe’s unfinished films, remains in a state of incompletion, drawing what must be for now only interim conclusions, but pointing towards a future of creative uncertainty for his film oeuvre, with all the fears and hopes that such fragile futurity holds.

 

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