FRAGMENT 6

 

Here, again, there are stones on the ground, and here, too, there is blood. But there’s been no earthquake that would blur a still photograph taken at exactly the right moment. Instead, it is the image itself that moves, in all senses of the word, to film what no longer does: the blood on the pavement of a street in Cairo at night, the blood that no longer courses through the body of someone who lived and refused the forces of order. The blood forms a trail and marks a course, as if it leads to something other than just the eventual point where it must stop, because there is only so much in a body. Along each side of it, people have placed rocks and fragments of stone, one after the other, hundreds of them, to form a continual line that frames the stain. And it is this that is filmed, the camera shaking in the hands of whoever holds it as they walk along the stone-framed path and angle the lens downwards. The blood goes on and on, impossibly long in slow-motion, so much that we only know that they have died, and there is no sound.

The shot comes in Four Days of Death in December, a film made by the Egyptian collective Mosireen during the riots and rebellion of December 2011. The shards that fill this book mark the way that a certain technique goes in search of what can allow it to occur, and what it finds are images of devastation, of the world being taken to bits along with whoever gets in the way. Here, it is the very opposite. The technique is a handheld tracking shot, but this did not decide what would be shown. What came first was the blood and what dictated the need for this technique was the violence of a state, which produced the obscene length of this blood trail, too long to see at once without taking to the sky to look down.

The frames of the video advance. The camera moves over the ground. And no one who sees it can remain unmoved. This is its promise. Before it comes onscreen, a woman sits on the stairs, holding a bloodied rag, and says:

I’m sure of it, they will take to the streets, your parents
and the taxi drivers, if they see this now, if you show
this to a taxi driver he won’t be able to sleep, he
won’t be able to take it, he will go down to the street.
They will all take to the streets, I swear to God.

The camera is not fast glass, as they say: the image is blurry when it moves too quickly. But over it are written, with absolute clarity at the center of the screen, the names and the ages of the dead, one after the other, until we reach the ones who have not been identified:

unknown

The word repeats four times, and then the sound comes back, swelling in slow, and the voices are chanting:

This coming Friday, the revolution’s coming. It’s coming.

But we haven’t even reached the end of the blood or the stones, which continue on through the legs of the crowd that blocks the path of the camera.

So it can only be shown as a duration, in order that the image might take it all in and prevent any accusation of choosing a single angle that makes it look worse than it really was.

Still, a decision was made in the gap between the shooting of the video and its appearance in the film: the decision to slow it down, to make it hold. And in this space of silence, on a screen that swerves back and forth to follow the trail, we see not only the blood and the other hands reaching phones out to photograph it and the legs of those who stand by its side. We also see the stones that give a skeletal frame to this loss, like the beginning of a mosaic that would fill the city’s streets in order to point to this again and again, to not let it become unseen.

And in order for this frame to appear, there was not only the courage of those who took to the streets and threw rocks and died doing so. There was also this hidden and slow work of composition: to grasp whatever rocks were at hand and to assemble them into an outline that made this a moving image even before the camera followed its lead.