Revolution Until Victory AKA We are the Palestinian People (1973)
52 min, B&W, 16 mm
Made by a breakaway faction of the US Newsreel collective Pacific Newsreel, Revolution Until Victory AKA We are the Palestinian People is a clear act of transnational solidarity cinema. The film collates archival footage into a detailed, historical reconstruction with great attention paid to the political genesis of Zionism, the role of colonial Britain in assigning Palestine to Zionists and the strategic role Israel has played ever since in the control and monopoly of the world's most sought-after commodity – oil. Its storytelling is influenced and aware of the internationalist dimension of anti-imperial struggle, connecting the Palestinian revolution to the trans-global peoples’ struggles, and making a clear distinction between the Jewish people and the Zionist movement as a colonial extension of the Empire. The positionality of the filmmaking in solidarity (informed by the Newsreels’ work documenting in Vietnam as well as the Black civil rights movement in the US) also enables a new image: Palestinians are given agency, speaking directly to the camera. Tellingly, one of the very first images in the film is of a woman urging the camera not to take her picture until she returns home. This refusal to participate in the proliferation of a certain type of image, and the resistance to being typecast, underlines a deep understanding of the power of the image. It is also reflective of the changing tide of representation politics being played the world over, supported by new technologies and the movements they underpinned through the 1960s and 70s.
Revolution Until Victory is available in English with Arabic subtitles.
