There is nothing in filmed interviews as a cultural form—nor in conversation, for that matter—that makes the practice inherently resistant, countercultural, or progressive. But that does not mean interviews are apolitical. If anything, the most obvious forms are always the most ideological—ordinary forms that appear to be outside of history are forms that most reliably reproduce status quo assumptions. Framed as a type or kind of conversation, interviews are often celebrated as vehicles for individual self-expression to be protected under the liberal social order, from free speech to the free market and its political analog, the public sphere, aka the marketplace of ideas. The ideal of conversation that underpins so many fantasies about free speech and press in liberal democracy developed in tandem with the history of the interview as a mainstay of commercial news media and colonial social science. 

But the interview also plays a significant role in the historical contributions of documentary media practices to anticolonial, antifascist, anticapitalist, and antiracist social struggles. In the United States in 1859, it was the opposition to slavery and the desire to inform (and warn) readers that prompted Horace Greeley to ask Brigham Young if he planned to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 in Utah, and to publish their exchange in the New-York Tribune, an abolitionist newspaper. A century later, in the context of the “women’s question,” documentary interviews became a means to extend the practices and insights of collective consciousness raising developed within the American women’s movement in the 1970s and to challenge male dominance in antiwar and civil rights movements.{1} Palestine Film Unit cofounder Mustafa Abu Ali’s They Do Not Exist (1974) also looms large in the history of militant interview work. Composed of nine separate parts, the film counters the titular claim with footage and eyewitness statements that document the brutality of Israeli raids on refugee camps and villages in Southern Lebanon. We can also add to the list Jayce Salloum’s untitled part 1: everything and nothing (1999–2001). At once a contribution to the literature of resistance and exemplary of Salloum’s “art of conversation,” untitled is invested in reframing the transaction, representation, reproduction, circulation, and screening of filmed interviews—what I call filmed interview work—as an aesthetic form that is fundamentally partial, partisan, and politically motivated.{2} Salloum’s interview work is partial in the sense that the filmmaker’s political and cultural sympathies are evident in his formal and editorial choices. Not only is Salloum’s subject a partisan and militant, but his video also takes up her mantle, endorsing the very idea that talking—and talking on camera about militant struggle—is a meaningful form of resistance, one that is integral to the development of a solidarity movement. 

Salloum’s video captures Soha Bechara as a subject who has moved beyond the time and space of her detention, even as her thoughts keep returning to Khiam, where she was imprisoned, to her time in solitary confinement, and to the isolation of the cell, countered only by prisoners’ solidarity with one another. In her descriptions of herself and her motivations for speaking, she now aims toward a different horizon and future, a future beyond the cycles of Israeli occupation, withdrawal, bombardments, and ceasefire in Southern Lebanon since 2000, a hopeful possibility that even looks past the devastating realities of 2025. As she explains, talking with others sustained her during her detention and continues to sustain her after, enabling her to continue the work of building global resistance and solidarity movements. Salloum’s filmed interview work extends Bechara’s mission to heal from her decade in detention so that she can continue the unfinished work of resistance.

Eschewing the use of cutaways to fill the gaps in conversation, Salloum instead relies on short intervals of black and silence throughout the work, strategies which conjure other scenes and moments, and which Salloum refers to as “interstices.”{3} Untold numbers of lives and testimonies have been lost to history. In this sense, the black frames index what is missing from view, the erasure and silences that shape every archive. Salloum’s insertions underscore the centrality of editing and listening to this cultural form and practice, highlighting the fact that interviews are also partial in another sense of the term: necessarily incomplete, in-process, and limited in their capacity to represent political collectivity, history, or social movements. By including in the edit his back-and-forth with Bechara, Salloum embraces the collaborative construction of the method and demonstrates that wherever interviews present responses as definitive statements, the social aspect of the practice and the centrality of listening are excised from the interview form. And it’s in part this modeling of interactivity that enables filmed interview work to encourage discussion and debate in screening spaces.

UNTITLED PART 1: EVERYTHING AND NOTHING (Jayce Salloum, 1999–2001).

In an interview with filmmaker Mike Hoolboom, Salloum elaborates that the added pauses in image and soundtrack between shots are “structural” in the sense that they establish a logic and provide a distinctive shape. These gaps create the illusion of continuous filming—of a single session condensed into an organic sequence of unedited parts bracketed by discrete elisions.{4} Thus, in addition to bracketing that which is absent, Salloum also intends the formal device to invite considerations of what might come next. The film, like Bechara’s project, isn’t finished. It is, in the spirit of the serial form, to be continued. There is more work to do, more questions to be asked and answered. As a historian of the documentary interview, I hear whispers of the memoir that Bechara will go on to publish; I hear the detailed firsthand account of the torture inflicted on Henri Alleg, a French journalist covering the war for independence in Algeria, published as La Question in 1958; and I hear the 1968 Newsreel interview with Huey Newton while he was incarcerated, in which he affirms “this idea of film” as a means to educate, extend, inform, and mobilize the Black Panthers’ struggle.

Throughout the video, Bechara situates herself in relation to her peers: she is a member of the armed resistance, one of many detainees, part of an international and national resistance movement, part of a generation of militants who share a vision of a future free of oppression. The subject of Salloum’s video is not explicitly the struggle for Palestine, nor a history of armed resistance per se, nor a testimony of incarceration, but rather the struggle for self-determination and liberation, in other words, political resistance and subjectivity more broadly considered. 

Salloum released untitled part 1: everything and nothing in 2001, eleven years after Introduction to the End of an Argument (1990), a biting critique of American commercial media representations of the history of Israel and Palestine that he codirected and -edited with Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman. In counterpoint to the tremendous variety of images, intertitles, and archival footage compiled in their 1990 video, untitled offers an exercise in minimalism. Also unlike his earlier collaborative project, untitled is forward-looking, exploring the stretch and resonance of a single filmed interview, not to end an argument but to continue a struggle that is ongoing, unfinished, incomplete, and unrealized. In this sense, Salloum’s video demonstrates how foregrounding the partial character of filmed interviews can open a space for more conversation, not less. 

Salloum intended untitled as a supplement to so many other broadcast interviews with Soha Bechara produced by international media outlets in the immediate aftermath of her release from detention in 1998. But when he released untitled in 2001, it began circulating in a world and media landscape fundamentally transformed by the liberation of Southern Lebanon from Israeli occupation in May 2000, the eruption of the Second Intifada several months later, suicide bombings in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and then the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center.{5} Nearly twenty-five years later, Salloum’s video now absorbs and refracts an even wider archive of media interviews, video testimonies, eyewitness accounts, and news segments, drawing our attention to how much of Palestine remains unrepresentable, untranslated, unheard, and erased. Indeed, Salloum’s reframing, repurposing, and reworking of this recording invites viewers to consider how filmed interview work shapes our understanding of the history of the struggle for Palestine—not just through the representation of voices from below and stories of exile, imprisonment, and expulsion, but also in the marking of the absences, what remains to be done, what comes after release, ceasefire, after genocide. The elegance of his strategy is that it is fundamentally cinematic—the audience’s reckoning with histories of dispossession, ethnic cleansing, settler-colonial violence, torture, and political assassinations emerges from the series of gaps, cuts, and ellipses that punctuate the representation of Bechara’s answers to Salloum’s questions.

Near the end of their conversation, Salloum proffers a question from offscreen. “Who is Soha Bechara?” Salloum asks, presenting Bechara with an opportunity to synthesize her previous answers, to summarize her thoughts, to supplement the recitation of facts that opens the video. More than an invitation to provide a concluding remark, to put an end to the conversation, the repetition of slightly revised or rephrased questions is a hallmark of journalists and filmmakers aiming to generate a sound bite, to get their subjects to do the work of condensing and editing for them. But this isn’t in fact the final question of the interview or the film. Salloum asks one more question: “What would you call the finished film I will make from our time together, from what we’ve taped?” Bechara laughs. And then she suggests, calmly, “untitled.”