They were people and I had to follow their each and every move, In my fumbling, my ups and downs, or maybe theirs. I followed him, scrutinizing the meanders of his thoughts, There’s a certain childishness in curiosity. I knew immediately that it wasn’t me looking at you in that infinite second where my skin ceased to be and I was only flesh. I swayed your story, I don’t want to know it.

You saw me, a cyclop. One shouldn’t cry in the presence of a cylop. An amnesiac moment guided by a gaze.
I wrote too many embellished words before I finally realized your poetry was actually mine,
Too many words for a meeting carried by blood.
*the text is based on the letters of Chaghig Arzoumanian, Translated into Arabic and English by Rola Alaedine.

They were people and I had to follow their each and every move, In my fumbling, my ups and downs, or maybe theirs.

I followed him, scrutinizing the meanders of his thoughts, There’s a certain childishness in curiosity.

I knew immediately that it wasn’t me looking at you in that infinite second where my skin ceased to be and I was only flesh.

I swayed your story, I don’t want to know it.

You saw me, a cyclop.

One shouldn’t cry in the presence of a cylop. An amnesiac moment guided by a gaze.

I wrote too many embellished words before I finally realized your poetry was actually mine,

Too many words for a meeting carried by blood.

 

 

*the text is based on the letters of Chaghig Arzoumanian, Translated into Arabic and English by Rola Alaedine.

——————————————–

Come as I Rise is a video shot during the Ashura ritual in Nabatiyeh, south Lebanon, in January 2009.

It is a response to my previous encounter with the ritual as an observer, and to a whole record of Ashura, where it is being seen and represented as a communal event and a historical collectivity in the Shiite consciousness, with its associated traits of torture and lamentation and future promises.

Come as I Rise is a personal experience of the ritual, that makes steps beyond the documentary and its associated controversy, to position itself closer to poetry.

By approaching the ritual from an eye-to-eye level, bathed in the present, narrowing the angle to an individual’s scale instead of a mass perspective and thus encountering the substance at a humane point, the controversial and somewhat repugnant ritual becomes more accessible to the spectator, or even vanishes inside an individual’s experience of it.

A new experience emerges: A woman with a camera in a virile environment, obsessively examines a particular man’s will to transcend his own condition. She dedicates herself to whatever he will show or offer, challenging him to unravel himself in her presence.

Many processes are revealed in their detail: transcendence vs. self-consciousness, complicity vs. frustration, community vs. individuality, the intimate and the exhibited, the image of one’s body facing the pressure of the observing eye and camera, autonomy and fusion, all within the intense versatile bond between  a director and a performer who are strangers to each other.

In a bath of great pathos, this film is kinetic poetry.

Come as I Rise is a video shot during the Ashura ritual in Nabatiyeh, south Lebanon, in January 2009.

It is a response to my previous encounter with the ritual as an observer, and to a whole record of Ashura, where it is being seen and represented as a communal event and a historical collectivity in the Shiite consciousness, with its associated traits of torture and lamentation and future promises.

Come as I Rise is a personal experience of the ritual, that makes steps beyond the documentary and its associated controversy, to position itself closer to poetry.

By approaching the ritual from an eye-to-eye level, bathed in the present, narrowing the angle to an individual’s scale instead of a mass perspective and thus encountering the substance at a humane point, the controversial and somewhat repugnant ritual becomes more accessible to the spectator, or even vanishes inside an individual’s experience of it.

A new experience emerges: A woman with a camera in a virile environment, obsessively examines a particular man’s will to transcend his own condition. She dedicates herself to whatever he will show or offer, challenging him to unravel himself in her presence.

Many processes are revealed in their detail: transcendence vs. self-consciousness, complicity vs. frustration, community vs. individuality, the intimate and the exhibited, the image of one’s body facing the pressure of the observing eye and camera, autonomy and fusion, all within the intense versatile bond between  a director and a performer who are strangers to each other.

In a bath of great pathos, this film is kinetic poetry.