For Cultural Purposes Only

United Kingdom| 2009 | 8 min | Experimental “For Cultural Purposes Only” is an experimental film essay investigating the cultural importance of cinema. In an age dominated by the moving image, what would it feel like to never see an image of the place that you came from? The Palestinian Film Archive contained over 100 films showing the daily life and struggle of the Palestinian people. It was lost in the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982. Here interviewees describe from memory key moments from the history of Palestinian cinema. These scenes are drawn and animated. Where film survives, the artist’s impressions are corroborated. This is a film about reconstruction and the idea that cinema is an expression of cultural identity - that cinema fuels memory. A film by Sarah Wood Sarah Wood works with the found object, particularly the still and moving image, as an act of reclamation and re-interrogation. She works mainly with the documentary image to interrogate the relationship between the narrating of history and individual memory. Recently she's been focussing on the meaning of the archive, in particular the politics of memory, asking not only why some objects are preserved while others are ignored but also why preservation is made at certain historical moments. Wood also works with artists’ films as a curator. With Selina Robertson she co-founded Club des Femmes, a positive female space for the re-examination of ideas through art.