On Stars at Midday

I like to catch thoughts on paper, but whenever I have a notebook on me, I never use it. When I leave the house without a notebook, I want one immediately when I arrive at my destination; and when I’m at home, the notebook I really want is at the studio. I never quite have the right place to write, or rather I’m in a constant state of creating text in the interstices of where what I imagined meets what the reality actually is.

Noor Abed’s Stars at Midday is the result of her own notebooks and digital photographs. The publication, released in October 2024, is described by the artist as a personal production diary, compiling notes that she made during the filming of A Night We Held Between, which she filmed in Palestine in 2023 and released earlier in 2024. The book is part of an ecosystem of artistic production which includes the film itself, shot on 16mm in color and first screened at IDFA Pavilion Shorts and the Eye Filmmuseum before being shown at the Rijksakademie Open where Abed was a resident, as well as a number of other venues in 2024 including Wiels, Brussels, and The Showroom, London

About the size of an A5 notebook, Stars at Midday is perfect bound, but its spine is exposed, apropos of the diaristic nature in which Abed, through a mixture of emotional registers, chronicles the experience of shooting the film. Poetic reflections in green text on gray pages seem to mark phases in the production process, or rather how these moments mark (metaphysical, existential) portals that the artist passes through: “I leave without knowing, I become someone else two days before traveling…there is another body in my body…”¹ The photographs in the book are captioned by extended narrations that contextualize the images. A photo of a road slicing through a valley is described as the Jericho area, where resistance fighters once hid in caves, and where at the time of the photo, H, the film’s DOP, complains about how slow Abed’s father drives. In another caption, among those caves, a shepherd recites a line from the Bible and speaks of demons and haunting. Throughout this diary Abed folds, layer by layer, historical context onto quotidian experience onto biopolitical reality onto enchanted heritages onto quotidian experience onto historical context and so on.

What I want to find a way to describe is my sense of this publication as a diary of a filmmaker, immersed in the quick, intuitive work of the formal-aesthetic decision making that undergirds creative practice, flowing in and through the oscillations of these moments on the spectrum between biopolitical enclosure and spiritual experience. “I took one picture with my phone. We left.” Biopolitics + Spirituality = Death Work, arrived at by finding a good spot to film. The crew makes space in the production schedule to absorb the gravitas (“I didn’t know what touching water meant to him”) of performing a kind of death work through film.

I do not wish to propose death work as unique to either the film or to the landscape in which it is situated or the diary of it that we read. In fact, I would like to dwell a bit on this question of whether my expository skills are adept enough to review this book without re-inscribing a colonialism I would like to see abolished when I consider Abed’s recordkeeping as a type of testimony, or an unforgetting, when this connection I’m making is informed by the context in which Abed was filming. In Palestinian territory occupied by a violent offshoot of the Euro-American imperial project, the context of Stars at Midday is interlaced with the banal bureaucratic obstacles of navigating colonial occupation (“scan of my permit to enter certain areas of Occupied Palestine”), a banality, maybe that of a slow drive through a valley, punctuated by the gut punch of a sharp threat and an intrusion on one’s sense of control—like when the group, while scouting filming locations, gets heckled by armed colonizers. Devoted Tangents enthusiasts may recall a book I reviewed last year, Rizvana Bradley’s Anteaesthetics, in which Bradley demonstrates that aesthetic regimes and racist regimes are co-constitutive—which I think is important to remember when reviewing a book about a film about Palestinian cultural memory, because the discourse (of which writing reviews is a part) that surrounds art produced from or about or within the experience of imperialist violence for the most part tends to re-impose the expectation that we (we, as Rizvana wrote it, was black women born under American imperialism) spectacularize our suffering or, even worse, transcend that suffering through aesthetic gesture. And anti-colonial as my desires might be, for some reason I still choose to work in this format, art critique, which is at its foundation built to spectacularize the death work that we (anti-colonial persons) are being compelled to do, albeit dealing with different tentacles of the beast based on what landscapes bore us.

While continually subjected to the abuse of this hundreds-year-long Euro-American tantrum that is called modernity, as Bradley calls out with bold certainty, rightly so, we (artists) also withstand so much terrible art critique, even and especially when it celebrates the work as “good,” and re-inscribes this European tantrum through its predatory inclusions of that work into categories such as “good“ “powerful“ and “beautiful.“ In other words, Bradley’s theory bites back at the mechanism by which some thumping art critic might say, if I made a film, that I had made a powerful film that abolished systemic racism in Louisiana. A fantasy which would be fun to see, but anyway, roleplaying as an art critic, I wish not to then intimate that Abed’s production diary frees Palestine through formal-aesthetic intuitive decisions about where to shoot, or through the testimony that exposes how this shoot was unjustly required, at times, to center protecting the crew from menacing settlers, or that it has political and metaphysical import over and above its aesthetic qualities. Rizvana!! Help, get me out of this cave!! I forgot why I would choose to do art criticism? I saw my Aristotelian shadow as a person whose lexicon is built to re-inscribe violence and I don’t want to drag someone else into it!

In the words of Tangents editor Becket Flannery, what I’m searching for is whether viewers and readers can engage with Stars at Midday, and the film that it describes, as an object of contemplation and/or criticism, before pressing it into affective service, whether for spectacular or ethico-political ends. In a battle between “formal aesthetic questions” and “ethics,” I surmise that the quotidian and the historical contexts are the conditions for the things but are not themselves the things for readers to be looking at. Now, I am going to tie my writing hand behind my back and, without recourse to the political liberation fantasy that I may have already conjured in your minds, attempt to respond to what Stars at Midday is actually doing for me!

What is significant to me? Early in Stars at Midday, Abed describes that she and her collaborator H have been working together for over ten years, but she does not say whether they always work in 16mm together, or if H is a specialist in 16mm, or how either of them came to the medium, and I do have further questions about this context because 16mm imagery is, I would argue, a dead art. Or rather, to work in 16mm is a type of death work. I say this from the perspective of someone who is part of a collective in London that is delivering palliative care to a collection of 16mm cameras and editing equipment which are in varying states of function, dysfunction and disrepair. Abed writes a few times that she wanted to “touch death,” and I think that when you film on 16mm, you are in fact touching death. The way that the medium has fallen out of industrial circulation is a type of death I think we can be happy about amidst our grief, a death that has given way to an afterlife of DIY usage that is at its core provisional, inconvenient, bodily, takes a long time and places time restrictions on and makes demands of filmmakers. Its unyielding parameters of scarcity (of material, of time, of infrastructure) also can force a levity to the serious work of formal-aesthetic filmmaking. In Stars at Midday there is a documentation shot of Abed turning her father’s car into a dark room in order to change film on set, before then returning the car to its other function as the film crew’s lunch table.

The scarcity of infrastructure for 16mm is conterminous with the fact that actually you don’t need any infrastructure in particular to make work on 16mm. This contingency is part of its power, and I don’t mean political power, although also that, but I mean its spirit. A 16mm camera is a mechanical (as opposed to electrical) machine which makes demands, which talks back, which cooperates or does not. Abed writes later of a landscape which “revealed itself to us, in silence, and in trust” at the right moment during filming, after a group of heckling settlers had left the area. Stars at Midday does not speak to it directly, how the camera has a tendency to do this too, to be an inanimate object that nonetheless gives and withholds consent; that reveals itself in its own time, or insists that filmmakers take theirs, like spending 90 minutes to compose a ten-second shot, an imbalance which is inherent to film in any format. But as 90 minutes of analogue film could cost about a thousand euros, I would guess from the production notes that the medium they chose to shoot in had a big impact on the balancing act between choreography, economy and improvisatory flow, a negotiation that is described throughout the film’s production. I would be curious to have read more about her and H’s direct experience with analogue film, particularly in the context of filming on a land which is also resisting colonial occupation. I start to remember my experience of watching the film that this book diarizes, how watching was like looking not at a landscape but at how it behaves; maybe it was that the camera was a comrade in this journey.

Abed recounts a production schedule full of re-directions and contingency plans and retakes and compromises and responding intuitively to surprises and sometimes failure. She communicates with incisive detail the interplay between a matter-of-factness of a production schedule and a roll of analogue film with a set number of seconds left to shoot, an inherent limitation in the medium, and the heartfelt intimacy of having a thing you wanna shoot and having to recollect yourself when the spirit of the production says no, this as you initially planned it will not work out. Plans mundane but effectual like:

• the men showing up on set not ready to dance what they had rehearsed
• the sound guy oversleeping and missing the shoot
• the spontaneity of a man passing by on a donkey
• waiting for tourists to pass by
• a body movement, which was exactly what she had planned but nonetheless didn’t capture the feeling that she wanted and thus was dropped
• improvising a scene, not wanting to “let go” of a location
• the 16mm reel ending, realizing that the rest of the reels were in a car that had already left the shoot

I read most of these re-directions that Abed describes in the book with a sort of muted affect, as if it was a captain’s log. But when it comes to describing her plan to have a black goat’s head in the film—and that black goat heads are believed to be inhabited by spirits, and seeking a goat head from the butcher, and then reserving one, and then that plan not working out, and being offered a sheep’s head instead, and feeling clear that no, for the film it needed to be the head of a goat, but not feeling clear about whether a different goat should be killed especially for the use of its head in the film, and what to do—this conundrum hit me with a particular salience, this battle between formal aesthetic questions and (maybe) ethics and economy and the spirit that lives inside an animal or the spirit that an animal hosts in its head and the metaphysics of death work.

I appreciate what Abed has done with Stars at Midday. Her book metabolizes the spectacular nature of an art object (the film itself) by exposing, through the publication, what often is given no platform on which to circulate, namely the conditions within which the work had to be made. The conditions are such that to varying degrees many readers of this book will resonate with the spirit that moves through the production. Perhaps these readers, like me, feel trapped in the devolved cave where modernity molds us into thinking humans as opposed to what we could be: animal vessels for spirits. We are, if we pay attention, engaged alongside Abed in a sense of being called to do some kind of death work. This sense of resonance with death work had me thinking about what I might say an audience’s role would be in receiving this exposure to death work through reading the publication’s pages. I think we all need to let go of the sense of ourselves as an audience entirely; I think our liberation work would be to reject the conditions of production as a subject of spectacle, and in that sense a liberated audience is an irreconcilable idea. And so why am I writing art criticism? Maybe I’m realizing that there is death work to be in language. And I’m a vessel for a spirit who likes to play with text.

1. All quotations come from Noor Abed, Stars at Midday, London: Occasional Papers, 2025.