Hussein Shariffe's Filmic Ruins: Archival Noise and The Dislocation of Amber (1975)

My audiovisual essay explores Hussein Shariffe’s The Dislocation of Amber (1975) as a filmic “ruin” within his archive. Described by collaborator Sondra Hale as “Sudan’s first art film,” The Dislocation of Amber was filmed in the Sudanese city of Suakin, which lies in ruins. The available digitised copies of the film are degraded and disrupted by noise. Hale interprets the film as “a metaphor for a society decimated by colonialism,” and this essay uses Shariffe’s approach to the ruins of Suakin as a model for how to approach the ruins of Shariffe’s film itself, along with the political and personal histories that entwine around this material object. I pay close attention to the degradation of the images in Shariffe’s film to open up questions about the political realities of Sudanese cinema. This videographic scholarship is influenced by Ji Anger’s “film theory from below”: a speculative and concrete way of thinking about images through images that “inherently depends on the material qualities of the digitised objects, the traces and gestures embedded in the individual frames and between them.” If the film’s future is one where restoration can help gain a larger audience for this extraordinary work, it is also vital to mark this moment of its material history, to stay with the noise and retain its loss as an index of political contingencies.