Against the Eye of Empire

The Struggle over Imperial Vision

“Open the Prison Door to Daylight” is the title of a short film programme that seems to promise revelation. It suggests exposure, release, a passage from darkness into visibility. Yet the four films gathered under that heading are striking precisely because they do not readily trust visibility. Presented by the film journal Ultra Dogme as part of Glasgow Short Film Festival 2026, and framed as “four strikes against the eye of Empire,” the films return again and again to damaged, unstable or contested forms of mediation: testimony arrives dubbed and interrupted; subtitles slip from transcription into sabotage; the past survives less as image than as acoustic residue; scenes of daily life are crossed by the unfinished movement of displacement. If these works share a politics of refusal, it lies not only in what they show, but in how insistently they trouble the terms on which power asks to see, hear, and classify the world.

That instability matters. Programmes built around anti-imperial or revolutionary themes can sometimes flatten films into illustrations of a prior politics, as though the task were merely to confirm what the curatorial copy already knows. What is most persuasive here is something less declarative and more formally alive. These films do not simply denounce empire as a system of prisons, occupations, hearings, and exclusions. They also confront empire as an arrangement of perception: an order that names, translates, interrogates, archives, misremembers, and demands intelligibility from those it seeks to manage, classify, and dominate. The refusal staged by these works is therefore not always loud. Sometimes it takes the form of interference.

This is clearest in Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (2001), the most explicitly preoccupied with the politics of testimony. Structured around video statements by Souheil Bachar, a fictionalised stand-in through whom the film imagines an absent or inaccessible archive of captivity, the work returns to Bachar’s account of being held alongside American hostages in Lebanon. Bachar begins not with confession but with instruction. Before his captivity can become narrative, before it can circulate as document or evidence, he lays out terms for how his image and words should be shown, translated, and presented. Even without knowing the full circumstances under which only two of the fifty-three tapes were made accessible to Western audiences, the fact itself hangs over the film as a problem of selection and controlled legibility. Why these two? Why not the others? What is being managed here: memory, strategy, self-protection, address? The imagined hostage does not simply appear before the camera. He attempts to curate the afterlife of his own speech.

That struggle over narration continues in the film’s form. Bachar speaks directly to the camera, framed in a medium-long shot against a white wall that seems less neutral than makeshift, with an off-white cloth taped behind him, not quite covering the frame. Elsewhere, he appears in other guises and other framings: in close-up, in an undershirt, against artificial flowers. The image flickers with digital noise and static, transitions that do not smooth over the tape’s condition so much as insist on it. His voice is dubbed by a soft female speaker, occasionally interrupted by a more expository male voice whose official cadence evokes the authority of reportage. There is no stable, sovereign speaking position here. Speech arrives split, ventriloquised, overwritten.

That split is not incidental. All five American prisoners of the Lebanese hostage crisis went on to write books about their captivity, multiplying and canonising the Western side of the story. Bachar’s tapes, by contrast, do not settle into a single testimonial line. They remain partial, mediated, resistant to consolidation. Even his most disarming recollections—sexual suspicion among the prisoners, their bodily revulsion and dependency, the weird intimacies produced by confinement—dislodge any easy moral geometry. “Yes, our story is tragic,” he says. “But first and foremost, it’s a story.” The line is not an appeal to fictionality, exactly, but a reminder that tragedy, too, is shaped in telling. What becomes history is never just what happened. It is what gets framed, translated, and repeated.

The short appendix around Tape #31 further emphasises this. A static shot of water, a canted figure by its edge, and the note that the previous video’s duration corresponds to the average duration of statements recorded during his captivity: these gestures push testimony toward abstraction, toward duration itself as a measure of constraint. The tape becomes less an open window onto truth than a record of format, limit, and recurrence. Captivity persists not only as content but as an organisation of time.

Another Other (Bex Oluwatoyin Thompson, 2025)

If Hostage: The Bachar Tapes turns the hostage archive into a struggle over voice, Another Other (2025) stages a more contemporary battle over official language. Its opening text—“What the world does to you, if it does it long enough, you begin doing it to yourself”—already signals an interest in internalised violence and reproduced structures. From there, the film moves into a different register of coercion: the public hearing, the institutional performance of accountability. We hear footage from the 2023 House Education and Workforce Committee hearing in which Harvard president Claudine Gay was aggressively questioned over alleged antisemitism on campus in relation to student protests against Israel. On one level, this is a scene of procedural speech: inquiry, policy, administration. On another, it is an exercise in disciplining what can be said, by whom, and under what terms.

What makes the film bite is that the subtitles do not obediently transcribe the exchange. They diverge, almost imperceptibly at first, inserting alternative meanings, as when a question about whether calls for genocide violate Harvard’s harassment policy is subtitled: “I thought we had a deal.” The effect is sly but corrosive. The subtitle ceases to serve speech and begins to decode it, exposing the bad faith tucked inside procedural language. These are not mistranslations so much as acts of interpretive mutiny. They reveal institutional discourse as theatre: a pre-scripted negotiation over allegiance, punishment, and acceptable dissent.

The film’s image track seems similarly alert to racialised looking. Fragments from Rising Sun, Wesley Snipes moving within one visual economy, are juxtaposed with shots of an angry white man looking offscreen in another. James Baldwin is credited too: a ghostly presence if not always clearly localisable in the film itself. That uncertainty almost suits the work. Baldwin belongs here less as a quotation than as an organising intelligence, a reminder that the struggle over language is inseparable from the struggle over the racial distribution of innocence and threat. If Empire has an eye, it is one trained not only by surveillance but by accusation.

In most films, subtitles facilitate access; they help language cross borders. In Another Other, they do the opposite. They make language suspicious again. The subtitle becomes the film’s key weapon, forcing the viewer to ask whether official speech is ever merely what it claims to be. Refusal here is not a matter of counter-speech alone, but of making legibility itself unstable.

Something similar happens in On the Battlefield (2024), which opens the programme, though in a quieter, more spatial register. Here, the site itself seems divided between visible present and audible past. A sound recordist moves through what is now an open field, formerly the site of the Pyramid Courts, a housing estate whose destruction haunts the film’s layered soundtrack. Over this contemporary terrain comes a defiant speech directed against the state, while another, present-day voice comments that “you can’t just destroy and not put back.” The film does not reconstruct history through illustrative archival montage. It works more like a palimpsest. The present remains present, but the past insists beneath it, not as image but as sonic return.

There is something Straub-Huillet-like in this manoeuvre: landscape as bearer of historical pressure, sound as a force that reanimates the apparently neutral field. The sound recordist becomes a mediator, but also a witness to erasure, moving through a space from which conflict has ostensibly been cleared. What has been destroyed is not only a site but the social world that once gave it meaning. The field, in this sense, is not empty at all. It has merely been rendered legible as emptiness by redevelopment, forgetting, or the state’s own management of public memory.

That line—“you can’t just destroy and not put back”—lands with particular force because it names something larger than architecture. Empire destroys and calls the result progress. It demolishes, then naturalises, the vacancy it has produced. On the Battlefield resists that neutralisation. It listens where official history has already moved on.

Morgenkreis (Basma al-Sharif, 2025)

If Morgenkreis (2025) feels gentler than the other works, it may also be the one that most quietly folds imperial violence into the textures of ordinary life. The film opens in motion, a long take through a Berlin courtyard and into a flat, before settling with Mr. Abrahamyan, leaning by a window and smoking, answering questions from an unseen German voice. The questions are chilling, not because they are shouted but because they are bureaucratically intimate: have you formed an attachment to our way of life? Do you identify with Germany? “Our way of life,” “your community”: the old distinctions arrive with administrative politeness. Belonging is not offered here; it is examined.

The film then shifts toward the father and son, Adnan, resisting being taken into the nursery, the daily friction of care. Once inside, the children begin working with musical instruments, and sound gradually accumulates into something like a collective sequence. The translated lyrics appear in huge letters: “Wake up, don’t fall asleep. We are saluting the parrot.” The line is absurd, childlike, faintly ceremonial. Yet as the camera begins to turn in a circle, the image abstracting and bleeding into itself, another image emerges underneath or beyond the nursery scene: a long column of people marching slowly, suggestive of exodus, displacement, or flight from war.

The superimposition refuses a clean separation between the routines of settlement and the histories of displacement that shadow them. The nursery does not cancel the exodus. The questions of identification do not erase the movement of those forced to leave elsewhere. If the film is indeed linking the father and son’s present to another geography of mass movement and dispossession, it does so delicately, without converting them into symbols. The point is not equivalence. It is persistence. The world one flees does not stay behind; it continues under the image, under the song, under the demand to integrate.

Taken together, these films do not form a seamless political language. The programme’s curatorial framing—Arab and Black radical traditions, communal emancipation, strikes against empire—is, in some ways, bolder than the affinity one might initially draw across all four works. What binds them more persuasively is not a shared rhetoric of revolution, but a common suspicion of transparency. None of these films suggests that power is best opposed simply by making everything visible. On the contrary, they repeatedly show that visibility is one of power’s preferred instruments: the hearing, the archive, the interview, the testimony extracted, the subject translated for institutional consumption.

Their answer is not pure opacity either. These are not sealed films. Rather, they produce a different ethics of appearance. They let speech be split into multiple channels. They allow subtitles to revolt. They restore the buried history of a site through sound rather than spectacle. They place scenes of ordinary adaptation under the shadow of unresolved movement. In each case, the viewer is denied the comfort of transparent access. Refusal becomes formal before it becomes thematic.

That may be what “daylight” comes to mean here. Not a flood of illumination, not the fantasy that the prison door opens onto a fully knowable world, but the creation of breaches in a regime of managed perception. A crack in the frame. A noise in the soundtrack. A line of text that no longer serves authority. The daylight these films seek is harsher and less consoling than liberation rhetoric usually allows. It does not wash history clean. It reveals, instead, that the prison is built not only of walls and laws, but of images, captions, procedures, and ways of listening. To refuse empire, these films suggest, is also to refuse its claim to explain what we are seeing.