Damnation: On Ali Cherri’s The Dam
We hang between. -Stanley Cavell, "Ending the Waiting Game" So ends an essay by Stanley Cavell on Samuel Beckett. But between what? We're "poised," Cavell writes earlier, between past and future, hope and despair, beast and angel, life and death, good and evil, heaven and hell. He calls this the "inescapable fact." In The Dam, Ali Cherri adds that we're suspended between earth and water, with only a layer of fixative holding us together.Cherri's film begins at one of the cataracts of the Nile in the shadow of Sudan's Merowe Dam, where "toiled a man whose living was made of mud." Within