This was the smoothest watch for me out of Director Elia Suleiman’s four films.

There’s something comforting about how Suleiman returns to familiar places and people throughout all four of his feature films. Watching Suleiman grow older in his films is an experience in of itself. Seeing the Post Its on the wall (reflecting Suleiman’s own, real life note-taking process) in particular made me smile.

Though my thoughts might change if I get the chance to rewatch them (which I dearly hope I get to!), having now seen his four feature films, his first film is still my favorite.

I did notice a decidedly cis man gaze towards the women (especially young women) in each of his films. Women seem to be either mothers, bearers/symbols of culture, or eye candy.

But overall, Suleiman has gradually perfected this technique of elevating the contradictions of everyday life. Even the fantastical elements, as the director notes, are grounded in real life events he experiences or hears. Driving by a tank and dreaming of it exploding, or dreaming of a Palestinian woman, advertised as a shooting target, fighting back, become small ways of resisting daily dehumanization and of imagining a different world.

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Andd of course director Elia Suleiman is smoking cigarettes during the The Arab American National Museum Talkback I’m watching lololol! I feel like I've seen more smoking onscreen in the last couple of days than I have in my entire lifetime.

Some notes from the talkback (forgive any errors or mistranscriptions):

He attributes a strong oral storytelling tradition to his filmmaking career.

His film education as a dropout in New York in the 80s was sneaking into NYU Tisch film classes and watching movies—sometimes two a day. 

I think that learning how to make film is not film itself, it is actually how to engage culturally, how to put yourself in the realm of culture wherever it comes from.

Japanese and Taiwanese filmmakers, in addition to French filmmakers, were influences.

Ozu was a major inspiration. Watching Tokyo Story and similar films was where Suleiman first thought to himself “I could do this.”

Writers were a large influence on Suleiman, including prose, philosophical, and theoretical writings. 

On how Suleiman would like his films to be interpreted, or if people are reading too much into his films:

Primarily, I’m always hopeful that it gets interpreted in infinite ways. And I actually, starting from opening a lot of my frames into making them tableaus, and making a lot of different spaces in the same tableau, from you know size to background to foreground, and quite a few things happening sometimes at the same time. So, I want to actually to give that chance for the various interpretation of ways of looking. So it’s important for me actually that I do that. If I start to only point to what I want to, what gets to be seen, I think, this linearity doesn’t give me a lot of pleasure.

So, I try to always actually to do this, so that, well, first of all because the spectator can watch the film and also go at it again and watch the film if they want to, well, how should I say, it’s like watching a tableau in a museum, I hope I’m not being pretentious by the example, but I would like that my films get to be seen again, either visually or in the imagination. So when you are a spectator and you’re watching a film, well, you might focus on one layer, but then maybe when you leave the theater you might also have seen the second layer that actually will follow you when you are heading to the restaurant where you want to meet your friends and have dinner. So there’s different ways of how the image can actually, let’s say, circle and become part of your physical space in an imaginative way. And so you might take quite a few moments you have not necessarily focused on with you.

And so, the other thing about watching a film that I many times say is that, if you have enjoyed and the film did connect and you identified with the images you’re watching, I think my gratification does not only come from the physical watching again of the film, but also from the fact that it gets, let’s say, watched again by the different activities that we do. That means, if it for example instigates desire of all sorts. In other words, I am gratified if you’re hungry after you watch my film and you want to eat sushi. It can actually multiply its visits to the movie without control. And since I cannot really statistically tell you anything about that I’m just hoping that’s, this is the way that my film gets to be watched.

But mostly also, in a kind of a tender way. Like I would like to think that maybe the film might have produced desire for love and tenderness. I sound like the 60s but, you know, it is something that pleases me, you know, to imagine or to hope that this is what happens when people watch my films. That the different positive vibrations are interpreted and that they metamorphose in different components of pleasure. Maybe also including, for example, a certain—but this, I’m hoping too much, but I’ll tell you anyway—if I imagine that people can by defacto reduce their inner violence towards each other, for instance, maybe, you know. And I’m not saying now in the large political context, I’m saying our anger at ourselves, our violence even at ourselves and of course people around us. This would be also gratifying for me but I don’t know if this happens, I mean nobody came and told me ‘after I saw your film I was so hungry.’ ...

Not to mention, films are very expensive. So rather than make one every year, make one every seven.

And people can watch it every year for seven years.

For example.

On why/how Suleiman uses humor and political satire in his films:

I don’t think you utilize, or employ, or choose, or any of those. I grew up in a family that was quite tender and funny. They used humor around the lunch table, the dinner table, there was always humor. I was the youngest, so my initial and tender influence comes from actually my family, my brothers and my parents, and I think it comes from there. It may come from DNA but I’m not so sure about that. Comedy is not something you can actually take out of a drawer. It’s either, sorry to say... you’re either funny or you’re not.

So it’s not a choice. I think the combination of being brought up in a quite a charged political situation, that may have brought these two element together, which is the sociopolitical and the humor, the satire, and the melancholy not to mention, quite a few other elements that are there that coming from a certain upbringing, certain place that I grew up in. Nazareth for example, had already begun to become a ghetto when I was already a child, so. I mean, ghetto in a literal sense.

But it was still tender, you know, a small town on the hills of the Galilee, and then as the oppression continued to build and the segregation and the racism, and the mockery of our existence as, I would say, third class citizens but I would say even ten, not only third. We were the present forgotten, and we were the neglected, and the detested. So, we were there only so as to disappear one day. Our presence was always considered as temporary until another solution comes by.

Nazareth became a ghetto with quite a high percentage of unemployment in it. And with it also comes these kind of funny characters that sit in a kind of, well, in moments of stasis with nothing to do. And, as in ghettos, the highest example of that is the Second World War and the Jewish ghettos, the despair brings in quite a lot of humor. So, with what I’m telling you about of being in this family and then with what was I was witnessing and hearing and encountering, all these funny characters, there was something to be had for cinema in this.

And that continued basically, seeping through all my films. It became something, it became a bit like the basis of when you cook a meal, you start with your onions first. It became a sort of base that I’m not calculating nor strategizing, it just became what it is.

And also when I think about it, normally, when I'm sitting in a café and I'm watching the passersby, it's simply is what takes my attention. And that I consider, let’s say, has a potential of becoming a cinematic moment. So, you grasp that moment when it passes you by, and you think, ah there was something interesting in this, and you note it down.

That could also be, you know, choreographic potential, dramatic, melancholic, but that also can be humorous. So I take this moment and I write it in my notebook, and the rest is, how can I grow, make this moment, become cinematic potential? And so you build moment after moment after moment and you start to think now how it becomes, how it can, a sort of togetherness comes in, where this and that become the dance, or it becomes the punch line.

And of course, the rest is then what happens after when you start to construct the narrative of your film, or the tableau. I mostly work with tableau, so usually there's a pigmenting that I go through of one layer, after one layer, after one layer. So what happens then, as if in the narrative normally of a film, with me it happens in the tableau itself, what happens, after. The storytelling is inside the frame, happening. And actually I never put just the linear narrative and say OK, this person goes from Y to X. No, I first pigment these tableaus, and it is by this kind of subliminal montage that things start to take place. It’s me playing with the narrative of these tableaus. But you have to have faith of course that they connect. I mean you absolutely have to have faith that these tableaus are not in separate worlds, that they belong in the same cosmos.

Now you filter of course, and you go through the process of writing and making a certain montage, but at some point you see that there is something that is, that has this kind of.. there's a conversation that's taking place with these images. And these conversations are taking place in various layers. So you start to realize you are not outside of this conversation, and that you are in for, what we call in feature film, a narrative of some sort. So, you know, the humor, the choreography, the melancholy, the politics, the social issues, get together, and they tell a story.

I have to just add this. Because I talked about Nazareth. But I think you can take Nazareth just as one example of where humor exists. But then for example, I live in Paris, and same thing. I could say without the ghetto situation, but, but, what made things happen here was not the ghettoization, but you could say the state of emergency, and the police state situation that we’ve been having here for a while. So again, the humor comes from, as you saw in the Paris park, there’s quite a bit of police, ridiculous ones, but they are police. And so, due to, again a political situation and there's also the social aspect of things, but again it produces humor. Now why do I produce the humor there, that goes back to where I was born.

Speaking further on his influences, Suleiman rejects the idea of being influenced by one nation or culture. 

...The false way of seeing is how so many of these American films get to shoot one thing from a million angles and say nothing. While the idea is to actually be able to look from a million angles and say it in one go, and in one minimal way of watching.