Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema

DREAMS OF A NATION

DREAMS OF A NATION

First published by Verso 2006

© in the collection, Verso 2006

© in the contributions, the individual contributors 2006

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The moral rights of the authors and editor have been asserted

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ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-088-8

ISBN-10: 1-84467-088-0

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For The Warrior:

Abu Said

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Preface

Edward W. Said

Introduction

Hamid Dabashi

ONE For Cultural Purposes Only: Curating a Palestinian Film Festival

Annemarie Jacir

TWO The Weapon of Culture: Cinema in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle

Joseph Massad

THREE From Reality to Fiction – From Poverty to Expression

Michel Khleifi

FOUR Towards Liberation: Michel Khleifi’s Ma’loul and Canticle

Bashir Abu-Manneh

FIVE The Cinema of Displacement: Gender, Nation, and Diaspora

Ella Shohat

SIX Palestinian Exilic Cinema and Film Letters

Hamid Naficy

SEVEN A Letter from the Rest of the World or The Afghan Arabs

Nizar Hassan

EIGHT The Challenges of Palestinian Filmmaking (1990–2003)

Omar al-Qattan

NINE In Praise of Frivolity: On the Cinema of Elia Suleiman

Hamid Dabashi

Notes

List of Contributors

A Selected Filmography of Palestinian Cinema (1927–2004)

A Selected Bibliography on Palestinian Cinema

Acknowledgments

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1) A scene from Michel Khleifi’s Fertile Memory (1980).

2) A scene from Mohammad Bakri’s Jenin, Jenin (2002).

3) Mohammad Bakri (as Haifa) in Rashid Masharawi’s Haifa (1995).

4) A cartoon by Naji al-Ali.

5) Ali Suleiman (as Khaled) in Hany Abu Assad’s Paradise Now (2005).

6) The prominent Palestinian-Chilean filmmaker Miguel Littin, by the wall the Israelis have erected around Palestine (February 2004).

7) A scene from Michel Khleifi and Eyal Sivan’s Route 181 (2004).

8) Michel Khleifi.

9) Anna Condo (as Bride) in Michel Khleifi’s Wedding in Galilee (1987).

10) Lubna Azabal (as Suha) in Hany Abu Assad’s Paradise Now (2005).

11) Mai Masri, Frontiers of Dreams and Fears (2001).

12) Michel Khleifi’s Wedding in Galilee (1987).

13) Mai Masri, the co-director of Wild Flowers: Women of South Lebanon (1986).

14) Mai Masri, Children of Shatila (1998).

15) An old map of Palestine.

16) A scene from Michel Khleifi’s Tale of the Three Jewels (1994).

17) Ola Tabari (as Adan) in Elia Suleiman’s Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996).

18) Elia Suleiman (as himself) in Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996).

19) Elia Suleiman (as himself) with a Yasser Arafat balloon in Divine Intervention (2002).

20) Elia Suleiman, Cannes 2006, where he was a member of the jury.

21) Hanzalah keeping vigil – a witness to history.

PREFACE

Edward W. Said

The following is the text of the keynote speech that Edward Said delivered at the opening night of our Dreams of a Nation: A Palestinian Film Festival, on 24 January 2003 at the Roone Arledge Cinema, Lerner Hall, Columbia University, New York.

I’d like to make a brief series of reflections on what the significance of Palestinian films might be, and then try to relate it to the more general problem – political, aesthetic, historical – of the visible, to the dialectic of the visible and the invisible, so far as Palestinians are concerned. I will explain by way of an anecdote, from a book I wrote many years ago called After the Last Sky.¹

In 1983, I was a consultant to a United Nations International Conference on the Question of Palestine called UNICQP, which was held in Geneva; over a hundred countries were involved. From the moment that we started to work on this conference, it was clear that the United States and Israel would not approve nor participate. But the one difficulty I didn’t at all anticipate is connected to the subject of this festival, namely the problem of visual material and Palestinians.

Some of the problems were predictable. For example, one of my tasks was to commission papers for the conference (the UN loves to produce papers). Every delegate who came to the conference was supposed to get ten or so papers commissioned on, for example, the history of Palestine, the problem of colonialism, the history of Zionism, the history of Israel, etc. We gathered fifteen or twenty papers from experts from all over the world. But at a UN conference, any country can veto a paper without giving a reason. So in the end only three were allowed. (In the case of the Turkish delegation, for example, they vetoed the paper on the history of the region by one of the foremost experts in the world, a French professor called Maxime Rodinson, because it mentions the Armenians.)

We had commissioned a very well-known Swiss photographer called Jean Mohr, whom I had met through John Berger.² Mohr had spent years in the late 1940s working for the Red Cross. Later he went around Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, the West Bank, and inside Israel, taking pictures of Palestinians. He had amassed an archive of six or seven thousand photographs. Since he lived in Geneva, it seemed to me a logical and interesting idea to have his pictures at the entrance hall of the conference center, at the Palais des Nations, where the old UN, League of Nations, headquarters was. And so they were thus exhibited.

Then something unexpected happened: the photographs were shown in the hall, but only very limited captions were permitted. So there was a picture, for example, of a family, but instead of there being a label describing the family, what year the picture was taken, or what the family was doing there, the only identification allowed was Gaza.

It became obvious to me that the relationship of Palestinians to the visible and the visual was deeply problematic. In fact, the whole history of the Palestinian struggle has to do with the desire to be visible. Remember the early mobilizing phrase of Zionism: We are a people without a land going to a land without a people? It pronounced the emptiness of the land and the non-existence of a people.

This brings to mind an article I read in Haaretz on 22 January 2003 by the wonderful Israeli reporter Amira Haas. The title of the piece is You can drive along and never see an Arab. It is a description of the road system on the West Bank and Gaza built by the Israelis since the occupation, more particularly in the last few years, tying together all the settlements – around 150 or 160 settlements. These are roads on which Arabs and Palestinians cannot travel; if you are an Israeli citizen and settler, you can drive on them and not see any Arabs.

A person could travel the length and breadth of the West Bank without ever knowing not only the names of the villages and cities whose lands were confiscated in order to build the Jewish settlements and neighborhoods, but even the fact that they exist. Most of their names cannot be found on the road signs. And from a distance, the calls of the muezzins and the streets empty of people (after all, there is nothing to go out for) seem like an aesthetic decoration. A Jew traveling on the almost empty roads of the West Bank would think that there no longer are any Arabs: they do not travel on the wide roads used by the Jews.³

The people who planned the settlements, large and small, twenty years ago or more also knew that they must prevent the natives from harming the settlements or their residents – in other words, that they must build roads that would isolate every Palestinian city and village, that would divide them from each other and from the main roads, to such an extent that now all it takes is an earthen barrier to block a village’s access to the road or to its olive groves, or a city’s access to its industrial zone.⁴

Palestinian cinema must be understood in this context. That is to say, on the one hand, Palestinians stand against invisibility, which is the fate they have resisted since the beginning; and on the other hand, they stand against the stereotype in the media: the masked Arab, the kufiyya, the stone-throwing Palestinian – a visual identity associated with terrorism and violence.

Palestinian cinema provides a visual alternative, a visual articulation, a visible incarnation of Palestinian existence in the years since 1948, the year of the destruction of Palestine, and the dispersal and dispossession of the Palestinians; and a way of resisting an imposed identity on Palestinians as terrorists, as violent people, by trying to articulate a counter-narrative and a counter-identity. These films represent a collective identity.

The Palestinians are a dispersed people. Their films come from different places: the West Bank, Gaza, Israel, Europe, the United States. One of the efforts of these films is to recollect and gather together what has been lost since 1948, often in the most simple terms of everyday life. In the film I made in 1998, called In Search of Palestine, I filmed a family in the Deheshye Camp, outside Bethlehem, who insisted on bringing to me the key of their family house, which had been visible from near the camp inside Israel proper. The house had been destroyed, but they still had the key.

Things like keys, title deeds (useless now), family photographs, newspaper clippings, school certificates, marriage licenses – these are the bedrock of Palestinian memory.

In Michel Khleifi’s Fertile Memory, there is a superb scene in which an elderly woman is taken to see the piece of land that she owns. She has been dispossessed of the land, which is now occupied by the Israelis, inside Israel. She is taken to see it because her son tells her that some people want to buy the land, and they want to acquire it legally from its owner. There is a scene in which this woman – elderly, large, not well-educated, who works as a seamstress in an Israeli swimsuit factory – visits her land for the first time. She is radiant as she stands there and for the first time feels the ground beneath her. This point of contact between her and the land from which she’s been alienated – and which she no longer owns, and which the present inhabitants want to buy from her – illuminates the screen like an epiphany. The affirmation of her identity is conveyed in a totally unsentimental way. I think this is one of the keystones of Palestinian cinema.

A scene from Michel Khleifi’s Fertile Memory (1980). (Picture courtesy of Omar al-Qattan, Sindibad Films).

In its attempt to articulate a national narrative, Palestinian cinema discovers a world that has been frequently hidden, and the making visible, sometimes in very subtle and eloquent ways, as in the cinema of Elia Suleiman, or in folkloric ways in the later films of Michel Khleifi, is very exciting indeed.

INTRODUCTION

Hamid Dabashi

Here, on the slopes before sunset and

At the gun-mouth of time

Near orchards deprived

Of their shadows

We do what prisoners do:

We nurture hope.

Mahmoud Darwish

PALESTINE: THE PRESENCE OF THE ABSENCE

Making a case for the cause and consequences of Palestinian cinema as one of the most promising national cinemas cannot stop at the doorsteps of simply proposing that its local perils and possibilities are now transformed into a global event. The proposition itself is paradoxical and it is through this paradox that it needs to be articulated and theorized. How exactly is it that a stateless nation generates a national cinema – and once it does, what kind of national cinema is it? The very proposition of a Palestinian cinema points to the traumatic disposition of its origin and originality. The world of cinema does not know quite how to deal with Palestinian cinema precisely because it is emerging as a stateless cinema of the most serious national consequences. I have edited this volume in part to address the particulars of this paradox – at once enabling and complicating the notion of a national cinema.

The most notorious recent case that has dramatized this paradox is the refusal of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to consider Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention (2002) for the Oscars, objecting that he is a stateless person. This happened in a year that the Cannes Film Festival had accepted three Palestinian films in its various venues. As for Elia Suleiman’s nationality, well, he is officially an Israeli citizen – and the fact is that he would be accepted into the Academy if he were to submit his film as an Israeli, except that he was born into a Christian Palestinian family and does not have equal citizenship rights in the Jewish state. The Academy does not accept films from countries that are not recognized by the United Nations, an official of the Academy told reporters. The same UN resolution that recognized the formation of the state of Israel, however, partitioned the historical Palestine into two states, and the other one is Palestine. So if Palestine is not a state, the same is true about Israel. The Academy further stated that to be eligible for the Best Foreign Film category, a film must first be released in the country of its origin. But how would that be possible in the case of Palestine? With East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip – as indeed the rest of Palestine – under full Israeli military occupation, and most of the population under curfew, there are almost no functioning cinemas left and few Palestinians have the financial means to attend them. With the systematic destruction of Palestinian civil society and cultural institutions, and decades of Israeli military censorship, how could such a demand be met?

In February 2004, when I helped organize a Palestinian film festival in Jerusalem, the Palestinian cultural organization that hosted us (Yabous) had to transform the lobby of a YMCA into a makeshift movie theater – with foldable chairs, a rented projector, and a pull-out screen. Our audience had to negotiate their way through a labyrinth of Israeli military checkpoints to get to the festival. During the following summer, I traveled through a series of Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria, with a backpack full of Palestinian films, showing them to Palestinian refugees on the rooftops of dilapidated buildings – projected on walls from a mismatched constellation of equipment running on stolen electricity. Which of these movie theaters did the Academy have in mind in order for Divine Intervention to be seen by Palestinians in their country?

Today we are witnessing the spectacular rise of a national cinema – predicated on a long history of documentary filmmaking in pre-1948 Palestine and a subsequent dispersion of Palestinian filmmakers throughout the Arab world – precisely at a moment when the nation that is producing it is itself negated and denied, its ancestral land stolen from under its feet and militarily occupied by successive bands of white European and American colonial settlers. That paradox does not only preface the case of Palestinian cinema, it occasions it and gives it a unique and exceptionally unsettling disposition. What precisely that disposition is will have to be articulated through a close reading of its films – a principal reason behind the compilation of this volume. Palestinian filmmakers dream their cinema – the visual evidence of their being-in-the-world – in a forbidden land that is theirs but is not theirs. These dreams, as a result, always border with nightmares – hopes transgressing into fears, and at the borderlines of that im/possibility of dreaming and naming, the Palestinian cinema is made im/possible.

It is crucial to keep in mind that the origin of Palestinian cinema pre-dates the dispossession of their historical homeland. The first Palestinian film to have ever been made was a short documentary by Ibrahim Hasan Serhan, which recorded the visit of King Abd al-Aziz bin Abd al-Rahman bin Faysal al-Saud (1888–1953; reigned 1932–53) to Palestine, and his subsequent travels between Jerusalem and Jaffa. In the history of Palestinian cinema there dwells a sense of continuity that outlives the current political predicament of Palestinians and the disrupted course of their nationhood.

At the end of the nineteenth century, groups of white European settlers – escaping persecution from acts of religious, racial, and ethnic violence endemic to Europe, or else colonial opportunists taking advantage of that fact – began to move into Palestine and gradually took it over, forcing its native inhabitants to live in exile or be crammed into refugee camps, or else subjugated into second-rate citizenship in their own homeland. Mobilized by the memories of their pogroms and then a genocidal Holocaust, perpetrated against millions of European Jews, white Europeans sought to assuage their guilty conscience by granting the descendants of those they had sought to exterminate a state that was built on the broken back of another nation, which had absolutely nothing to do with the criminal atrocities committed by one group of Europeans against another. Thus the Palestinians were robbed of their ancestral homeland and the State of Israel – the first religious (Jewish) state in the region (preceding an Islamic Republic by more than a quarter of a century) – was born in 1948. Palestinians call this event Nakba or Catastrophe, and to this day it remains the central traumatic moment of their collective identity.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Israel has mutated into a military machine no longer even true to the original design of pioneering Zionists in the nineteenth century, who dreamt of an exclusively Jewish state. Today, Israel is a military camp completely given over to the imperial designs of the United States. Most cases of colonialism have ended in indignity: the French packed up and left Algeria, the Italians Libya, the British India, so did the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Belgians, and the Dutch. Those such as the Afrikaners who did not leave and stayed put with a shameless insistence on apartheid were finally swept away by the force of history, and had to abandon their racist practices and concede to the will of the nation they had subjugated. But the Zionists remain. The fact that Jewish communities have lived in Palestine since time immemorial is as much an excuse for the formation of a Jewish State in Palestine as the equally historical presence of Muslim or Christian Palestinians is an excuse for the creation of an Islamic or Christian republic. Palestine belongs to Palestinians – whether Jews, Christians, or Muslims.

At the core of the Palestinian historical presence is thus a geographical absence. The overriding presence of an absence is at the creative core of Palestinian cinema, what has made it thematically in/coherent and aesthetically im/possible.

Abdel Salam Shehada’s gut-wrenching film Debris (2002) is an example par excellence of the active mutation of body and soil in Palestinian cinema. Every time I saw a tree being uprooted, says the young Palestinian boy to the camera as he remembers the scene of Israeli bulldozers razing his parents olive grove, I felt a part of my body was being ripped out. The elders claim the land with their memory, as their children and their olive trees grow on it. Populating the land with Palestinians becomes the key element in preventing the question of Palestine to remain a question, or to become only a metaphor. Palestine is an issue," interjects Mahmoud Darwish at one point in the course of a conversation with Edward Said in Charles Bruce’s In Search of Palestine (1998), not an essence.

In most world cinema, the active formation of such globally celebrated traditions as Soviet Formalism, Italian Neorealism, French New Wave, or German New Cinema have been formed in the aftermath of a major political upheaval and national trauma. The Russians discovered and articulated their cinema in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917; Italians did the same in the immediate decades after the Mussolini era and in the throes of massive poverty caused by the war; the French followed suit in the aftermath of their colonial catastrophes in Africa; while the Germans did the same in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Hiroshima was as definitive to Akira Kurosawa’s cinema as the Chinese, Cuban, and Iranian revolutions were to the Chinese, Cuban, and Iranian national cinema. The central trauma of Palestine, the Nakba, is the defining moment of Palestinian cinema – and it is around that remembrance of the lost homeland that Palestinian filmmakers have articulated their aesthetic cosmovision.

TRAUMATIC REALISM

In what particular way can a Palestinian cinema have