This is the second part of a two-part post on new developments in Israeli and Palestinian film. Part 1 provided the historical and aesthetic background. Today, the new developments are considered. -Jeff
One of the first attempts to undermine and transcend Israeli cinema’s tendentious rhetorics and contents was Avanti Popolo (Rafi Bukai, 1986). It takes place in Sinai during the 1967 Six Days War. Two Egyptian soldiers (acted by Palestinian actors Salim Daw and Suhel Haddad) lost in the desert without water, discover two bottles of whiskey in a UN abandoned jeep, which they drink to survive. Khaled is an aspiring actor in Cairo fringe theater. He would love to act Hamlet but instead has been given the part of Shylock, the Jew, in Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice.” As the two wander, thirsty and drunk in the desert, they run into an Israeli patrol. Their captors refuse to share a can of water with them. Khaled stuns them as he desperately quotes Shakespeare tinged with an Arab accent “I am a Jew! Has a Jew not eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions, fed with the same food…”
An article by the Palestinian poet and critic Anton Shammas has brought to my attention that
“the two allegedly Egyptian soldiers lost in the desert talk behave like typical Palestinians. They represent the Palestinian to the Israeli cognition through the back door, through a brilliant, humane, humoristic and most of all clever cinematic distraction. Bukai, maybe intuitively, felt that the only way in which the Palestinian could touch Israeli conscience and raise his interest would be through a softened, retouched image of the ‘Egyptian’, who has existed significantly in this awareness since the days of the Bible.” (Shammas Anton, ‘He Confused the Parts’ in Bukai Rafi, Avanti Popolo, Kinneret Publishing House, 1990. Hebrew)
What strikes me about Avanti Popolo, is its yearning for a disinterested and universal “promesse du Bonheur” according to Stendhal’s famous definition of beauty, for Shakespeare, capable of transcending Israeli/Arab differences and conflicts. Avanti Popolo was followed by a veritable avalanche of fresh and unexpected visual, narrative and stylistic approaches generated a decade later by Israeli and Palestinian feature, documentary and experimental films.
Eran Kolirin’s The Band’s Visit (2007) closes a circle of Israeli-Egyptian relations opened by Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer and continued in Avanti Popolo. The Alexandria Police Symphonic Orchestra has just arrived in Israel to celebrate the opening of an Arab cultural center in Petah Tikva. Tunes of Chet Baker, Gershwin and a beautiful Oriental melody by Habib Shehada Hana unite throughout the film, like Shakespeare in Avanti Popolo 20 years earlier, women and men of different ethnicities and cultures. Like Avanti this is not a record of reality, nor a mirror to life, but sheer utopia. In reality, an Arab cultural center could be established in Nazareth, Haifa, even Tel Aviv, but never in Petah Tikva, with its numerous orthodox inhabitants. One could imagine a visit of an Alexandria Police band, but it would be surrounded by cordons of police and Mossad agents. Not to mention Egyptian secret agents. Yet, Kolirin’s film, like the best works of the last decade, does not copy reality – it questions it. This time – through the prism of beautiful music.
In Atash (Thirst, 2004), directed by Um-el-Fakhem born Tawfik Abu Wa’el, Abu Shukry, a tyrannical father forces his family to live in an abandoned IDF military camp. There is a sexual tension, almost incest, between the father and daughter. While her younger sister builds mobiles made of bullet cartridges and hand grenade safety pins, Jamila reads pieces of poetry (or philosophy). The silent, slow-paced and static mises-en-scene reminds one of the ceremonial style of Greek tragedies in which horrors were talked and sung about – but never shown. Similarly they exist in Atash, but only by implication. The scarce dialogue is silent about them. The spectator’s imagination has to complete the unsaid and the unrevealed. Yet, the characters’ yearning for culture, for beauty in the midst of nowhere, is stated clearly and unequivocally. Leaning against the wall of concrete in the drab military compound in which they dwell, Jamilla reads to her brother fragments of poetry: “The world’s beauty is fading and vanishing – I heard this truth from a mute.”
This same yearning, though presented with irony, pervades the works of the Nazaret born Elia Suleiman. In his Divine Intervention (2002), the protagonist (acted by the director) and his girlfriend (Manal Khader) live in separate cities and must meet near an Israeli checkpoint. As Manal Khader, beautiful and elegant like a fashion model straight out of the Rome-Paris-London-New-York scene, steps out of her car to join her lover, and soldiers watch her with amazement through the sights of their rifles, the steel watchtower overlooking the checkpoint miraculously collapses and smashes into pieces.
One can interpret this scene as a satire on Israeli militarism and lack of humanity, or as a satire on Palestinian day-dreaming and lack of will and capacity to act. Both interpretations are probably right and wrong since many more meanings can be ascribed to this and other scenes and films presented in this post. In our context, it is an ironic vision of beauty solving the Mid-East conflicts. Whatever the interpretations, the point I wish to make here is the films’ ambivalence and equivocation. At a price: Eliah Suleiman’s Chronicle of a Disappearance was condemned by many Israeli and Western critics as anti-Israeli. When shown at the 1997 Carthage Film Festival in Tunisia, it was booed by the audience as an act of treason and Zionist collaboration. The Band’s Visit was severely criticized in Israel as condescending, artificial and flattering Western tastes at the expense of the oppressed Oriental communities of the Israeli peripheries. The titles of these reprimands summarize their contents: “How to Sell the Middle-East,” “Stereotypes in The Band’s Visit” [Shmueloff Mati, ‘Stereotypes in “The Band’s Visit”‘, Maaravon vol. 3-4, (Spring 2009), Cohen Kfir, ‘How to Sell the Middle East’, Ha’Aretz (October 26, 2007). Hebrew].
George Orwell remarked in the early 1940s that novels about the First World War were on the whole better than novels about the Spanish Civil War, because the former asked questions while the latter supplied answers. He was alluding to British left-wing writers who conformed to the artistic demands of the political movements with which they identified and felt obliged to follow the party line. His conclusion was: “Good novels are written by writers who are not frightened.” The outstanding film-making in the Middle East, which has recently gained international attention, is critical of its own respective societies and also of itself as an aesthetic object. Darwish’s self-reflexive question formerly limited to literature “who writes the place better?” is now shared by cinema. “Are they [Palestinian films] appreciated because they are Palestinian or because they are good films?” asks rhetorically the Palestinian film-maker Omar Al-Qattan. The Ghaza born Rashid Mashrawi provides an answer: when at a screening of his film in Cairo, the audience began weeping before the screening started. The director reacted furiously – “They damage Palestinian cinema.” It is not the subject matter that should have moved them to tears, but the film itself as a work of art.
“True peace between nations will never be legitimate if not based on a common cultural denominator,” said Mahmoud Darwish in an interview to the Israeli Ha-Aretz. The recurrent theme in recent Middle-East cinema: the passionate desire for “universal culture,” or for “better writing” or for “beauty” – whatever one choses to call it – can be viewed as part of that “common cultural denominator” suggested and shared by Shaul Tshernichovski, Mahmoud Darwish and their film-making followers of the last two decades. To the best of my knowledge it has neither been suggested nor shared by Mid-Eastern politicians.
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