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.

“The promise of happiness” bequeathed by art and beauty (Stendhal) does not seem to have much political or social relevance in the grim perspective of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict today. For most Palestinians, happiness probably depends on getting rid of the Israeli occupation, if not of the Israelis themselves, For most Israelis, happiness may consist of being relieved of Arab threats, if not of the Arabs. Artifacts of both cultures, especially their respective cinemas, tended to reflect this irrelevance till the late 20th Century.

Recent developments in Israeli and Palestinian film share a new, unexpected theme: an outspoken yearning for high-art and beauty. In Atash (Thirst) by Tawfiq Abu Wa’el, an Arab village girl, oppressed and almost raped by her father, obsessively reads classical poetry. In Rafi Bukai’s Avanti Popolo, an Egyptian soldier captured by Israelis in the 6 Day War Sinai quotes Shylock’s monologue to save his life. In Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention, a beautifully stylized fashion-model causes a military checkpoint watch-tower to collapse. In Yoav Shamir’s documentary, Checkpoint, Israeli soldiers and Palestinian civilians in a routine search are accompanied by a beautiful Italian opera tune coming from a radio-transistor. These (and many more) works juxtapose art and beauty with bleak, everyday reality, creating an unanticipated, almost utopian vision in which art and beauty transcend reality, thus becoming critical (and self-critical) comments on their respective Israeli and Palestinian societies. They “help sketch new configurations of what can be seen, what can be said and what can be thought and, consequently, a new landscape of the possible” (Jacques Rancière).

*****

In 1899, Shaul Tshernichovski published “Facing the Statue of Apollo,” one of the most influential poems in modern Hebrew literature:

Youth-God, sublime and free, the acme of beauty…

I came to you – do you recognize me?

I am a Jew, your eternal adversary…

I bow to life and courage and beauty…

The outspoken idolatry of the poem scandalized the orthodox Jewish communities and still outrages many to this day. The God of Jews, emasculated by rabbis – “the rotten seed of men” who “bound Him by straps of phylactery” – needed to be freed by “conquerors of Canaan by storm.” The anticipated storm to “conquer Canaan” would save the Jews from the pogroms raging in Eastern Europe and alleviate the threats of the Dreyfus affair.  Once the storm blew over (or seems to have blown over) one wonders what is left of Tshernikhovski’s and his contemporaries’ vision of beauty.

In 2006 as the IDF conducted reprisals on the West Bank, not far from his house in Ramallah, Mahmoud Darwish wrote:

The critics kill me sometimes:

They want a particular poem

A particular metaphor

…if I see the rose in spring as yellow

They ask: “Where is the blood of our homeland in its petals?”

The poet refused to be “assassinated” by demands for patriotic messages: “If I write love poems I resist the conditions which don’t allow me to write love poems.” Elsewhere he wrote: “Whoever writes the story of the place – will inherit the place, and own its meaning.” This story must be well written: “Who is the owner of this land? Who loves it more? Who writes it better?”

The vision of “better writing,” of freely choosing the “particular metaphor,” was never, till quite recently, shared by cinemas, neither Zionist (later to become Israeli) nor Palestinian. In a manifesto published on the occasion of the 1935 premiere of the first Hebrew speaking film, This is the Land (by Barukh Agadati & Avigdor Hameiri), the filmmakers stated their purpose in a military fashion:

“This is not an acted play, a well plotted story but a slice of most dramatic life, whose heroes are determined to transform dead nature into blooming fields and woods… They will not desert the battle-front. This is a struggle for a homeland and not for a living…” Zimerman, Moshe, Signs of Movies (Tel Aviv, Dionon, 2001), 146

38 years later, in a statement published by the Palestinian delegation on the occasion of the 1973 Tashkent Film Festival:

“Film’s success is evaluated by the same criteria as military success: both strive to attain political goals… Revolutionary films strive for the same tactical and strategic goals as the revolution.”

In terms of cultural priorities, both Israelis and Palestinians considered cinema inferior to other artistic media. For the Zionists, the most important arts were verbal, contributing to Hebrew, the new/old language to be shared by the ingathering of fugitives. For the Palestinians, according to the Palestinian artist and critic Kamal Boullata:

“True to its Semitic roots, visual expression had over the centuries been generally relegated to a minor status in Arab culture … poetry continued to be revered as the supreme form of self expression.”

Films were expected to express national movements and public institutions. As a result, both Israeli and Palestinian, with few exceptions, were either forced by their respective funding institutions to think and speak in clichés, or accepted them voluntarily. Clichés necessarily impoverish the language. In the realm of filmmaking – its stylistic and expressive capacities: plots are solved arbitrarily, acting becomes explanatory and stagy, dialogue literary and artificial, the cinematography decorative, the music pompous, editing at its best covers up for the flaws of the rest. In This is the Land, the happy pioneers of Rishon LeZion celebrate the 60^th Anniversary of their flourishing settlement and reflect on the hardships of their heroic past in a manner reminiscent of Soviet social-realism. A pioneer dying of malaria comforts his tearful wife:

“Don’t cry! … I am dying, but land is reborn. My short life, my burning hope to dry these malaria swamps have been realized and this will be my crop for eternity.”

Compare this sentimental scene and narration scripted by Avigdor Hameiri to “The Pioneer,” a powerful poem written approximately at the same time by the same author:

There are no clothes, there is no home.

Oh my friend,

Tell me, where have God and beauty gone?

…And the spirit shivers in the frost –

Oh my friend,

Tell me what is the word “homeland” worth?

The sincerity, urgency and pain of the poem are missing from the film. Similarly, the earliest Palestinian films dutifully obeyed the directives of their ideologues and sponsors: Ibrahim Hassan Sirhan’s Visit of King Saud to Palestine, probably the earliest Palestinian film, was commissioned by the Palestinian Mufti Haj Amin El-Husseini (the Muslim leader of Palestinian Arabs in 1920s-1940s) “to follow the King from Lydda to Jaffa and from Jaffa to Tel-Aviv,” while “El-Husseini would suggest what to film: “meals, tours, important meetings.” (From an interview with Sirhan, quoted in  Space and Memory in Palestinian Cinema.) Among the works Sirhan produced and directed was a lead which preceded all films presented in the theaters of Palestine: the Mufti next to the Palestinian flag.

In Israel’s national epic of what Israelis call the Independence War of 1948 and the Palestinians call Nakbah (Disaster), Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer (Thorold Dickinson, 1955, co-produced with Britain), a brave, blond Israeli fighter captures in the Negev an Egyptian prisoner, who happens to be a German mercenary – Artur von Riebenhoff an ex-Oberstrumpfuhrer in the Waffen SS. The scene abounds in endless explanatory dialogue, obvious and trivial visuals like the shadow of the outstretched arm in a Nazi salute, over-acting as if the actors were frantically and desperately trying to convey a truth or hide a lie. The only Arabs present in Hill 24 are disciplined, well-trained soldiers of the Jordanian Arab Legion, Egyptian soldiers shot (in both senses) from afar, and Muslim oil magnates, along with German Nazis who serve them. Like in This is the Land, Palestinians do not exist in the film, the hysterical SS oberstrumpfuhrer has been given the thankless task of representing them. The excessive sound and visual symbolics cover up for this omission, like the voice of an argument raised in bad conscience. Produced just before the 1956 Sinai Campaign, Hill 24 was inspired by an urgent need to explain and justify the case of Israel. Thus, it had to visualize and verbalize its unequivocal messages. Kitsch, “the evil element of art” in Herman Broch’s famous definition is always transparent, unambiguous and at its bluntest in the art – or lack of art – of film.

A scene in J. L. Godard’s 1976 Ici et Ailleurs, supported by the PLO and commissioned by the Arab League, tries to incorporate patriotic poetry into film. Among ruins of the Caramel village destroyed by Israelis in 1968, a little girl emphatically waves her hands and shouts lines from a poem by Mahmoud Darwish “I shall resist.” Despite Godard’s obvious empathy for the plight of the Palestinians, one senses a certain embarrassment at the pathos of the scene, which Godard tries to touch up with an intellectual commentary:

“You could talk first about the setting, and about the actor in this set, that is about theater. This theater – where does it come from? It comes from 1789, from the French Revolution and from the pleasure that the delegates of ‘89 took in making large gestures and reciting their claims publicly. This little girl is acting for the Palestinian Revolution, of course, she is innocent, but maybe not this form of theater.”

I find Godard’s commentary condescending and smug. It is as if the complacent, self-satisfied European, got an intellectual kick from the Middle East desperate, existential struggle for survival. He re-colonizes Palestinian rhetorics by attributing them to French cultural roots. Wasn’t it Mahmoud Darwish (whom the little girl recites so emphatically) who remarked ironically “Oratory is the execution of meaning in the public square?”

(Tomorrow: art confronts such oratory, JG)