This is the first of a two-part post on developments in Israeli and Palestinian films: Today a reflection on the historical and aesthetic background, tomorrow on new developments. -Jeff
“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).
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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 60th 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)
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