 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 30 Sep. - 6 Oct. 1999 Issue No. 449 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 30 Sep. - 6 Oct. 1999 Issue No. 449
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
Michel Khleifi:
Looking for jewels
Profile by Youssef Rakha
The quest will take you far, far away from Nazareth or Gaza
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Like all directors, Michel Khleifi is an impromptu performer; like all Palestinians, an emotional refugee.
It is hard to take him seriously at first sight for, unlike the vast majority of filmmakers, he has few if any pretensions; and issues of dispossession and liberation are to him cultural, individual, everyday affairs, not the ideological episodes of a military-political grand narrative or the collectively apprehended pieces of a utopian puzzle. His frequently offhand tone and immediate propensity for fun can give an impression of frivolity. Yet he has an overriding commitment to his art. And he insists that life -- never to be taken too seriously -- is there to be lived meaningfully, down to the last detail. He has a striking instinct for survival -- a knack for persisting, for leaving a mark, an urge to speak for one's compatriots, and a conviction that a positive contribution, no matter how small, can have far-reaching effects. "The physicist who won the Nobel Prize some 15 years ago had proved that the flutter of a butterfly's wings can change the weather. It all depends on where the butterfly happens to be moving. And if a butterfly can change the weather, well..."
Khleifi's conversation -- a continuous and persuasive self-justification -- bubbles with the effervescent mischief of childhood. He tells jokes, meanders, expostulates; recites his favourite lines of Egyptian colloquial poetry, quizzing you on who wrote them. Out of the blue, he gets up to mime some hilariously shocking scene, dramatically illustrating his point. With the benefit of hindsight, he wonders how cinema could have invaded such a young adventurer's dreamy existence. Obsessively, he talks about freedom: "The liberation of Palestine is ultimately dependent on the liberation of the Arab human being, the individual"; "change has to be radical, but it also must start inside, by freeing the intellectual structure of the Arab mind"; "how can you liberate anything before you liberate the body?" "the filmmakers who influenced me are those who freed the language through which film communicates". He will just as readily argue against any one of these points, though, if it fails to corroborate his position, or if you simply point out a contradiction. He is a scatty listener, so it is a little hard to tell where you stand with Khleifi. He would much rather tell you an anecdote to amuse or stimulate you than answer a straightforward question, even though he seldom appears self-conscious.
He is a man possessed -- his phrase -- by an insuperable urge for the real; and the real, to him, is a far more subtle and personal thing than the politicians' and ideologues' versions. Loquacious yet verbally inarticulate, his handful of films -- exquisitely mythologised records of the harsh everyday realities of contemporary Palestine -- speak for themselves. On reflection, it is easy to see how the man fits his work. Still, Khleifi will always seal his dialogue with an irresolute laugh -- some private memory of mythic proportions -- distant and intangible, but never forgotten.
The heady mixture of documentation and fantasy which informs his work has also beset his life. He is just as inspired by historical events as dreams. And, like Tale of the Three Jewels (1994), his latest feature film (shot during the last days of the Israeli occupation, it was the first ever to be completed in Gaza), his own story is as much a fairy tale as a chronicle of our times:
A gypsy girl gives 12-year-old Youssef her grandmother's necklace; it is missing three jewels and, in order to marry her, Youssef must find them. The jewels were lost in Jaffa, but since the girl knows only that her grandfather bought the necklace in Latin America, this is where Youssef thinks he must go. The story is interspersed throughout with an accurate, apparently dispassionate record of the brutal realities that surround him (his brother is an Intifada fugitive; his father's mental and physical health has been irreparably damaged by torture in an Israeli prison; his everyday existence in a refugee camp is threatened by arbitrary violence), as well as aspects of his private and inner life (the orange groves; the sea; his bird-collecting hobby, which occasionally brings in a little money; his symbolic dreams, which he often recounts to his mother) -- until his attempts to leave finally lead him to death at the hands of an Israeli soldier but also, paradoxically, to his resurrection.
"Wedding in Galilee [1986] is the story of a challenge which pits two gods against each other, in the tragic sense of the word. One, the Israeli governor, holds military power. The other, Al-Mukhtar, the head of a Palestinian village, holds patriarchal power. Both seek the favour of destiny and destiny fails them both. In the end, only the people of the village are victors. Each of the two characters is trying to achieve some goal: the governor, to 'penetrate the soul' of the village by allowing the wedding of Al-Mukhtar's son to take place only on condition that the Israeli authorities attend; Al-Mukhtar, to stage the traditionally grand ceremony proving both his son's virility and his own worth. But the meaning of life is death and nothing more; politics, religion are myths. Only the bridegroom's failure to do what is expected of him is real, and it gives birth to love. Only everyday life is real. And Palestine is the mythic country par excellance. Wedding in Galilee attempts to combine myth and reality in a poetic description of reality: a synthesis of image, sound, rhythm, mood and feeling -- a whole series of landscapes which together converge to deliver a message of freedom." -- From Michel Khleifi's synopsis of his groundbreaking film, the 1987 winner of the Cannes Film Festival's Prix de la Critique Internationale and the San Sebastian Film Festival's Golden Shell, and the subject of much controversy both upon its first release in Egypt and again last week, when Khleifi attended the last round of the Alexandria Film Festival as a member of the jury 
Films (director, script-writer) 1980: Fertile Memory. Full-length documentary. 1984: Maaloul Celebrates its Destruction. Short film. 1986: Wedding in Galilee. Full-length feature. 1990: Canticle of the Stones. Full-length feature (participated in Cannes's Un Certain Regard in 1990). 1992: L'Ordre du Jour. Full-length feature. 1994: Tale of the Three Jewels. Full-length feature. 1995: Forbidden Marriages. 50-minute documentary. Youssef hides in a crate of oranges destined eventually for Europe, all other plans having come to nought. An intensely lyrical sequence follows, in which dream dissolves in reality. The oranges glow; Youssef's blind old uncle has regained his eyesight; his mother sends the bird to look for him; his father has finally come out of prison, appearing on the screen for the first time; there is an ancient manuscript and a prayer, three drops of blood, three other jewels -- a poem. But the people's daily lives remain palpable to the end. And the Gaza that we see, transformed as it might be by Khleifi's extraordinary eye for aesthetic detail, is as real as any.
Parallels emerge. Mid-1990s Gaza recalls Khleifi's first 20 years (1950-'70) in Nazareth, "a politically charged atmosphere in which I was imprisoned twice -- what more do you want? Like everyone else, I got beaten up. There were endless brushes with the army. And the 1967 War fragmented me totally, at both the mental and political levels, the way it fragmented everyone. It was then that a true cultural revolution should have started, but somehow people thought triumph could come only through war and politics. To this day, I am convinced that if the Arabs had concentrated on culture and the intellect, we would've been far better off by now." The fact that he left school at 14 (because, he explains, "my mind was elsewhere" -- something he still regrets) probably lies behind both the juvenile love story that marks the beginning of Youssef's lack of interest in his studies, and his modest efforts to earn a living. "Partly, yes, that was the reason. I wasn't paying enough attention and kept failing, so school wasn't getting me anywhere and there was no one to provide advice. I worked in a garage repairing cars and got very good at it. Volkswagens were my specialty."
And the life of the imagination continued to be nurtured, not only through reading. "There were life experiences. Because my father was a communist, there was reading material at home. I sought out my own things as well. Somehow there was this desire to do theatre. Because a lot of what I read were plays. And when I left I had a kind of determination to study theatre if I got the chance. But there was the life that I lived, no different from anybody else." It is possible that, in depicting Youssef's feverish determination to reach the jewels -- his disappointing visits to travel agencies and NGOs, even UN headquarters -- Khleifi was movingly reenacting the greatest dilemma of his own youth. "I needed change, hankered after change. I wanted to see something different and try out my luck elsewhere and see what I could do with my life. So I needed to get out."
At the age of 20 he did get out; and, despite his retrospective reticence about the immediate motives behind his departure, it seems to have been a vital, long-awaited step. Dreamy, "fragmented", dead to the world and to his country -- a mere Volkswagen repairman with no prospects and little knowledge, only a nebulous ambition and a geographic goal -- Khleifi was to act out his own remarkable resurrection. He left Nazareth "with $200 and not much else to my credit, truth to tell. I had $200 and this vague idea to learn theatre, and I went to Belgium." When he returned to Palestine in the late 1970s, he was not only a Europe-residing university graduate, but a skilled artist with a clear-cut vision and a revolutionary working process to go with it.
The intervening years were difficult, but immensely rewarding. Khleifi talks of badly paid part-time jobs, trouble with his papers, the struggle to establish a new life from scratch. Yet he stresses the incomparable benefits of exposure to technical and theoretical expertise for the first time. "I was unbelievably lucky to make it. As soon as I realised there was at least some chance, I was determined. Of course, it is principally a question of what you do with it all. It's not necessarily a useful experience. There's pasture for your cattle, but that doesn't necessarily mean they'll get fat on it, and it was basically my choice to make use of studying theatre." 1977 would promptly see him graduating with a theatre, radio and television diploma from INSAS and beginning work with RTFB (Belgian television). During his university years, he adapted a play by Palestinian author Emile Habibi and spent a few months in Palestine gathering material for his graduation thesis, "which was great because I got totally immersed in the folk arts and indigenous culture, reading absolutely everything that was written about them from the beginning of the century up to the end of the 1970s."
His documentary work for RTFB began immediately after graduation (a series of one-hour documentaries on the Arab-Israeli conflict, the first of which was produced in 1978); his first full-length film, Fertile Memory (1980), immediately after that.
In Fertile Memory (an old village woman and a young female writer tell the stories of 1948 and 1967, respectively), Khleifi indulged his passion to document in a more personal and stylised way. Somewhere between reportage and autobiography, there is a peculiar experience of truth -- a sense of "reality" at once accurate and beautiful. "I'd had very little experience of the cinema as such, and I went to the movies like everybody else -- my taste wasn't refined or anything. It took me a long time to realise that popular cinema was worthless. The awakening to the cinema's true potential came gradually later, for example when I first saw America, America by Elia Kazan. The Constantinople wedding reminded me of my sister's wedding in Nazareth -- some things were almost identical, and I began to feel that film too could communicate real and personal things, that it was possible to see people you know from life in the cinema, and truly share their experience." Fertile Memory was "the first film by a Palestinian to be shot in Palestine" and, though "we did not know yet the rules of the game", Khleifi's low-budget method of relying on a cast of local non-actors was to yield astounding results. "Fertile Memory is now taught as a successful example of a documentary that costs very little. It was basically a question of having a camera and an idea, and seeing what you could do with them."
What he could truly do with them would not become apparent until 1986, though, when Khleifi returned to the north to realise an idea which had haunted him for more than a decade: Wedding in Galilee brought nudity, impotence and the beautifully complex rituals of a traditional Palestinian wedding to a seemingly dispassionate account of a non-violent clash between the Israeli army and a typical Palestinian village. It also presented a passionately affirmative vision of Palestinian reality. The innate goodness of the Palestinians, the power of their culture, will be their ultimate salvation, Khleifi seemed to suggest. "And these were real Palestinians, not actors. These were mostly people I'd met while there, none of them professionals. When I look at it now -- so many people -- I'm surprised and impressed that I managed to do this so many years ago."
To listen to him reminisce about members of his cast and how he met them, one would find it hard to believe that Khleifi has not lived outside Brussels since 1970, and that he has a 21-year-old son there. Yet he is defensive about his alleged "divorce from Arab reality", insisting that it only takes a few weeks to make contact once you're there, that living within the Arab world does not guarantee an understanding of the individual and cultural movements that art pursues, and that the Palestinian, as the poet Mahmoud Darwish once said, has no option but to "bear his cross and roam the world". "What counts is not geographical distance. Mentally and emotionally, I'm bound up with Palestine and the Arabs, whether I like it or not. And I'm convinced of the power of the people -- their ingenious humour and vital intelligence, and the culture that's kept them going for so long."
In Wedding in Galilee, one of the wedding's drunks, in real life a homeless old man with whom Khleifi was delighted, addresses the Israeli governor amid roars of hearty laughter: "I have a strange and mighty shoe which is much bigger than my foot. And in this shoe there is a strange and mighty river, even bigger than the shoe in which it flows. And in this river there is a strange and mighty fish, still bigger than the river in which it swims. And you know what, governor sir? This fish can cross borders as it pleases, and it doesn't require a military permit."
