17 - 23 May 2001
Issue No.534
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 17 - 23 May 2001 Issue No.534 |
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Blood and tears
Viola Shafik watches Palestine between two Intifadas
Mai Masri's brand-new Ahlam Al-Manfa (Frontiers of Dreams and Fear) opened the Palestinian film festival in Beirut, setting the tone for a contradictory choice of cinematic works. Organised by the Al-Juna Arab Information Centre for Popular Art in cooperation with the cultural Shams cooperative, it took place between 9-15 May in the Beirut Theatre in East Beirut.
Called "Between Two Intifadas: Palestine in the New Cinema," the event seemed less concerned with the differences between the two uprisings than with two stylistic tendencies: the emotionally charged rhetorical film on the one hand and the analytical, even ironic, "auteur" film on the other. And if the programme aimed at a comprehensive retrospective, showing some of the most distinguished works of Palestinian filmmaking of the last decade, including Michel Khleifi's Al-Dhakira Al-Khisba (Fertile Memory) and Elia Suleiman's Sijjil Ikhtifa' (Chronicle of a Disappearance), it nonetheless remains telling that the organisers focused almost exclusively on documentaries.
The documentaries all tended towards tackling the socio-political situation of Palestine, an orientation that appears to betray a certain scepticism towards the ability to imaginatively assimilate the suffocating political situation, though films like Nizar Hassan's Ustura (The Legend), Elia Suleiman's Cyber Palestine and Azza Al-Hassan's Zaman Al-Akhbar (News Time), went against the general grain, by either fore-grounding a directorial sensibility or favouring the sense of absurdity over (realistic) violence.
Almost half of the works, including the opening film Frontiers of Dreams and Fear, operated rhetorically, underlining the emotional repercussions of the occupation, on children in particular. Mai Masri's film crosscuts scenes depicting children and adolescents from two Palestinian refugee camps -- Shatila, in Beirut, and Bethlehem on the West Bank. The children exchange a highly charged correspondence and end up meeting each other at the newly re-established South-Lebanese Israeli border. As they reach for each others' hands through the barbed wire and exchange souvenirs, they are suspiciously observed by Israeli soldiers. A small boy squeezes himself beneath the wire to shovel a bit of Palestinian soil into an empty plastic bottle. Cue tears both on and off the screen.
Masri gives much time to such scenes: indeed, it is only at the very beginning that these children are shown as what they are -- boys and girls raised in torn and broken families, their fathers killed, jailed or simply displaced, left in the custody of overstretched mothers or relatives. The complexities of individual tragedies tend to be subsumed in the director's desire to promote sympathy and solidarity, which is perhaps not so surprising from a filmmaker whose work has consistently articulated her commitment to the Palestinian struggle.
Mai Masri's first film, the 1983 Taht Al-Anqad (Under the Rubble), made with her Lebanese husband Jean Chamoun, was one of the first Lebanese films to document at length the bloody destruction inflicted on the Arab population by the civil war and by the Israeli invasion. Nor has the stream of blood ceased.
A similar orientation was evident in other Palestinian documentaries, not least Elyas Natour's Lamma Zaffuk (When You Were Paraded), which features several mothers attempting to come to terms with the loss of sons during the second Intifada.
The portrayal of occupation as a source of violence, death and oppression that in turn produces an endless line of victims is as old as Palestinian filmmaking, which since its birth has been a cinema of resistance. Conceived initially as a response to Zionist propaganda, Palestinian cinema presented not only information on the struggle but was intended to mobilise viewers in the fight against Israeli occupation.
In the intervening years it has developed far beyond these initial aims, though some filmmakers never quite abandoned the old rhetoric in order to embrace the more complex, self-reflexive critical analyses that first appeared in the late 1970s. Until quite recently, the resulting stylistic schism had been characterised in terms of idealism versus pragmatism, and of living in exile versus living under occupation.
The appearance of Michel Khleifi's first film, Fertile Memory, in 1980, broke this paradigm. The first Palestinian filmmaker to be born in Israel, he has built an international reputation for his stylistically coherent and self-critical cinematic work. In some ways his work can be viewed as a cinematic counterpart to the novels of Sahar Khalifa, works that pointed out the double oppression of women in society, advocating the view that any external liberation necessitates an internal one and thus placed the gender issue on the national agenda.
Internal problems such as gender inequality or political abuse hardly got a look-in at this year's festival. In contrast, the majority of films screened were concerned with children, beginning with the tear-jerking opening film and continuing with Abdessalam Shehadeh's 1997 study of child labour, Al-Aydi Al-Saghira (Little Hands), or Saed Andoni and Sobhi Zubeidi's stories of children disabled by Israeli weapons -- Jamal: A Story of Courage and Ali and His Friends. Even those films characterised by a more sophisticated analytical approach, such as News Time (2001) by Azza Al-Hassan or Nizar Hassan's The Challenge (2001) shared the same sense of urgency in presenting children's hardships.
The presence of so many children is, of course, likely to generate sympathy. But it also has very real structural reasons related to the very nature of the second Intifada.
As Penny Johnson, who works at the Women's Studies Centre of Bir Zeit University has indicated, the second Intifada brought with it a crisis in parenting. In the face of the ferocious military assault of the Israeli army parents have lost the power to protect children -- a dilemma most forcefully, and tragically, captured in the filmed images of 12-year-old Muhammad Al-Durra, shot by Israeli soldiers while his father was trying to shelter him. Similarly, 13-year-old Fares Oudeh, pictured on Palestinian posters standing the way of an Israeli tank, was eventually shot, despite his mother's repeated attempts to keep him away from check points.
Parental inability to protect, Johnson argues, is often complemented by lack of control. The social disintegration at the heart of these examples aside, they point up the difference between the two Intifadas. During the first parents were more actively involved in the resistance whereas now, by contrast, the clashes tend to be concentrated in check points and settlements, where jobless young men vent their anger outside while parents stay fearfully at home.
This difference is vital to understanding films that focus on the current conflict: News Time (2001) by Azza Hassan and The Challenge (2001) by Nizar Hassan. In the former the director shows how four boys from a neighbouring camp would come to her neighbourhood in Ramallah and wait for soldiers and tanks to show up. Azza Hassan presents her film as a work in progress, with the protagonists openly involved in the filming. The latter -- originally commissioned as a documentary on Muhammad Al-Durra's death -- evolved into a record of the madness of shooting a film under war conditions.
In this and a second film, Ustura, screened in the festival, Nizar Hassan, who lives in Ramallah but grew up in Israel, proves himself a master of irony.
The themes of family and children are not the only topics tackled in the festival. In Sobhi Zubeidi's Khartati Al-Khasa Jiddan (My Very Private Map), for example, colonisation is approached head on. Rashid Masharawi, too, in Khalf Al-Aswar (Behind Wall, 1998) describes the changing demography of Jerusalem. Azza Al-Hassan, who grew up between Beirut and Jordan and was educated in the UK, conducted, with a small digital camera, what amounts to a private investigation into what remains of Palestinian life in present-day Israel. Her short, 1999 experiment, Kharij Al-Makan (Out of Place) gives voice to a past so thoroughly erased there is no longer any sign of it in the present.
Dwelling on the notion of place -- the homeland -- involves historical associations that turn out to be crucial in understanding the conflict -- so much so that it highlights the limitations of the rhetorical genre, which seems to reduce that conflict to a simplistic myth. Elia Suleiman's Cyber Palestine (1999) -- the festival's only fictional narrative -- recounts how a modern-day Mary and Joseph receive orders to return to Bethlehem over the Internet. Queuing at the Israeli-checkpoint, Joseph is teased by the soldiers about not being the father of the baby Mary is expecting. He responds by slapping one of them. When they begin to beat him this triggers a whole sequence of news footage full of such day-to-day clashes.
Who owns "home"? Is it not the Christian West that helps a Jewish state prevent Palestinian Christians and Muslims from going home? Is it the male ego that lies behind the excessive physical violence going on in Palestine today?
The film's last shot shows Mary driving away, alone.
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