Calling cards
Hani Mustafa speaks to Palestinian filmmaker Nizar Hassan about his latest film, Ijtiyah (Invasion), which will open this week at the Creativity Centre
The Palestinian issue, an unavoidable topic for contemporary Palestinian filmmakers, continues to provide artistic challenges. The topic lends itself to a visual rhetoric far removed from artistic objectives, but to tackle it without falling into that trap is an exacting task: how to effectively convey the feelings and thoughts associated with Palestinian reality without creating a piece of cinematic propaganda or sinking into potification or sentimentality? The task, tragically, may be facilitated by the fact that the occupation has become so much a part of Palestinian reality it is no longer restricted to themes of resistance.
In the work of Nizar Hassan, at least, the human dimension remains ever present; the filmmaker approaches refugee life the way he would the life of any group of people, anywhere. The pay-off that comes with a less crassly politically engaged orientation is increased credibility, greater impact.
Shot in the Jenin refugee camp last year, Ijtiyah (Invasion), Hassan's latest offering, exemplifies such a methodology. "I was there with my crew just after the Israeli forces withdrew, right after the massacre, and I wanted to capture the atmosphere exactly the way it was." Having supervised the editing of the film by Dalia Al- Nasser in Cairo last December, Hassan is due back from Nazareth, where he is based, to attend several screenings. It may, though, be difficult to persuade the average Arab viewer, who has already consumed more than his fill of this brand of violence through satellite channels and live broadcasts, to see a documentary on the massacre of Jenin.
Yet Hassan manages to be as unexpected as one has come to expect: Tahaddi (Challenge), for example, commissioned for the Arab Screen Festival of March 2000 as part of a series of films on the much publicised killing of Mohamed Al-Dorra, was an account of Hassan's own drastically aborted attempts to meet with his crew in Ramallah to discuss the possibility of making the short film in question; the meeting was complicated by the fact that Hassan happens to be an Israeli citizen. Irrespective of the pretext, it is the notion of shatat (the dispersion under which the Palestinian community suffers) that is communicated in a powerful way.
Eschewing the logic of direct (visual) shock, Hassan shocks his audience in his own, subdued way. The invasion of the camp involved razing the homes of and killing dozens of Palestinians; and, rather than attempting a comprehensive narrative of the event, Hassan simply divides his film into two interlocking sequences: in one he surveys the demolition; in the other he conducts interviews with refugees who had lost close relations. And throughout the film, in a remarkable balancing act, the director himself talks with an Israeli soldier who had driven one of the bulldozers during the attack. Purposely, the filmmaker refrains from adding to graphic depictions of the invasion, relying instead on a presentation of its human repercussions.
"I purposely made it so that, until a few minutes have passed, the viewer wouldn't understand what was going on. That tends to be my way of introducing a film." And such suspense does contribute to removing the film from the arena of news broadcast and/or propaganda.
The integrity of presentation, its simplicity, is preserved in several ways. The conversation with the soldier, for example, takes place in a film theatre where Hassan is broadcasting scenes from his documentary. All the conversations in the film are conducted in a neutral tone, and the questions remain ordinary, everyday questions until the topic shifts seamlessly to the massacre.
He begins talking to the soldier by asking questions about the power of his bulldozer's motor, how he used to relieve himself while on the job etc., until the soldier willingly begins to talk about the massacre, the scenes on the screen before him having made him realise the full extent of the destruction he wreaked. "I wanted to besiege the soldier with real-life, human images of what he had done, thinking of the American airforce officer who tried to kill himself after seeing the destruction caused by the atomic bomb he dropped on Hiroshima -- the instant death of 80,000 people."
"The statement I was leading up to, that I wanted him to end up saying -- it was this statement that condemned so many Nazis in the Nuremberg trials -- was simply 'I was carrying out orders,'" Hassan explains.
The climax of the sequence occurred when, having been claiming that he never razed a house with inhabitants inside it, the soldier was confronted with the process of searching for people who were still alive under the rubble. "This particular soldier claimed he was a left-winger who understood the full dimensions of the issue, and part of my object was to reveal aspects of the character of such people, people who perpetrate such acts on the pretext of fighting terrorism, for example, and who claim they never kill civilians."
"Another thing is that the job of bulldozer driver is one of the most despised in the Israeli army, and so these people tend to have a highly developed sense of pride in the destruction they wreak. Despite all they say it's the macho mentality that predominates; and it only finds support in such mindless brutality..."
Hassan conducts another dialogue with a young woman from the camp. They are discussing her marriage. And questions like, "So what have you decided about the house?" are answered in the present tense. "I want to make the kitchen part of the living room, he wants to keep it enclosed." Only at the end of the conversation do we realise that the fiancé in question died during the invasion. The scene ends here, and the viewer is forced to deal with the shock.
One motif running through the duration of the film concerns the messages left by the Israeli military for the inhabitants of houses they have visited. They take the form of pieces of paper, graffiti or even an engraving on a candle. An extreme example of the messages in question are the bullet marks on the hand and foot of an elderly Palestinian who, while fleeing his own house, was stopped by an Israeli soldier. Having interrogated him in the usual way, the soldier fired at his extremities before letting him go.
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 6 - 12 March 2003 (Issue No. 628)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/628/cu4.htm