Beyond Entertainment
The burden of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the continued occupation of Palestine are obviously involved.
As for Lebanon, the feverish reconstruction of the country and the reminiscences on the civil war, the weight on sectarianism and the deep rift between classes, almost totally pervade the new Lebanese film industry which, though often supported by Europe – there is no public assistance for the cinema in Lebanon – remains a national cinema portraying a national reality.
Starting from this trend, can we obtain a new cinema? It would be of an unusual nature, probing into a period of confrontation. And is this cinema unrelated to the social reality, to the Palestinian citizens that massively elected the Islamic party Hamas or the Israeli extremists that refused to leave the colonies in Gaza?
Revisiting political and artistic dimensions
Cinema, the 7th art, has always been, year after year, a shield against narrow-minded religions and values, trying to impose their vision of the world and to colonise the political sphere of societies. Even Censorship, both Eastern and Western, has a scant long term effectiveness on this matter.
Today, some would like to prove to the world that Middle-Eastern societies have become almost totally Islamic and are populated by kamikazes manipulated by religious groups that advocate the destruction of the West. Cinema in this geographical area reacts to these clichés by revisiting two essential dimensions of the whole history of cinema, that is, the political and artistic dimensions.
The Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman is one of the most notorious examples. Through his last films, "Chronicle of a Disappearance" and "Divine Intervention", he inquires on circumstances that pretend to foster civilisation, but prefers going back to the introspection of his main character, placing him at the centre of the story.
This is also the case of recent films such as "Atash" by Tawfik Abu Wael (2004), a biting, radical piece; or "Paradise Now" (2005), by the Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu Assad, which has had a big success and received an Oscar nomination.
Abu Assad chose to tackle the particularly controversial topic of suicide attacks through the history of two childhood friends living in Nablus, Khaled and Said, selected for an attack in Tel Aviv.
The story of Khaled and Said in "Paradise Now"
Although they start off as voluntaries in an Islamic group, the two friends start having doubts on the need to commit this action. Throughout the film, we get acquainted with their lives: they work off and on in a garage, but spend most of their time on the top of a hill, watching over an occupied Nablus, daydreaming and brooding over their daily humiliations and lack of freedom and work.
Deep wounds have marked their lives: Khaled's father was tortured by Israeli soldiers. As for Said, he has to live with the disgrace of a collaborator father, executed by Palestinian militia when he was 10.
The filmmaker at this point fails to agree with the myth of martyrdom and returns to the debate on politics; if the violence of the Palestinian colonisation fosters further violence, that of attacks, it prompts an even more terrifying violence, that of the destruction of the Palestinian society, human morality. The film was shown in Ramallah, in one of the two cinemas left in Palestine, the Al Kasaba theatre on September 2005.
The comeback to politics in Israeli cinema
As for Israeli cinema, the comeback to politics is especially strong in documentaries: a few filmmakers chose to question society and to battle against the fake representations imposed by the present power, to denounce the lack of respect of human rights, the pursuit of colonisation in Palestine, the erection of a totally illegal wall condemned by international conventions.
Simone Bitton and her film "The Wall" – Juliano Mer Khameis and the striking film "Arna's Children", an homage to his own mother who was recruited as a young girl in the clandestine Jewish army of Palmach, married an Arab communist intellectual after 1948 and then became a leftist Israeli militant.
After the first Intifada, Arna created a theatre in the refugee camp of Jenine with the camp's children who, she will discover as her son returns to Jenine in 2002, will have come to a tragic end: either killed by the Israeli army or became kamikaze…
Avi Mograbi is one of the enfants terribles of Israel's cinema, a troublemaker who is set, film after film, to build awareness for his people and to deconstruct Israel's myths. In his last film, in 2005, "Pour un seul de mes yeux", Mograbi abandons his former grating and burlesque comedy to investigate (together with his public and his people) on two Israeli myths:
Samson (who is classified as the first kamikaze in history) and the myth of the Massada hill, extolling the collective suicide of the Zealotes. The young Israeli generations have had their fair share of these two myths, both in school and during group visits to historical sites, which seem more like the reunions of a sect…
As for fiction, the filmmaker Amos Gitai has of late cast off his interest for Jewish orthodox communities represented in his film "Kadosh", and is going back to research in his disturbing film Promised Land, which thrusts us in the slave trade and the Eastern prostitutes market and unveils the lack of values of Israel's society.
A "clash of civilisations" in a very personal light
A distressing, highly subversive film that has been much criticised in Israel. "Alila" and "Free Zone", are also disturbing films. They are tales of free women, stories of friendship between women of opposing cultures, one American, the other from Israel, the third Palestinian, the famous clash of civilisations again, but in a very personal light...
As for the Lebanon, some young filmmakers like Ghassan Salhab ("Terra incognita",1998, "Beyrouth fantôme", 2002), Danielle Arbid ("Raddem", "Dans les champs de bataille", 2004) abandon the aesthetic codes imposed by the large Egyptian film industry as well as the American model, by creating new codes and crossbreed narrations that thrive on European art cinema and other more remote cinema.
In "A perfect day" (2006), Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige have progressed even further by producing a cinema d'auteur, which although abstract, it deals with shapes, space, time and the loss of memory, such a central theme in Lebanon.
It is a minimalist film, which reflects Antonioni with his adventures, where silences make sense. Beirut is there, an inconspicuous star, and for the first time our senses are spared of the wounds of the civil war or of its feverish reconstruction: they remain in the background, in that non visible space, the viewer's imagination.
Considering this brief summary of the cinema in the Middle East, we can ask ourselves: is cinema the last barricade under siege or on the contrary, the building ground for a future trans-national civil and secular society with strong international ties?
In any case, the cinema witnesses the conflicts that cross each one of these societies, that animates them and makes them live or tests their own existence.
It represents a place of contact, of dialogue even between societies at war. The fact that cinema, being present in festivals world wide, instantly becomes an international show should lead us to think on how European societies take part in the financial aid, the co-production of these national cinemas, of this "regional" Middle Eastern cinema, of which I have tried to pull out some common characteristics, beyond the clichés of the clash of civilisations.
Antonia Naim
© Babelmed 2006
Qantara.de
Interview Hany Abu-Assad
Shooting "Paradise Now" amid Israeli Rockets
The film "Paradise Now" by Hany Abu-Assad, which was shown in competition at this year's Berlin Film Festival, is the first feature film to take on the theme of suicide bombers. Igal Avidan interviewed the Palestinian filmmaker.
Arab Cinema: Abu Wael's "Atash"
Realism in Unreal Places
The film "Atash" by the young Palestinian director Tawfik Abu Wael is about a family that has been living in seclusion in the no-man's-land of a former Israeli military base. Ingrid Arnold had a look at the film
Simone Bitton's "Wall"
An Existential Study on Being Shut in and Shut Out
Filmmaker Simone Bitton has made a documentary film titled "Wall" about the Israeli-Palestinian border wall. Amin Farzanefar with a portrait of the internationally acclaimed film director