D.I.
as it turns out the library is usfull ,,, here is a part of an interviwe with elia slaiman talking about stuff in general and Divine intervention ... i only posted half of the interview , maybe the fomrating is a bt off cause i copied it page by page from a PDF , i dont think u can post PDF on this thing , enjoy
The Occupation (and Life) Through an Absurdist Lens
Journal of Palestine Studies Jan 2003, Vol. 32
.
.
.
.
Butler: Do you mean you were not politicized growing up as a Palestinian in Israel?
Suleiman: When I was growing up in the 1960s, there were lots of taboos about Palestine from our parents and the whole community. In fact I don’t remember ever
hearing the word “Palestine.” Shin Bet was very powerful in those days, and anybody
who so much as mentioned Palestine or Arab nationalism or anything like that would
be harassed and could even lose their job. People knew that if they wanted to be able
to support their families or send their kids to school, they’d better keep their mouths shut. There were also lots of collaborators or informers around. So people lived in fear. Things eased up when Likud came to power—the Likud didn’t care whether or not the Shin Bet kept track of everyone and tapped phones and all that, because they had another agenda. Their aim was not to pacify the population but to get rid of us entirely in a kind of total solution. Not necessarily by loading us onto trucks, but through economic and other pressures. There are lots of ways to make people leave.
Butler: But even if things weren’t openly discussed, I would think that children
would pick up political messages . . .
Suleiman: Yes, of course. And we always had the sense of an inferior “otherness” vis-
`a-vis the ones who dominated us. And the segregation spoke a lot about that, because
we always felt intimidated when we left Nazareth or crossed into any Jewish city—we
felt always that we were unwanted visitors in our own land.
Butler: So in other words, there wasn’t much interaction with Israelis . . .
Suleiman: There was absolutely none at all. Except some business dealings, products
bought and sold.
Butler: So your family was not politicized?
Suleiman: Not at all. My father was a follower of Nasser, though not a Nasserite. He
was very nationalistic , but not ideological. I mean, he had fought in the resistance in 1948 and had his own feelings about Israel and what it had done to his country and his land and people, but there was not a political discourse in my family. I did get some of that from my brothers, who were students and therefore to some degree politicized . . .
Butler: You mentioned the silent ambiance of your films—in fact, they almost are
silent movies. Is there a political message here?
Suleiman: Well, look. In general terms, I think silence is very political—what it conveys depends on how you use it. Silence is a place where the poetic can reign. If
there’s anything the authorities hate, it is poets, because of poetry’s potential for liberation. And silence is a real magnifier of poetic space. So obviously it’s extremely political. And of course there is the more literal dimension. I mean the silence shows a breakdown of communication—it fits the idea of Nazareth as a ghetto. It tells the tension, the powerlessness, the potential of explosion. It tells a lot. In a philosophical sense, when you create a silence you create a kind of potentiality for the present to exist more intensely. In my view, “consumption cinema” is made up of noise and polluted spaces. They kind of slide you along and make time pass and make sure that you are not at all with any kind of meditative or self-reflective moment. To my thinking, the films that keep you attuned to who you are individually are the ones that keep a bit of distance, where you have the awareness that what you see is a film in the making or in the viewing, which forces you to take a critical position.
Butler: You seem to be touching on what you said earlier, about allowing for a multiplicity
of readings.
Suleiman: Yes. Silence allows space for the spectator. I mean, if I have an image, why not maximize its potentiality? Why resolve the thing being told? Even dialogue, when it answers itself, has a closure. I try to do something different. I try to keep that little gap that the spectator can fill in with their own imagination of that text. I think that by just creating an esthetic territory in a poetic site, you envisage a potentiality for the spectator to participate, to co-produce the image, in a way. That’s very important for me, and I find that when I succeed in getting to the deepest, most sincere truth that’s inside me, a lot of times it gets transmitted to the spectator. I am not just talking about the content, the messages if you will, but also laughter, gags, color, sound, choreography,
and so on. It’s when you dig inside yourself and there’s no self-deception, when
you’re completely honest, that there’s a connection to the audience. It’s as if you have to be truthful with yourself to be able to get through—maybe this is what they call universality, I don’t know. I learned this after Chronicle , when I felt there was a moment that was still lacking, that wasn’t quite truthful, or not pigmented enough, or could use more work, that I was not exactly convinced of. But then you think it’s just a few seconds in the film and the other hour and a half is fine, and you let it go. But what’s so incredible is that there’s always a spectator who comes to you and says, “There’s only one moment I didn’t like in the film”—they catch it, you know? So I learned from that. If you start to think that you can pass off something, someone is going to catch it. It’s a nontruth.
Butler: You obviously give a lot of leeway to the viewer. Coming out of the theater,
everyone was deep into speculation about what actually happened in this or that
sequence in the film, or what this or that might have meant. For example, the Ninja
sequence was clearly a fantasy and projection, but there was the implication that
the hero’s lover had left him to join the resistance. There is that scene where he is
sleeping while she is watching from the window the collaborator in the street below,
and then we cut to the next scene where she is walking up the road past the checkpoints
. . .
Suleiman: You read very well, but I left it open on purpose. I didn’t want to do what a
lot of filmmakers do, which is segregate the fantasy from the reality by putting the
dream in blurry images or showing that it’s a flashback in some other technical way,
signaling that what we are about to look at is nonreality. What I wanted to do in this
film was to bring the imagined to potential reality and vice versa. For instance, all
those Nazareth scenes might just be part of a script that I am writing. Because later in
the film, in Jerusalem, you see me with these cards, remember ? I’m working on the
scenario, shifting these cards that represent scenes: “father gets sick” and so on. So it’s
not clear whether what we saw up until then—that is, all the Nazareth scenes—are
supposed to have just happened or whether it’s a script he wants to make, a flashback—
we don’t know in fact. I was trying to blur the boundary between the reality
and the imagined. Just like when you’re daydreaming while driving a car, and then
you come to yourself and you’re just driving along. That’s what I did in the film. I
made that fantasy about blowing up the tank as part of the quotidian, as if it were
something I might do any time I drive down the road, you know, Why do you park
tanks at the side of the road? Well, it happens. And then the scene just cuts to the
hospital where I’m visiting my father. The film just moves on without comment. The
tank explosion is in passing, sort of like, “By the way. . . .”
The Ninja has a similar effect, because I don’t know in fact if the woman continues
where she becomes a reality or whether she’s real or imagined. I want to leave that
absolutely open. It’s true that in the breakdown I put her in a close-up to start suggesting
her transformation into a Ninja, but then once you see the Ninja, it cannot but
be his fantasy. First of all, because I did it as a genre—like a Western, between Sergio
Leone and The Matrix. And I think it always remains in the second degree, and I used
all the symbolism that I could muster and all the political stuff. But the violence, if
there’s anyone to blame for that violence—to “blame” in quotes—it’s the director,
who imagined it, it’s not at all the woman.
Butler: Fantasy or not, the woman from Ramallah is just about the only one in the
film who acts purposefully and with will. It would seem significant that she’s a Palestinian
from the West Bank, not Israel. And in fact, there does seem to be a rather
marked contrast between the scenes that take place in East Jerusalem and those of
Nazareth. Do you want to say something about that?
Suleiman: Well, obviously I’m talking about two different kinds of occupation. The
occupation of 1948 Israel is no longer militaristic, there’s no longer a military government
with tanks and soldiers in the streets and all that. It’s become psychological,
economic, denial of rights, humiliation in all its forms, and it’s manifested in the film
by the ghetto atmosphere. . . .
Butler: The Israelis in fact are not very visible . . .
Suleiman: The Israelis are not visible at all in these ghettos; they’re just sitting in their
bureaucratic offices sending you notices about how your property is being confiscated.
It’s a total ghetto—people living on top of each other, no hope of a better
future, the feeling of being entirely closed in by Israel and being slowly pushed out, in
very “peaceful”—between quotes—ways.
In the 1967 territories, obviously, the occupation is overt. It’s as blunt and pornographic
as it was for 1948 Palestinians, but with the difference of time. So in 1967 that
same process started in another border—expropriation and annexation of land, a
large emigration of Palestinians right after the war, and so on. It was on the same
track, but somehow it hasn’t quite worked out as Israel hoped and they haven’ t managed
to empty the Palestinians out. Israel never intended to give the land back, never,
not under Oslo or any other time. If Israel had its way today, if there were another 11
September situation, God knows what they would do.
Butler: What you’ve just described is the two kinds of occupation. But the viewer is
struck by an implied contrast between the societies, even the people. In Nazareth,
people don’t act at all. It’s absolutely static, like a society devouring itself, all the
aggression and violence seem inner-directed . . .
Suleiman: It’s inner directed because of the paralysis that comes from the conscious
or unconscious acknowledgment that the dominant force that rules over you can’t be
shaken. So out of such a stasis and paralysis, of course, what you have is the frustrations
that start to be unleashed against one another. This is not peculiar to Nazareth,
but symptomatic of ghettos in general, but it acquires a particular intensity here because
of the national dimension . . .
Nazareth is a very claustrophobic space, no land, no possibility of expanding in
the city, no cultural venues, unemployment is rife, frustration, stasis, a sense of despair
and hopelessness—you may think the Nazareth scenes are an exaggeration, but
in fact everything you witness in the film is a fraction of what really happens there—I
mean, people shoot at each other over nothing in Nazareth.
Butler: So in contrast, in the West Bank the aggression would be directed against the
outsider . . .
Suleiman: Yes. There’s a greater sense of togetherness in the West Bank. Despite everything,
there is more hope. I mean, people have resisted very hard and stood their
ground, and so far Israel has not succeeded in its aims.
Inside Israel, more than fifty years of oppression have taken their toll on the Palestinian
population. But even there, I do not believe the situation can sustain itself as is.
I mean, I cannot see that the Palestinians inside Israel are going to continue to take
the blows, and I think that once the volcano erupts it won’t stop, and that’s going to
be the Palestinians inside Israel.
Israel knows this. They are haunted by the fear that their “Arabs” are going to
become “Palestinians” again, that the guy who’s just sitting in front of his shop smoking
a cigarette is going to put on a hood and organize a cell or carry out a suicide
attack. Today the Israelis see us as their greatest threat. The most dangerous place
for them is not the West Bank but our neighborhoods right
here in Israel. Because we block them in their project of a Jewish state.
In fact, Israel has two choices: either it continues to be the apartheid state as it exists today, or it transfers the Palestini-ans. There is, of course, a third solution that Israel continues
to refuse, which is that it ceases to be a state serving exclusively
the Jewish people, that it becomes not a theocratic or a tribal state but just an
ordinary state like any other. If that happens it would be great. But in the short run,
I’m for a Palestinian state not for reasons of nationalism, but just so the Palestinians
could live in some form of integrity, some form of livelihood that is acceptable and
some form of freedom, relative as it will be given the people in charge. But in any
case it’s up to the Palestinians to decide what kind of state they want, not the Israelis
or the Americans. And in the very long run, when the wounds are healed, maybe the
boundaries won’t matter.
Butler: Getting back to your films. In both Chronicle of a Disappearance and Divine
Intervention , the audience laughs a lot, in almost every scene. Yet one senses in this
humor a kind of detachment or distance. To what extent is this a product of a kind
of hybrid identity, of being an outsider, as a Palestinian Israeli?
Suleiman: Well, that’s up for question. If there is an element of that, it’s “also.” What is
more important, I think, is that I am a person who does not go further than the closeness
that I feel, let’s say. In other words, this is how close I feel to the place that I am
in. So if I am sincere, I have to remain at that distance.
There’s another reason that’s very cinematic. When I observe day-to-day life, and
when I come to reflect upon it on the screen, I try to record it from exactly the same
position from where I saw it. The camera sees what I saw, which is what the spectator
will see. So obviously there’s that distance. And once again, for me, esthetically as
well, it’s important to have that distance preserve the poetic territory that can be multiply read. When you open a camera you de-center a lot of the elements in the frame,
and then you have a lot of tableaux, you have a program, you can read horizontally or
vertically, you can choose another animated temporality in the frame. My images are
meditative, so you can be there and participate in them, which is another reason that I
open up the frame.
Butler: What would you say is your main aim in your films? What are you showing?
Suleiman: You know, I only can tell you with the same distance that we are talking
about—I cannot say with certainty “this is what I want.” What I can say simply, very
simply, is that cinema is a way of life for me. It’s not a profession; it’s a way of life. I
wake up in the morning and when I go out to the street to buy a croissant I’m with my
notebook and my pen. If suddenly an image touches me—a movement, a choreography,
a banality, something makes me laugh—I jot it down. That’s where it all starts.
And then, at some point, I have too many of these piled up, and I think: it’s time to go
into a solitude and start trying to construct something from the different sounds and
images I’ve collected, and this is what the result is. If you see the occupation in my
film, it’s not because I set out to create it, it’s because it came my way.
Butler: So first you collect these snapshots, and out of that comes a whole ?
Suleiman: Yes. After that I start to build tableau after tableau, like you pigment it, and
when I feel that every tableau is weighty enough, is potentially multilayered—it’s
something I feel, it’s just a sense—then it becomes a scene. I do another one, and
another . . . and then at a certain moment, I have all these scenes, like the cards like
you saw in the film, and I start to do a kind of poetic montage. I discover the narrative
as I go along. I do not preconceive a narrative, I cannot start by saying, “I’m going to
make my next film about . . .” No, no. It’s just from my daily notes, like a writer takes
notes and then tells you afterward, in the reductive sense, what the story line is. What
is Divine Intervention about? It’s about a man who’s losing his father, who is dying,
and he’s losing the woman, who’s on the other side of the border. But it’s not really
about that, in fact. I mean I speak near the subject, I never really talk about it—I don’t
have that presumption . . .
Butler: Even taking into account your mode of work, your subject matter, your raw
material, still seems to be Palestine/ Israel. You spent a lot of time in the West, yet
your subject matter seems to remain your homeland . . .
Suleiman: Yes, but it’s not really my subject matter, not only. My subject matter is also
love.
Butler: Yes, but the backdrop, the framework . . .
Suleiman: Take occupation away, what will the background be? In other words, if
tomorrow the checkpoints are gone . . . Let’s say I’m living in Ramallah, and tomorrow
there are no checkpoints and no Israelis. There will be other things that will take my
attention, no? Other ironies, other humor . . .
Butler: So you’re saying that the centrality of occupation is because in your sketches
that’s the reality that imposed itself . . .
Suleiman: I didn’t go to study the occupation. I just happen to live it. In New York, I
took a lot of these notes that obviously have nothing to do with Palestine, except for
my being Palestinian. But I came back and shot my first film, and then I went back
and I shot my next film. I did shoot one film in New York, about the Gulf War, and avideo . . . But really, I can’t do much about the fact that I will always carry Palestine
with me wherever I go. If a French person makes ten films in France, does this make
his films about France? I mean, they are films that he’s making. I’m doing the same
thing. I’m making very Palestinian films that happen to be in Palestine, and Palestine
is under occupation. And sometimes it’s a nomadic film—my next film might take
place elsewhere, but it will have a lot to do with Palestine. I mean, Palestine is not just
a geopolitical specificity; it’s something I carry with me. It’s a concept by itself, it’s my
being, you know? But it’s not at all nationalistic, it’s the contrary. What may be most
Palestinian about me is that anti-nationalistic sense.
Butler: Elaborate on that.
Suleiman: Well, it’s the diasporic experience that I’m living—almost the Jewishness of
it. You know, conceptually speaking, I often say that Israel did some of us—a few of
us, not all of us—a favor. Israel came and handed us their Jewishness and off we went.
The Israelis became racist tribalists, and we became the diasporic people. And now
we are the ones who are feeding on non-centered cultures, on resisting power structures.
We are feeding on cultures that do not automatically assume for themselves a
dominance of some kind. We are the ones who are doing the interesting culture, the
interesting cinema. And for me—for a few of us, the very privileged among us—there
is this luxury, the privilege of living this kind of transgressive life, if you will. To be
able to consume different cultures, different othernesses, to have the exoticism of
being in another place, to be able to feel at home in quite a few territories, and that
you can be the perfect stranger, and that in fact life is a lot richer than just creating a
binary opposition and always thinking of yourself as what the other does not have.
So, I mean, all this is very Palestinian.
The Occupation (and Life) Through an Absurdist Lens
Journal of Palestine Studies Jan 2003, Vol. 32
.
.
.
.
Butler: Do you mean you were not politicized growing up as a Palestinian in Israel?
Suleiman: When I was growing up in the 1960s, there were lots of taboos about Palestine from our parents and the whole community. In fact I don’t remember ever
hearing the word “Palestine.” Shin Bet was very powerful in those days, and anybody
who so much as mentioned Palestine or Arab nationalism or anything like that would
be harassed and could even lose their job. People knew that if they wanted to be able
to support their families or send their kids to school, they’d better keep their mouths shut. There were also lots of collaborators or informers around. So people lived in fear. Things eased up when Likud came to power—the Likud didn’t care whether or not the Shin Bet kept track of everyone and tapped phones and all that, because they had another agenda. Their aim was not to pacify the population but to get rid of us entirely in a kind of total solution. Not necessarily by loading us onto trucks, but through economic and other pressures. There are lots of ways to make people leave.
Butler: But even if things weren’t openly discussed, I would think that children
would pick up political messages . . .
Suleiman: Yes, of course. And we always had the sense of an inferior “otherness” vis-
`a-vis the ones who dominated us. And the segregation spoke a lot about that, because
we always felt intimidated when we left Nazareth or crossed into any Jewish city—we
felt always that we were unwanted visitors in our own land.
Butler: So in other words, there wasn’t much interaction with Israelis . . .
Suleiman: There was absolutely none at all. Except some business dealings, products
bought and sold.
Butler: So your family was not politicized?
Suleiman: Not at all. My father was a follower of Nasser, though not a Nasserite. He
was very nationalistic , but not ideological. I mean, he had fought in the resistance in 1948 and had his own feelings about Israel and what it had done to his country and his land and people, but there was not a political discourse in my family. I did get some of that from my brothers, who were students and therefore to some degree politicized . . .
Butler: You mentioned the silent ambiance of your films—in fact, they almost are
silent movies. Is there a political message here?
Suleiman: Well, look. In general terms, I think silence is very political—what it conveys depends on how you use it. Silence is a place where the poetic can reign. If
there’s anything the authorities hate, it is poets, because of poetry’s potential for liberation. And silence is a real magnifier of poetic space. So obviously it’s extremely political. And of course there is the more literal dimension. I mean the silence shows a breakdown of communication—it fits the idea of Nazareth as a ghetto. It tells the tension, the powerlessness, the potential of explosion. It tells a lot. In a philosophical sense, when you create a silence you create a kind of potentiality for the present to exist more intensely. In my view, “consumption cinema” is made up of noise and polluted spaces. They kind of slide you along and make time pass and make sure that you are not at all with any kind of meditative or self-reflective moment. To my thinking, the films that keep you attuned to who you are individually are the ones that keep a bit of distance, where you have the awareness that what you see is a film in the making or in the viewing, which forces you to take a critical position.
Butler: You seem to be touching on what you said earlier, about allowing for a multiplicity
of readings.
Suleiman: Yes. Silence allows space for the spectator. I mean, if I have an image, why not maximize its potentiality? Why resolve the thing being told? Even dialogue, when it answers itself, has a closure. I try to do something different. I try to keep that little gap that the spectator can fill in with their own imagination of that text. I think that by just creating an esthetic territory in a poetic site, you envisage a potentiality for the spectator to participate, to co-produce the image, in a way. That’s very important for me, and I find that when I succeed in getting to the deepest, most sincere truth that’s inside me, a lot of times it gets transmitted to the spectator. I am not just talking about the content, the messages if you will, but also laughter, gags, color, sound, choreography,
and so on. It’s when you dig inside yourself and there’s no self-deception, when
you’re completely honest, that there’s a connection to the audience. It’s as if you have to be truthful with yourself to be able to get through—maybe this is what they call universality, I don’t know. I learned this after Chronicle , when I felt there was a moment that was still lacking, that wasn’t quite truthful, or not pigmented enough, or could use more work, that I was not exactly convinced of. But then you think it’s just a few seconds in the film and the other hour and a half is fine, and you let it go. But what’s so incredible is that there’s always a spectator who comes to you and says, “There’s only one moment I didn’t like in the film”—they catch it, you know? So I learned from that. If you start to think that you can pass off something, someone is going to catch it. It’s a nontruth.
Butler: You obviously give a lot of leeway to the viewer. Coming out of the theater,
everyone was deep into speculation about what actually happened in this or that
sequence in the film, or what this or that might have meant. For example, the Ninja
sequence was clearly a fantasy and projection, but there was the implication that
the hero’s lover had left him to join the resistance. There is that scene where he is
sleeping while she is watching from the window the collaborator in the street below,
and then we cut to the next scene where she is walking up the road past the checkpoints
. . .
Suleiman: You read very well, but I left it open on purpose. I didn’t want to do what a
lot of filmmakers do, which is segregate the fantasy from the reality by putting the
dream in blurry images or showing that it’s a flashback in some other technical way,
signaling that what we are about to look at is nonreality. What I wanted to do in this
film was to bring the imagined to potential reality and vice versa. For instance, all
those Nazareth scenes might just be part of a script that I am writing. Because later in
the film, in Jerusalem, you see me with these cards, remember ? I’m working on the
scenario, shifting these cards that represent scenes: “father gets sick” and so on. So it’s
not clear whether what we saw up until then—that is, all the Nazareth scenes—are
supposed to have just happened or whether it’s a script he wants to make, a flashback—
we don’t know in fact. I was trying to blur the boundary between the reality
and the imagined. Just like when you’re daydreaming while driving a car, and then
you come to yourself and you’re just driving along. That’s what I did in the film. I
made that fantasy about blowing up the tank as part of the quotidian, as if it were
something I might do any time I drive down the road, you know, Why do you park
tanks at the side of the road? Well, it happens. And then the scene just cuts to the
hospital where I’m visiting my father. The film just moves on without comment. The
tank explosion is in passing, sort of like, “By the way. . . .”
The Ninja has a similar effect, because I don’t know in fact if the woman continues
where she becomes a reality or whether she’s real or imagined. I want to leave that
absolutely open. It’s true that in the breakdown I put her in a close-up to start suggesting
her transformation into a Ninja, but then once you see the Ninja, it cannot but
be his fantasy. First of all, because I did it as a genre—like a Western, between Sergio
Leone and The Matrix. And I think it always remains in the second degree, and I used
all the symbolism that I could muster and all the political stuff. But the violence, if
there’s anyone to blame for that violence—to “blame” in quotes—it’s the director,
who imagined it, it’s not at all the woman.
Butler: Fantasy or not, the woman from Ramallah is just about the only one in the
film who acts purposefully and with will. It would seem significant that she’s a Palestinian
from the West Bank, not Israel. And in fact, there does seem to be a rather
marked contrast between the scenes that take place in East Jerusalem and those of
Nazareth. Do you want to say something about that?
Suleiman: Well, obviously I’m talking about two different kinds of occupation. The
occupation of 1948 Israel is no longer militaristic, there’s no longer a military government
with tanks and soldiers in the streets and all that. It’s become psychological,
economic, denial of rights, humiliation in all its forms, and it’s manifested in the film
by the ghetto atmosphere. . . .
Butler: The Israelis in fact are not very visible . . .
Suleiman: The Israelis are not visible at all in these ghettos; they’re just sitting in their
bureaucratic offices sending you notices about how your property is being confiscated.
It’s a total ghetto—people living on top of each other, no hope of a better
future, the feeling of being entirely closed in by Israel and being slowly pushed out, in
very “peaceful”—between quotes—ways.
In the 1967 territories, obviously, the occupation is overt. It’s as blunt and pornographic
as it was for 1948 Palestinians, but with the difference of time. So in 1967 that
same process started in another border—expropriation and annexation of land, a
large emigration of Palestinians right after the war, and so on. It was on the same
track, but somehow it hasn’t quite worked out as Israel hoped and they haven’ t managed
to empty the Palestinians out. Israel never intended to give the land back, never,
not under Oslo or any other time. If Israel had its way today, if there were another 11
September situation, God knows what they would do.
Butler: What you’ve just described is the two kinds of occupation. But the viewer is
struck by an implied contrast between the societies, even the people. In Nazareth,
people don’t act at all. It’s absolutely static, like a society devouring itself, all the
aggression and violence seem inner-directed . . .
Suleiman: It’s inner directed because of the paralysis that comes from the conscious
or unconscious acknowledgment that the dominant force that rules over you can’t be
shaken. So out of such a stasis and paralysis, of course, what you have is the frustrations
that start to be unleashed against one another. This is not peculiar to Nazareth,
but symptomatic of ghettos in general, but it acquires a particular intensity here because
of the national dimension . . .
Nazareth is a very claustrophobic space, no land, no possibility of expanding in
the city, no cultural venues, unemployment is rife, frustration, stasis, a sense of despair
and hopelessness—you may think the Nazareth scenes are an exaggeration, but
in fact everything you witness in the film is a fraction of what really happens there—I
mean, people shoot at each other over nothing in Nazareth.
Butler: So in contrast, in the West Bank the aggression would be directed against the
outsider . . .
Suleiman: Yes. There’s a greater sense of togetherness in the West Bank. Despite everything,
there is more hope. I mean, people have resisted very hard and stood their
ground, and so far Israel has not succeeded in its aims.
Inside Israel, more than fifty years of oppression have taken their toll on the Palestinian
population. But even there, I do not believe the situation can sustain itself as is.
I mean, I cannot see that the Palestinians inside Israel are going to continue to take
the blows, and I think that once the volcano erupts it won’t stop, and that’s going to
be the Palestinians inside Israel.
Israel knows this. They are haunted by the fear that their “Arabs” are going to
become “Palestinians” again, that the guy who’s just sitting in front of his shop smoking
a cigarette is going to put on a hood and organize a cell or carry out a suicide
attack. Today the Israelis see us as their greatest threat. The most dangerous place
for them is not the West Bank but our neighborhoods right
here in Israel. Because we block them in their project of a Jewish state.
In fact, Israel has two choices: either it continues to be the apartheid state as it exists today, or it transfers the Palestini-ans. There is, of course, a third solution that Israel continues
to refuse, which is that it ceases to be a state serving exclusively
the Jewish people, that it becomes not a theocratic or a tribal state but just an
ordinary state like any other. If that happens it would be great. But in the short run,
I’m for a Palestinian state not for reasons of nationalism, but just so the Palestinians
could live in some form of integrity, some form of livelihood that is acceptable and
some form of freedom, relative as it will be given the people in charge. But in any
case it’s up to the Palestinians to decide what kind of state they want, not the Israelis
or the Americans. And in the very long run, when the wounds are healed, maybe the
boundaries won’t matter.
Butler: Getting back to your films. In both Chronicle of a Disappearance and Divine
Intervention , the audience laughs a lot, in almost every scene. Yet one senses in this
humor a kind of detachment or distance. To what extent is this a product of a kind
of hybrid identity, of being an outsider, as a Palestinian Israeli?
Suleiman: Well, that’s up for question. If there is an element of that, it’s “also.” What is
more important, I think, is that I am a person who does not go further than the closeness
that I feel, let’s say. In other words, this is how close I feel to the place that I am
in. So if I am sincere, I have to remain at that distance.
There’s another reason that’s very cinematic. When I observe day-to-day life, and
when I come to reflect upon it on the screen, I try to record it from exactly the same
position from where I saw it. The camera sees what I saw, which is what the spectator
will see. So obviously there’s that distance. And once again, for me, esthetically as
well, it’s important to have that distance preserve the poetic territory that can be multiply read. When you open a camera you de-center a lot of the elements in the frame,
and then you have a lot of tableaux, you have a program, you can read horizontally or
vertically, you can choose another animated temporality in the frame. My images are
meditative, so you can be there and participate in them, which is another reason that I
open up the frame.
Butler: What would you say is your main aim in your films? What are you showing?
Suleiman: You know, I only can tell you with the same distance that we are talking
about—I cannot say with certainty “this is what I want.” What I can say simply, very
simply, is that cinema is a way of life for me. It’s not a profession; it’s a way of life. I
wake up in the morning and when I go out to the street to buy a croissant I’m with my
notebook and my pen. If suddenly an image touches me—a movement, a choreography,
a banality, something makes me laugh—I jot it down. That’s where it all starts.
And then, at some point, I have too many of these piled up, and I think: it’s time to go
into a solitude and start trying to construct something from the different sounds and
images I’ve collected, and this is what the result is. If you see the occupation in my
film, it’s not because I set out to create it, it’s because it came my way.
Butler: So first you collect these snapshots, and out of that comes a whole ?
Suleiman: Yes. After that I start to build tableau after tableau, like you pigment it, and
when I feel that every tableau is weighty enough, is potentially multilayered—it’s
something I feel, it’s just a sense—then it becomes a scene. I do another one, and
another . . . and then at a certain moment, I have all these scenes, like the cards like
you saw in the film, and I start to do a kind of poetic montage. I discover the narrative
as I go along. I do not preconceive a narrative, I cannot start by saying, “I’m going to
make my next film about . . .” No, no. It’s just from my daily notes, like a writer takes
notes and then tells you afterward, in the reductive sense, what the story line is. What
is Divine Intervention about? It’s about a man who’s losing his father, who is dying,
and he’s losing the woman, who’s on the other side of the border. But it’s not really
about that, in fact. I mean I speak near the subject, I never really talk about it—I don’t
have that presumption . . .
Butler: Even taking into account your mode of work, your subject matter, your raw
material, still seems to be Palestine/ Israel. You spent a lot of time in the West, yet
your subject matter seems to remain your homeland . . .
Suleiman: Yes, but it’s not really my subject matter, not only. My subject matter is also
love.
Butler: Yes, but the backdrop, the framework . . .
Suleiman: Take occupation away, what will the background be? In other words, if
tomorrow the checkpoints are gone . . . Let’s say I’m living in Ramallah, and tomorrow
there are no checkpoints and no Israelis. There will be other things that will take my
attention, no? Other ironies, other humor . . .
Butler: So you’re saying that the centrality of occupation is because in your sketches
that’s the reality that imposed itself . . .
Suleiman: I didn’t go to study the occupation. I just happen to live it. In New York, I
took a lot of these notes that obviously have nothing to do with Palestine, except for
my being Palestinian. But I came back and shot my first film, and then I went back
and I shot my next film. I did shoot one film in New York, about the Gulf War, and avideo . . . But really, I can’t do much about the fact that I will always carry Palestine
with me wherever I go. If a French person makes ten films in France, does this make
his films about France? I mean, they are films that he’s making. I’m doing the same
thing. I’m making very Palestinian films that happen to be in Palestine, and Palestine
is under occupation. And sometimes it’s a nomadic film—my next film might take
place elsewhere, but it will have a lot to do with Palestine. I mean, Palestine is not just
a geopolitical specificity; it’s something I carry with me. It’s a concept by itself, it’s my
being, you know? But it’s not at all nationalistic, it’s the contrary. What may be most
Palestinian about me is that anti-nationalistic sense.
Butler: Elaborate on that.
Suleiman: Well, it’s the diasporic experience that I’m living—almost the Jewishness of
it. You know, conceptually speaking, I often say that Israel did some of us—a few of
us, not all of us—a favor. Israel came and handed us their Jewishness and off we went.
The Israelis became racist tribalists, and we became the diasporic people. And now
we are the ones who are feeding on non-centered cultures, on resisting power structures.
We are feeding on cultures that do not automatically assume for themselves a
dominance of some kind. We are the ones who are doing the interesting culture, the
interesting cinema. And for me—for a few of us, the very privileged among us—there
is this luxury, the privilege of living this kind of transgressive life, if you will. To be
able to consume different cultures, different othernesses, to have the exoticism of
being in another place, to be able to feel at home in quite a few territories, and that
you can be the perfect stranger, and that in fact life is a lot richer than just creating a
binary opposition and always thinking of yourself as what the other does not have.
So, I mean, all this is very Palestinian.
posted by apunctum at 9/02/2006 04:21:00 PM
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