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Notes from the Palestinian diaspora: An interview with Elia Suleiman
Author: Porton, Richard ProQuest document link
Abstract: Porton interviews Palestinian filmmaker and actor Elia Suleiman. Among other things, Suleiman discusses the nature of Palestinian identity, the history of the state of Israel, his “conceptually Jewish” humor, and his admiration for Primo Levi and Walter Benjamin.
Full text: Invoking the work of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, Edward Said pays homage to “the need to reassemble an identity out of the refractions and discontinuities of exile.” In recent years, the films of a much different representative of Palestinian culture, Elia Suleiman, have depicted life in contemporary Israel and the Occupied Territories with a wry detachment engendered by his years of “voluntary exile” in New York and Paris. Suleiman s detachment, however, does not preclude him from being angry and passionate. His stripped-down film esthetic, which is considerably indebted to European and Asian art cinema, coexists with a savvy political and social consciousness.
From his initial short films to his most recent feature (Divine Intervention-winner of the Jury Prize at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival), Suleiman has mingled quasiautobiographical ruminations with concerted efforts to make films that are both politically committed and nondidactic. Homage by Assassination (1992), for example, is a diary film that filters a critique of the 1991 Gulf War through multilayered personal anecdotes. For critics Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, the film’s shifts in tone-gallows humor mixed with despair-personify Suleiman’s lucid portrait of “cultural disembodiment”-a disembodiment that manifests itself in “multiple failures of communication,” which reflect the inevitable contradictions and quandaries of living abroad as a “diasporic subject.”
Suleiman’s first feature, Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996), commemorates, with considerable self-irony, his return to Nazareth after years of living in New York. Despite the restrained optimism engendered by the Oslo accords, the characteristically deadpan humor is noticeably tinged with melancholy and frustration. Suleiman uses himself as the butt of more than a few self-deflating jokes-particularly a scene in which a faulty microphone prevents the returning filmmaker from introducing his work to a Palestinian audience. The little annoyances and peculiarities of daily life-a young Palestinian woman’s futile attempts to rent an apartment in Jerusalem, the marketing of biblical souvenirs in a Nazareth gift shop-become barometers of a greater political malaise.
If the humor is more barbed and even more despondent in Divine Intervention, it is undoubtedly a result of how the Middle East political climate has worsened during the intervening years. Suleiman again appears as a thinly fictionalized version of himself (E.S.), a bemused observer of his compatriots’ inner rage. Opening with the incongruous spectacle of Santa Claus staggering towards his death after being stabbed in Nazareth, the film proceeds to relish the comic dyspepsia of E.S.’s father, a man whose ire towards his neighbors sums up the internecine warfare and undiluted pessimism that plagues Palestinians during the Sharon era.
Several of Divine Intervention’s signature sequences poke savage, quasiabsurdist fun at the media-generated images of Palestinians as nothing more than unapologetic terrorists. After E.S. casually throws a peach pit out of his car, an Israeli tank explodes. A helium-filled balloon emblazoned with Yasir Arafat’s picture hovers over an ominous checkpoint and becomes as much of a threat to the Israeli military as a cache of bombs. And, most spectacularly-and controversially-E.S.’s beautiful girlfriend is magically transformed into a Palestinian Ninja warrior who battles Israeli soldiers with superhuman panache. Although it is evident to most viewers that these sequences function more like parodies of common Palestinian wish-fulfillment fantasies than endorsements of actual violence, critics with an axe to grind have viewed them as wholehearted paeans to the gory intransigence of suicide bombers.
Cineaste interviewed Suleiman on the eve of Divine Intervention’s American premiere at the 2002 New York Film Festival. He proved eager to discuss everything from the nature of Palestinian identity and the history of the state of Israel to his “conceptually Jewish” humor and admiration for Primo Levi and Walter Benjamin.
Cineaste: Your short films are quite different, at least stylistically, from your features, which highlight a string of interrelated comic vignettes.
Ella Suleiman: There’s a consistent pattern of development in my films; it’s part of a learning process. Maybe as you learn more and gain confidence, you stretch-and unleash-yourself further as you feel more comfortable with the camera. And you don’t censor yourself as much. I’ve been asked to explain the difference between Divine Intervention and my previous feature, Chronicle of a Disappearance. The current film just takes the premise of Chronicle and adjusts it to the more intense ambiance of the contemporary situation. I might have censored myself a bit in Chronicle. Perhaps ‘censor’ is not precisely the right word, but in the current film I went further in finding a style to fit my feelings of otherness. But, in many respects, the approach is quite consistent with the short films such as Homage by Assassination.
Cineaste: It’s true that Homage is a ‘diary film’ and your current work is still quite diaristic. From the beginning of your career, you chose to integrate your own persona into the films.
Suleiman: You really have to speak in the plural, about ‘personas.’ When I look at the screen and watch myself, I do not see anything else but myself. But it’s a more of an extension of myself than my ‘authentic’ personality. The only reason that I don’t get annoyed while watching myself has to do with the fact that I’m emptied out.
Cineaste: Could you talk about the evolution of the premise, and script, of Divine Intervention?
Suleiman: Talking with a number of journalists has made me more aware of how I proceed in a film. I work very much like a writer and usually start with a series of notebooks. Even here in New York, I’m constantly jotting things into notebooks. I have to be tickled by an idea-and if it doesn’t come I know there’s no film there.
Sometimes, I’m a bit irritated that it’s not there, because I would have loved to work on a particular project. If I’m motivated to write something, that provides me with a great deal of pleasure although 1 can never be sure of the result. Now I’m not in a great mood for writing and don’t feel like solitude. Maybe this is a shift of some kind- perhaps I want to shoot instead of write. I’m a bit worried, because I have nothing to say at the moment. But I keep reading novels and try to think of ideas.
Cineaste: It might be a naive question to pose, but the title of your film, Divine Intervention, seems congruent
with the sad reality of life in the Middle East today. Because the situation is now so dire, people can only desperately hope for ‘divine intervention.’
Suleiman: Titles have a lot to do with poetic license. I also get my titles towards the end of the editing process. I make the images in a tableaux-like fashion and then add sound and pigment. And it’s the same with the titles. The title might provide a summary of the film’s content. Since the title is arrived at just before the film is ready for release, you can hit on some poetic resonance if you’re lucky. When this poetic license is present in the title, it can extend itself to various corners of the film itself.
Cineaste: So the audience can provide its own interpretation.
Suleiman: Exactly. I think there’s a certain irony and second degree humor. The title Divine Intervention is a bit pompous. That’s why I had to ground the film with the subtitle-“a chronicle of love and pain.”
Cineaste: Did you always intend to open the film with the scene featuring Santa Claus being taunted in Nazareth.
Suleiman: Always. I absolutely wanted that scene. The first time I shot it, it didn’t work. The producer even
asked me if I could make the film without this scene. But, after thinking about it for twenty-four hours, I said, “No, this scene has to open the film and it’s going to give you an idea of everything that will follow.” It was originally a joke to list Michel Piccoli as playing Santa Claus, but he eventually agreed to dub the character’s heaving breathing.
Cineaste: You’ve spoken of your childhood hatred for Santa Claus.
Suleiman: I hope that my hatred of Santa Claus will spread all over the world. I associate Santa with a nauseating sweetness. I enjoy the fact that people are a little shocked by this. Every year, Santa Claus comes with his jingle bells and the world is going to its doom. It’s a good idea to rupture the sweetness associated with Santa.
Cineaste: And it’s ironic, but not at all coincidental, that this assault on Santa Claus occurs in Nazareth. Suleiman: Nazareth is the best place to stab Santa. When people know that I’m from Nazareth, they say, “Wow, that was where Jesus walked.” But you should just go and see for yourself the kids who live in Nazareth today. They lost their innocence years ago and there’s nothing left for them to do. So, fuck Santa! But this is just an anecdotal account. In fact, it’s a great opening because you get a definite idea of the breakdown in communication that comes later in the film. It lets the audience unfasten their seat belts and helps them become attuned to the humor that comes later.
Cineaste: And perhaps their expectations are frustrated as well. Suleiman: Well, it’s really a question of achieving a flow and some harmony. It’s similar to what happens with a symphonic piece. If you start with a bang, you can then proceed to all of the little variations on the main theme. The musicality of the film’s structure is important.
Cineaste: To ask another naive question, many viewers probably wonder how autobiographical this film really is.
Suleiman: It’s very autobiographical, but not in a literal-minded, exact way. That’s why I refer to the film as a self-portrait. You can’t be presumptuous about biographies anyway-they’re all inventions. I’m inventing factual moments, and their truth value probably lies in the way that I’m telling (or retelling) them, not whether they actually happened or not. But I can tell you that most of the events actually happened in Palestine, except of course for Santa, (Actually Santa did get stabbed there once, but not in Nazareth.) All the stuff about my father
and the woman are definitely taken from reality. It’s not a realistic representation of my father, but it corresponds to some aspects of him. A lot of this stuff actually happened during my childhood.
Cineaste: Many of these incidents also illustrate the fact that people who feel oppressed frequently vent their anger among themselves and within their own communities.
Suleiman: Yes, and I’m sure what you see in the film is only one one-thousandth of what actually goes on. I recently heard about some gang shoot-outs; it’s a true ghetto atmosphere. People are extremely angry and frustrated. They’re not nice to each other and there’s no tenderness whatsoever or hint of harmonious community.
People complain about the checkpoint scene being implicitly violent. Go and watch the true violence, if you like, and you’ll see the sadism that’s being exercised every day. But I am against portraying brutality, for moral reasons, within the film frame.
Cineaste: Is this because you don’t want to reproduce cinematic cliches?
Suleiman: It’s more a question of how can we in fact depict the extent of pain and violence within the frame. You can hint at the extent of pain and violence, but as soon as you contain it within the frame, there is the assumption that you know its extent. For example, if you were to portray an interrogator beating someone being interrogated, the audience wouldn’t really understand what the victim was experiencing. Instead of doing that, it’s up to the spectator to make the association between the events of the film and the true horror.
For example, I’d say that too much sensationalism concerning the Holocaust really obscured a lot of what the Holocaust really meant for those who lived through it. This kind of reductive history can reach an immoral level. I’m really repulsed by people opportunistically reproducing images of bodies being thrown into big holes and audiences consuming them. If you reduce the Holocaust to these images, you are banalizing it-as opposed to someone like Primo Levi, who is one of my favorite writers of all time. When I read Levi, I understood how I should shoulder moral responsibility for the stories I’m telling.
In The Writing of the Disaster, Maurice Blanchot talked about these issues in a much more complex way-the silence we must maintain if we really don’t comprehend certain historical events. But Primo Levi poeticized the little events of daily life and left the horror for the reader to imagine. I’ve learned a lot from him, both morally and esthetically. It’s funny; some people might question my identity.
Cineaste: It was quite amusing to overhear some conversations at the film festival press screening. A few uninformed critics were asking, “Is he Palestinian or Jewish?”
Suleiman: That’s very funny. Factually, of course, I’m not Jewish. But I often refer to my humor as “conceptually Jewish.” They just didn’t get the humor again. Would it matter if I actually was Jewish? No, but certain cultural particularities would be different. Am I attracted to certain Jewish cultural and philosophical strands? Yes, of course.
Cineaste: Walter Benjamin, for example?
Suleiman: Yes. This is the sort of thing I was reflecting on in New York when I first started making films. I still don’t know how to write a full sentence without ten grammatical mistakes. I still don’t know how to tell you how I came to make films. When I read Walter Benjamin, I could relate to the way he wrote. He didn’t make grammatical mistakes, but the way he broke and ruptured every single sentence he ever wrote gave me the space and freedom to express myself without any of the conventionalities that are imposed on all of us.
Whenever I tried to write scripts and articles and showed them to people, they would always make the same comments, “This is not the way you write a script, this is not the way you write an article, this is not the way you write an Arabic sentence.” I think it was only my stubbornness that made me continue. And this was true with films as well. Until this film, when I would show scripts to people, they’d usually say, “Well, I guess it’s in your head.” If you didn’t have enough confidence, you’d think that was bad. But, as it turns out, scripts should be questioned.
Going back to more complex matters, I’d say that Walter Benjamin was a typically diasporic writer. You see it in the structure of his language, and I can see the same chaos, or the same order that I put to the chaos, or the same chaos I put to the order, in my films. I toy with it now. Maybe before, because of insecurity, I had some qualms about this. From the beginning, I threw myself into very modernist philosophical questions. After this self-searching, which I filtered through a lot of intellectual rhetoric, I’m becoming more interested in immediate experience. After all of this intellectualizing, I’ve come to a very simple realization: if you want to make a good
image, be sincere. If I was a teacher and gave a lecture endorsing sincere images, the students would say, “Oh, my God, this guy is really full of himself.” But, after a lot of convoluted thinking, I’m trying for once to achieve the essence of a poetic moment. I hope I’m getting better.
Cineaste: You seem to want to take viewers by surprise at some moments in the film and give them a jolt. You wouldn’t necessarily think a fairly meditative film like this one would appropriate pop-culture imagery, as in the fantasy sequence that features a female Ninja warrior doing battle with Israeli soldiers.
Suleiman: Maybe that’s also why I don’t feel at all defensive concerning my own inner violence. I think I’m so clear about the fact that I’m utterly nonviolent.
Cineaste: Have people criticized this sequence for being violent? Since it’s obviously a parody, this seems very literal-minded.
Suleiman: Yes, and it’s a first-degree reading. But I heard the word violence only after some commentators had seen the film. I was constantly laughing while making this film.
Cineaste: They don’t see it as playful.
Suleiman: No, some of them don’t. I wanted to ask these people, “How could someone who, up to now, had been making such a subtle film, come to such a blunt, simplistic conclusion?” As if this sequence constituted ‘the solution’!
Cineaste: And, of course, just preceding this sequence, the episode featuring the Arafat balloon hovering over the checkpoint is more like something out of an Ionesco play than a bloody action film.
Suleiman: I was accused of making insinuations about kamikaze operations or suicide bombings. I found that completely ridiculous. But these accusations came from a very important French journalist with a Zionist background who has some connections to Israel. At some point, he mentioned something about the biblical right of the Jewish people to Israel, even if it meant the expulsion of the Palestinian people.
Cineaste: It seems like a case of projection on his part. Perhaps he actually yearns for Israeli Ninja warriors to take on Palestinians.
Suleiman: This is the rare film in which, within a genre sequence, you’re not encouraged to totally identify with the heroine. When Clint Eastwood shoots the good, the bad, and the ugly, we’re all with him. Or when John Wayne kills Indians, we’re euphoric. The Ninja sequence is a bit like Sergio Leone, with some effects borrowed from The Matrix. It’s totally artificial and the audience should be laughing. But certain people didn’t laugh, and I think it has something to do with their political affiliations. But this represents about one percent of the critical reception.
Cineaste: As you observe in your notes on the film, you also had to confront the irony of casting Israelis as checkpoint soldiers, actors who had to demonstrate their hostility to Palestinians to get hired.
Suleiman: In a way, it’s a pity that I didn’t keep the audition tapes.
But I didn’t want to be on the same level of the people I was critiquing. It was interesting to write about this paradoxical, and quite perverse, situation-the fact that, being the director, I had a certain power over these guys who had exercised their own power over Palestinians a couple of years ago. They were all ex-soldiers; as you know, everyone in Israel has to do military service. And now they wanted to become actors. Most of them are actually ‘half actors’-more than extras but less than full-fledged actors. The guy with the megaphone, however, is Menashe Noy-a very famous TV and theatrical actor in Israel. He’s a very fine actor and I asked my line producer, Avi Kleinberger, to seek him out.
Cineaste: But you had to go to France to blow up a tank for the film.
Suleiman: Yes, that was really great. We tried to do it in Israel. It’s possible to rent a tank there, although not from the Israeli army. But the Israelis wanted their tank back intact and the French army didn’t mind if we blew up the whole tank. This was an experiment for them; they had infrared cameras and everything. One of their cameras was actually destroyed entirely and one of ours was hit in the tripod. If that didn’t happen, I would have probably held the shot a bit longer.
Yesterday, someone was defending me for exploding the tank, by saying that it was all part of the gag. I played the devil’s advocate and said that, yes, I actually do want to explode tanks. Maybe I don’t want to explode them myself, but I don’t want to see the presence of tanks and armies. Why be shy about saying that all armies, and all weapons, should be destroyed? Melt all the tanks and make something useful and artistic from them. I don’t want to censor myself and conform to the White House’s manipulative discourse. There are more checkpoints now than ever. Not only the checkpoints in Ramallah, but psychological checkpoints all over the world as well. Cineaste: Your style is much less didactic than what you find in many Palestinian fiction films and documentaries. Does your almost minimalist filmmaking style have something to do with a distaste for mainstream Palestinian cinema? It’s hard to find affinities between your work and other recent Palestinian films such as Ticket to Jerusalem or Rana’s Wedding.
Suleiman: It has to do with my upbringing and the type of films I’ve consumed over the years. I don’t want to put you off, but I don’t identify with the kind of cinema you’re referring to. My tastes don’t really have much to do with mainstream Palestinian or Arab cinema. I’m saying this in an extremely objective manner-it’s not that this type of cinema repulses me! It’s just that I’m much more interested in this guy [points to Cineaste issue featuring Hou Hsiao-hsien]. Hou was one filmmaker who impressed me, in a totally self-reflexive way, when I started to see a lot of films. Before that, Ozu made a great impression on me and, of course, Bresson.
Cineaste: There also seems to be a tangible Jarmusch influence in both Chronicle and Divine Intervention. Suleiman: It’s funny, I didn’t see Jarmusch’s films when they came out and I was living in New York. But if his
influence is in my films, it’s probably not accidental. I like his films very much and think he’s a great filmmaker. I absolutely adore the way he works-despite the ups and downs that all filmmakers have and not all of the films are equally good. But my main touchstones have been Asian cinema and self-reflexive directors like Antonioni. Critics mention Jacques Tati and Buster Keaton in reference to the humor in my current work, but I wasn’t really that familiar with their films. But there’s a lot of humor in Hou Hsiao-hisen and Tsai Ming-liang. Not to mention Bresson. Some people might not notice this, but I’m always tickled while watching his films.
Cineaste: I do recall you being quite critical of some Arab films by directors such as Youssef Chahine and Michel Khleifi.
Suleiman: I would say indifferent instead of critical. We don’t exactly reside in the same world. I did, on the other hand, feel an affinity with Merzak Allouache’s first film, but his later work doesn’t interest me. I’m indifferent to the quite exotic form of representation you find in many of these films. There seems to be an unconscious deliberation of what the Occident wants from these filmmakers and these films. Or else, it’s a kind of internal colonialism. This might be less true with Khleifi, although a film like Wedding in Galilee is totally bound up with a folkloric, Orientalist representation. On the other hand, I really liked his first film, Fertile Memory, which honestly tried to do something straightforward and intimate.
Cineaste: But even if you’re not dogmatic, you’ve always identified yourself as a Palestinian filmmaker. Suleiman: Yes, I don’t want to be identified as an Arab-Israeli filmmaker. I totally embrace a Palestinian identity. Until they regain their occupied land, I will be strongly and intensely Palestinian. If, conceptually, Israel becomes very Palestinian and is still called Israel, I’ll be Israeli. But, for the moment, I’ll remain Palestinian. If I were an Israeli, I’d be so ashamed to hold on to that identity within the context of a fascistic state. But if tomorrow there emerges a democratic state without those religious and Zionist affiliations, who the hell cares if you’re an Israeli or a Palestinian within such a situation? Eventually, the hope is that, when all the ideologies crumble and people return to their homes and there’s no more racism, binationalism might not be such a bad idea.
Cineaste: Binationalism is a dream that goes back to a time before there was even an Israeli state.
Suleiman: Yes, but within the possibilities of modernity, I think we can definitely reconsider the term-redefine it and make it more nuanced. I don’t see any other positive alternative to the notion of a secular, democratic state. What else can Israel become?
Cineaste: But what do you do when faced with Sharon on the one hand and Hamas on the other?
Suleiman: Personally, I wouldn’t do anything. I’ll continue to make films. But I hope that all of these religious ideologies, this kind of fanaticism, will eventually evaporate. Zionism will have to evaporate, because of its racist consequences. I read an article in The New York Times yesterday and was astounded to read that some people on campuses object to calling Zionism racist. It’s apparently become something of a taboo. But, if you see it being practiced as I have, what else can you call it? It’s also taboo to even discuss why people might become suicide bombers. And in Israel it’s taboo to talk about the pre-1948 period. I had a wonderful assistant director,
a really sweet Israeli guy. When we were denied permission to shoot in West Jerusalem, I realized that he didn’t know what the term ‘Arab houses’ meant. He just thought the Hebrew words referred to an architectural style. I had to inform him that this referred to the fact that Arabs once lived in these houses.
Maybe the situation is confused in the United States; I understand that there are some right-wing Holocaust- deniers who employ anti-Zionist rhetoric. And it’s true that some of the early Zionists had certain ideals that should be differentiated from contemporary consequences. There are obviously different branches of Zionism. Unfortunately, the ones who advocated expulsion of Palestinians and had a colonialist mentality were the winners. I was talking to an interviewer yesterday, and after mentioning Palestinians over and over again, I suddenly said, “There’s not only the Palestinians, but there are also the Kurdish.” The guy was surprised, but the two people today who are suffering lack of recognition and humiliation are the Palestinians and the Kurdish people. The anecdotal and ironic part is that I said, “It’s lucky that we have Israel.” The Kurds don’t have Israel and they’re completely forgotten. Actually, I know that, several hundred years ago, on my father’s side of the family, we had ties to Kurdistan. For a long time, because of Arab nationalism, Arab intellectuals didn’t want to equate Palestine with Kurdistan-Arabism and all of that nonsense. I hope this is over now, because they really have to do away with the juntas that are ruling their countries.
Cineaste: After 9/11, there were some contradictory developments. There was both a resurgence of jingoism and, on the other hand, the opportunity for Chomsky to reach a much wider public than he ever had in the past. Suleiman: Perhaps there’s some hope that a film like mine can be distributed in so many countries and have such success. Many people, just a few years ago, predicted that this kind of film would cease to be made and there would be only multimillion dollar blockbusters. A film like mine tries to transgress the boundaries between Hollywood and ‘art cinema.’ It seems to me that audiences are eager to see something done in a fresh mode. They want different types of pleasure and are not as shallow as many producers assume. It’s certainly a hopeful development when Chomsky can become a best-selling author and films like Kiarostami’s and mine, which are not blockbusters or shot in a classical Hollywood style, can become popular
Sidebar
Divine Intervention is distributed by Avatar Films, 150 West 28th Street, Suite 1803, NYC 10001, phone (212) 675-0300, www.avatarfilms.com.
Palestinian director Elia Suleiman discusses his new film, Divine Intervention, a distinctive mixture of deadpan humor and impassioned political commentary, along with his cinematic influences, his eclectic literary tastes, and his views on Zionism and the ongoing crisis in the Middle East.
AuthorAffiliation
Richard Porton is completing a new book on prostitution and the cinema to be published later this year by Cooper Square Press …
Subject: Motion picture directors & producers; Actors; Motion pictures; Diaspora; People: Suleiman, Elia
Publication title: Cineaste Volume: 28
Issue: 3
Pages: 24-27,2,47
Publication year: 2003 Publication date: Summer 2003 Year: 2003
Publisher: Cineaste
Place of publication: New York Country of publication: United States Publication subject: Motion Pictures ISSN: 00097004
CODEN: CNSTDR
Source type: Magazines Language of publication: English Document type: Interview
ProQuest document ID: 204850097
Document URL: http://search.proquest.com/docview/204850097?accountid=35803 Copyright: Copyright Cineaste Summer 2003
Last updated: 2014-05-19
Database: ProQuest Research Library