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From Bleeding Memories to Fertile MemoriesNurith Gertz & George KhleifiPublished online: 24 Jan 2007.
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Third Text, Vol. 20, Issue 3/4, May/July, 2006, 465–474
Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online © Third Text (2006)http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/09528820600853290
From Bleeding Memories toFertile Memories
Palestinian Cinema in the 1970s
Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi
Taylor and Francis LtdCTTE_A_185261.sgm10.1080/09528820600853290Third Text0952-8822 (print)/1475-5297 (online)Original Article2006Taylor & Francis203-4000000May/July [email protected] a manifesto, published in 1973 in The Photography Section, MustafaAbu Ali’s Palestinian film group articulated the goals of Palestiniancinema. These goals were ‘to reveal the actual reasons for [the] situationand to describe the stages of the Arab and Palestinian struggle towardsthe liberation of [their] country’.1 The writer of the manifesto maintainedthat these goals require a new-found aesthetics to express the newcontents and a total commitment of cinema to the Palestinian revolutionand the Arab causes: ‘The Palestinian Film Group views itself as anintegral part of the institutions of the Palestinian revolution.’2 ThePalestinian national struggle is associated here with Marxist-Leninistrevolutionary ideology, which dominated the thought of the Palestinianleadership during those years, as well as with the artistic expressions ofthis ideology informed by Socialist Realism. The Palestinian cinema ofthe third period, created in exile in the 1970s – in Jordan and particularlyin Lebanon – responded to a great extent to these poetics and ideologyand to the role designated to cinema by the organisations that supportedit: constructing the Palestinian national narrative as part of an interna-tional revolutionary struggle.
In the 1970s, during the formative years of the Palestinian LiberationOrganisation (PLO) led by Fatah (the Palestinian national movement),the image of the repressed refugee that had dominated Palestinianculture in previous years gave way to the image of the fighting Fiddaiy.3The tale of suffering and adversity evolved into a story of struggle withemphasis on the future. As Mahmud Darwish later asserted in a poemdirected at the Israeli public: ‘We have what you do not like: we have thefuture and we have things to do in our country.’4 Cinema was to depictthis future and to connect it to both the past and the present. As BasharIbrahim claimed:
Cinema is a means for describing and analysing the state of the Palestinianpeople, to explain the past and foresee a more desirable future, to lead a
1 Guy Hennebelle and Khemais Khayati, La Palestine et le Cinéma, E 100, Paris, 1977, p 15
2 Ibid
3 Elias Sanbar, ‘De l’Identité Culturelle des Palestiniens’, in Palestine: l’Enjeu Culturel, eds Elias Sanbar, Subhi Hadidi and Jean Claude Pons, Circé Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, 1997
4 Mahmud Darwish, Diwan Mahmud Darwish, Beirut, 1978, p 10 [in Arabic]
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struggle and to spread awareness of the Palestinian problem throughoutthe world.5
He spoke of the role of cinema in preserving the Palestinian past throughPalestinian folklore and culture, in portraying the present by describingcurrent events in the ‘occupied homeland’, and in leading to a future of‘relieving ourselves of the disgrace of the Zionist enemy’.6
The cinema of this period does not in fact deal with the story of thePalestinian past, present and future. It does not examine the events of thepast before or after 1948; nor does it construct a sequential nationalnarrative that clarifies and documents Palestinian history, thus preserv-ing a national historical memory. Instead, the films refer locally anddirectly to the events they document and refrain from overtly touchingon the painful past7 or the historical sequence of events that led to andfollowed it. The cinema of that period is therefore based on a forgettingof history rather than on constructing it. Yet, although appearingobscured, unanalysed and unfamiliar, the repressed past still surfaces inthe films. It emerges as a traumatic memory obsessively returning to twopoints in time: to the lost object – the pre-destruction past reincarnatedin the present as an idyll of beauty and perfection – and to the 1948defeat, which the cinema revives and displays as if occurring in thepresent. Thus both the trauma and the life preceding it remain unproc-essed and disconnected from a historical story that progresses from thepast to the present and future.
The Palestinian cinema of the 1970s is a cinema of trauma. Trauma isthe result of an event so horrific that it remains unregistered byconsciousness, resisting immersion into a sequential and causal storywhether personal or collective. Trauma is indescribable in the familiarterms derived from a known repertoire and is therefore unconnected toprior knowledge and does not become an integral link in a chain ofevents leading to the future. Ostensibly, it does not leave a trace.8 Yet itstill exists as a repressed memory and, after a period of latency, as Freudsuggested, the repressed surfaces, disturbing and harming the possibilityof experiencing the present or of integrating it into a causal sequence.The trauma remains a living event, enduring and unchanging, as if fullypresent rather than merely represented in memory.9 Trauma as suchcannot be placed in a historical past that might have led to and shapedthe present. The reappearance of the traumatic event is not at any rate areturn to what actually occurred but a reliance on substitutes for it, acoming back to the actual traumatic moment of loss, but also to whathas been lost and is so difficult to let go and impossible to separatefrom.10 Thus, since the lost object exists in consciousness and past eventsemerge in the present as if perpetually recurring, time stops. The pastreplaces the present and the future is perceived as a return to the past.That is why it becomes impossible to tell history as a narrative, as achronology of events, as rational cause and effect, as a directing ofaction.11 The more problematic the present is, and the more violencerepeats itself in striking against those who still have not forgotten theinitial trauma, the more difficult it is to break free of this vicious circle.The theory of trauma therefore indicates a way of comprehending bothPalestinian history, which incessantly revives both the idyllic past and itsdisintegration, and 1970s Palestinian cinema, which recounts it.
5 Ibrahim Bashir, A Look on Palestinian Cinema in the Twentieth Century, A Tarek Press for Research, Damascus, 2000, p 6 [in Arabic]
6 Ibid, p 6
7 Ibid
8 See Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol 12, Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, [1953] 1974; Cathy Caruth, ‘Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History’, Yale French Studies, no 79, 1991; Haim Bresheeth, ‘The Boundaries of the Palestinian Memory: Home and Exile, Identity and Disappearance in the New Palestinian Cinema’, Theory and Criticism, 18, Spring 2001 [Hebrew]; Haim Bresheeth, ‘Telling the Stories of Heim and Heimat, Home and Exile: Recent Palestinian Films and the Iconic Parable of the Invisible Palestine’, Intellect, 1/1, 2002; Haim Bresheeth, ‘A Symphony of Absence: Borders and Liminality in Elia Suleiman’s Chronicle of a Disappearance’, Framework, 43/2, Fall 2002.
9 For the ‘acting out’ of trauma, see Dominick LaCapra, ‘Revisiting the Historians’ Debate’, History and Memory, 9/1, Fall 1997.
10 Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, op cit
11 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, John Hopkins University Press, London, 1996
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The films discussed in this article focus on specific events such as thebombing of Tel A-Za’tar in 1976, the battle in Kafr Shuba and theevents of ‘Black September’ in Jordan in 1970.12 These incidents, mostlydelineated through documentary archival materials, are organised in afixed pattern that reappears and is repeated in various films. This patternproceeds from images of tranquillity (orchards, trees, vegetation – even ifonly within the refugee camp itself) to a sudden unanticipated bombard-ment. Scenes of death and destruction follow the bombardment, eventu-ally to be replaced by shots of Palestinian fighters in training or in battle,or symbolic depictions of rifles, hand-grenades and shotguns. This struc-ture apparently describes individual incidents, but since the same footagepersistently duplicates similar shots of bombardments, ruins and thedead, the impression becomes abstract. The pattern of these filmsfollows a single and distinct meta-text that revives different variations ofthe 1948 trauma and the idyllic state preceding it.
This form reflects the traumatic memory of Palestinian society and yetsimultaneously enables a conception of a united Palestinian nation shar-ing a common past. The speakers in these films overtly express the viewsof the PLO or other organisations under the PLO’s wing and reiterateissues that constantly resurface in other media: descriptions of what arereferred to as Zionistic crimes, depictions of the Palestinian people asvictims of the Zionists and a belief in the Palestinian organisations’ mili-tary power to change the situation and return the refugees to their land.
Thus a geographically and socially fragmented society is unifiedaround one shared historical memory which disregards anything thatmight distract from national pride – such as the 1948 defeat. This defeatis evoked in the films time and again not as a memory of the event but asa modified version of it. What at the time resulted in failure and defeatbecomes present descriptions of various forms of victory. Palestiniancinema thereby creates what Anderson calls the amnesia necessary forthe creation of a national narrative.13
Palestinian society was for years composed of regional, rural, famil-ial, clan, religious and pan-Arabic identities that competed with thenational identity.14 This phenomenon is illustrated by the example of aPalestinian from Nablus who defines himself first and foremost as aNablusi or as an Arab and only then as a Palestinian. At the time whenthe institutions that had traditionally constructed collective identities(the family, religion, the village and the region) disintegrated,15 a sharednarrative took their place, crystallising in a certain historical moment theneed to integrate all these different identity stories into a single unifyingnarrative. The narrative was no longer that of many individual villagesand families but rather one of bonding all those dispersed from thevillages and families. This narrative invents what Edward Said calls ‘arhetoric of belonging’ and attempts to ‘create out of the deconstructedhistory of exile a new wholeness’.16 The invention of tradition is a formof praxis that serves the authorities in mass societies in their endeavoursto create national bonds which replace the weak ones between smallunits such as villages and families.17 The traumatic Palestinian story doesnot strive to compromise and bridge the individual segmented storiesbecause it does not recognise privacy or fragmentation. It endeavoursinstead to blend these stories into a single, complete and exclusive one.Yet it too serves the same function that ‘the invention of tradition’ does.
12 The events of ‘Black September’ occurred in 1970 in Jordan. The tension between the fedayeen and the resistance organisations, which were centred on Jordanian territory on the one hand, and King Hussein on the other, intensified as a consequence of his support of the American peace proposal. On 16 September, the king announced a military State of Emergency and sent the Jordanian army to attack the concentrations of fedayeen in Amman and in the refugee camps. In these attacks, many civilians were killed, and the Jordanian army succeeded in deporting the PLO from Jordan (see Yaacov Shimoni, A Political Lexicon of the Arab World, Keter, Jerusalem, 1988 [in Hebrew]).
13 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, London and New York, 1991
14 See Rashid Khalidi. Palestinian Identity, Columbia University Press, New York, 1997; Salim Tamari, ‘The Palestinian Society: Continuation and Change’, in The Palestinians in the Twentieth Century: An Inside Look, ed Adel Manaa, Center for Research of the Arab Society in Israel, Tel Aviv, 1999 [in Hebrew]; Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal, Palestinians: The Making of a People, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1993.
15 Ibid
16 Said described similar processes of creating a collective memory at the expense of minor units such as the family or village. Although he does not refer directly to the Palestinian society, his descriptions seem appropriate for it as well. Edward Said, ‘Invention, Memory and Place’,
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Rashid Khalidi wondered why the 1948 Palestinian defeat was sototal. He maintains that Arabs tend to describe the war as a stubborn actof resistance against an invincible enemy. Blame for the defeat is placednot only on Israel’s military might but also on the support it had fromthe British, Americans and Russians, as well as on the weakness and lackof unity of the Arab states, in addition to the Dir Yasin affair and Israeliattacks on other villages. Khalidi claims that the defeat was mainly dueto the conditions prevailing in 1948 Palestinian society: a divided andleaderless society lacking an organised army, representative institutions,allies and an internationally recognised national identity. Acknowledge-ment of these facts would compel Palestinians to take responsibility fortheir own fate and oblige them to confront the present state of their stillsegmented society.
Palestinian cinema created in the different diasporas during the 1970shas not completely ignored the past and present causes of fragmentationin Palestinian society. However, rather than isolating and analysing thosecauses, film-makers have chosen to overcome them by ‘repairing’ the pastand present reality and advancing national unity over conditions ofsegmentation. Such unity, achieved by a single traumatic memory struc-ture, obscures references to specific places where the shock events tookplace. All sites seem to be the same in these films – a setting for one collec-tive Palestinian fate. Blurring the difference between locations wherespecific events occurred achieves yet another effect. It makes theperception of Palestinians as victims more poignant by presenting them assuffering repeated blows not only from Israelis and from the West as chiefsupporter of Israel; but also blows delivered by the Arabs themselves – theChristian militias in Lebanon (Tel A-Za’tar), the Jordanians (‘BlackSeptember’, 1970) and the Syrians during the Lebanese Civil War (1975–76). The similarity between injuries meted out to Palestinians by foes andallies alike sharpens the unity of the people who endured them andcontributes to the tendency to replace pan-Arabic inclinations inPalestinian society with a separate national identity.
Various historians have discussed the impact of the refugee condi-tion. The uprooting and disappearance of local identity on the one hand,and the isolation of Palestinians in their host societies on the other hand,accelerated the crystallisation of a national consciousness at the expenseof regional and communal identities that had lost their power and signif-icance. The important function that literature and specifically poetry hasserved in this process has been considered.18 Cinema was presumably toplay a similar role.
Nabiha Lutfi’s film, Because the Roots Do Not Die (1977), iscomposed of Palestinian women’s testimonies recounting the story of thedestruction of the Tel A-Za’tar camp by the Christian militias in Leba-non in 1976 and the massacre that took place there. Archival photo-graphs taken by Palestinian photographers and directors, including AbuZarif, Edward Alkash, Samir Nimer, Omar Almokhater and MustafaAbu Ali, support their story. The testimonies focus on the event itself,and so does the footage, but the editing displaces the event from itshistorical context and enters it into a series of abstract repetitions ofpredestined events. These repetitions locate the 1976 event within thePalestinian traumatic memory as a variation on the theme of the 1948catastrophe which disrupted the idyllic situation that preceded it.
Critical Inquiry, 26/2, Winter 2000.
17 Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds, The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge, 1983
18 See also Salim Tamari, ‘The Palestinian Society: Continuation and Change’ in The Palestinians in the Twentieth Century: An Inside Look, ed Adel Manaa, Center for Research of the Arab Society in Israel, Tel Aviv, 1999 [in Hebrew].
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The film does not recount the Tel A-Za’tar chain of events in theorder in which they occurred: first the Lebanese Civil War, then the siegeon Tel A-Za’tar, the bombardment and the massacre, and finally theescape of some of the residents to the town of Damour. It breaks thischronological sequence in order to commence with a state of relativecalm in Damour and then turns back dramatically from that tranquillityto the destruction of Tel A-Za’tar summoned forth by the women’s testi-monies and accompanied by appropriate footage. The film next shiftsfrom the depiction of ruin to the portrayal of Palestinians fighting, thusamending their fathers’ defeat in the past. The image of the shahidreplaces the image of the refugee.19 The same cycle repeats itself later in adifferent version: the opening calm (with shots of the camp prior to thebombing and images of peaceful everyday life),20 the siege of the camp(with shots of the wounded and dead) and the Palestinian struggle(scenes of weapon maintenance). The overall pattern guiding the film –serenity, destruction, struggle – repeats itself several times in varioussituations that occur in different places before, after or during the battle.Thus the event that in reality occurred only once is reproduced over andover again in the film. The film opens with the relatively calm image ofsome women in Damour and ends with scenes of women training forbattle. Framed by these opening and concluding shots, the film repeat-edly shifts back and forth from tranquillity to massacre and nationalstruggle. Such a structure appropriates the historico-temporal nature ofevent and transforms it into a timeless cycle which can be related toother specific events involving Palestinians in other regions.
During the interviews, the refugee women declare:
We are in Lebanon because we are denied the option to return to ourland – our country. Our weapons were not intended to be directedagainst any Arab state, only against our enemy… but the Phalange andthe Arab reactionaries have swerved our struggle away from its initialgoal and towards a civil war.
The women refer to Palestine as their country of origin and to theirbanishment from it. Homeland and deportation do not constitute anactual living memory in the film but, rather, are revived in exile in theTel A-Za’tar camp and its fate, which serve as symbols representingthe original land and the expulsion from it. ‘You, Tel A-Za’tar, you arethe deepest, purest, clearest wound bruising our hearts’, sings SheikImam, Egypt’s most prominent protest singer, as the film commencesand concludes. One of the women supports his sentiment with thewords: ‘As long as we are alive, we will not forget Tel A-Za’tar.’ Thefilm, then, continuously reincarnates the first traumatic event, whichdoes not itself appear as memory within the historical sequence. It existsas a ‘present absence’ through events which represent it and is evenamended by substituting the defeat and expulsion of the past with thestruggle of the present.
This structure of Because Roots Do Not Die is consistently dupli-cated in the other films as a blueprint for assembling different materials.In Mustafa Abu Ali’s films, such as They do not Exist (1974), ZionistAggression (1973) and Scenes from the Occupation in Gaza (1973), theimages of tranquillity most directly reconstitute the ‘paradise lost’ of the
19 ‘You left without fighting properly. Now it is time for our struggle’, says one of the young men to his father, and another sums it up: ‘The Palestinian revolution came to create a new, fighting, Palestinian shahid, who replaces the persecuted refugee.’
20 This footage, like many other examples in this film, depicts the camps prior to the bombing as a place of tranquillity and beauty, ignoring the crowded conditions, poverty and unemployment that characterised them.
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past. In They do not Exist, this is done achieved through shots of agrapevine on a fence or plants surrounding a small house. These imagestaken in the town of Nabatiya could easily be mistaken for ones in aPalestinian village. Refugees often shaped their environment in thecamps after the model of their abandoned villages. The director chose toemphasise this custom. He conveys the serenity of the camp not onlyreflected in a stand of trees but also by choosing to shoot the film in theafternoon hours when people relax by their houses, children play withmarbles, the grocer arranges his cucumbers and potatoes and womenbake pitta-bread. A voiceover narrator in these scenes conveys informa-tion about the camp.21 The leisure and calm, nature and housework,vegetables and the pitta-bread all seem abstract elements from which onemight extract the essence of the former peaceful village life. The filmbegins with a specific camp-based character – a little girl writing a letterto a Palestinian fighter – but she at once disappears, forgotten in thecourse of events, until after her death when the fighter to whom herletter was addressed dreams of avenging her. The actual life of this childis not the subject of the film but rather the elements of childhood inno-cence, as part of the tranquillity that is disrupted. Flesh-and-bloodpeople do not fill the camp but extras representing the lost past, predat-ing the trauma of deportation.
In the films Zionist Aggression and Scenes from the Gaza Occupa-tion, the director disconnects scenes of tranquillity and from the begin-ning reconstructs them as part of a vague reality supposedly presenteverywhere and in the ‘lost place’ in particular. The camera wandersacross orchards and vineyards and fertile fields, pauses near an appletree, lingers on a boy holding a bunch of grapes and swings to farmersreaping their crops. This sequence is without sound. The director statesthat his intention was to create an illusion of unprocessed and uneditedshots.22 But these shots are affected by the director’s manipulation. Thefirst were taken in South Lebanon and the second in fields around Gazafrom which in both cases any recognisable features of these specificplaces are purposefully absent. The scenes are set in the ‘any place’ of thepast: the fields, vineyards and orchards of a deserted land.
Specific locations become even less important as the editing cuts thepastoral scenes in order to insert dramatic images and sounds of bomb-ings into them. Once again the abstract structure of pastoral serenityfollowed by destruction is adhered to. In Zionist Aggression, this is high-lighted by captions: ‘In September 1972 the Israeli Air Force bombedvillages and Palestinian refugee camps in southern Lebanon, in northernLebanon and in Syria.’ The familiar pattern reappears: the wailing ofambulances and scenes of destruction, succeeded by images of thewounded and the dead, and in their turn substituted by actual orsymbolic accounts of the Palestinian struggle – machine guns aimed atairplanes in Zionist Aggression, gunshot flashes in They Do Not Exist,repeated depictions of hand-grenade and shotgun in Scenes from theOccupation in Gaza. In every case, these images are supplemented by amatching soundtrack – a victory song, such as In Spirit and in Blood(1971) (‘The victory day is not far… when a child born to a Palestinianmother will emerge from the womb holding a rifle’), victory speechessuch as the one by Faruk Kadumi, head of the PLO’s political office inThey Do Not Exist (‘Our answer is more and more armed operations in
21 The refugee camp near Nabatiya, seventy kilometres south of Beirut, was established in the early 1950s and houses 6000 refugees, most of whom are from the upper Galilee and work in agriculture and as day labourers in the Nabatiya area.
22 Private interview with Mustafa Abu Ali, Ramallah, 2003.
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order to eliminate the Nazi traits characterising Israeli society’), or thewords of one of the townspeople (‘We are Fiddaiyun till the end. I hateIsrael and I don’t care if I die. We will continue the struggle untilvictory’). Evidences of the struggle are intended in all cases to compen-sate for the ever-present traumatic event: to end well what had onceended badly.
Since it is not particular events that guide these films but abstractstructure, they alternate comfortably between different times and places.The story of the Palestinian struggle against the Israelis in Kafr Shuba(1975) includes scenes of demonstrations in the Rashedia school nearDamascus Gate, Jerusalem, shots of other demonstrations in variousareas of the West Bank and also reference to the 1936 Palestinian rebel-lion against the British Mandate. Scenes from the Occupation in Gazafocuses on the anguish caused by house demolitions, searches and arrestsin Gaza but transfers the struggle itself to Jerusalem, Khan Yunes, TulKarem and to the north of Palestine. The intention was to expand thesingle-location struggle and depict it as part of a comprehensive struggleof the Palestinian people in both the past and the present. But the presen-tation of an abstract action occurring anywhere rather than necessarilyin one place strengthens the abstract mythic structure that dominates thefilm when the peaceful shots are situated in ‘no place’. For example, theKafr Shuba bombings afflict not the village itself but the pastoral seren-ity of the cultivated land near the Litany. The conflict over the Litanywaters connects these images to the concrete event, the war in KafrShuba village. However, the interchangeability of sites, the alternationbetween the Kafr Shuba film scenes and those located near the Litany orin Jerusalem, associates these images with an abstract structure thatrepeats itself and blurs the concrete quality of these places, once again tosignify the calm before the storm.
The only feature film produced by the Palestinian organisations, TheReturn to Haifa (1982), based on Ghassan Kanafani’s novel, is one ofthe few films that allude directly to 1948 in the story of a refugee familyfrom Haifa. In the pandemonium of the 1948 flight, the family had leftits young son behind. After 1967, the parents now living in Ramallahdecide to go to Haifa to find out what happened to him. They discoverthat he was adopted by a Jewish family, grew up an Israeli Jew, joinedthe army and even became an officer. The parents reveal his truePalestinian identity to him, but he chooses to hold on to his JewishIsraeli identity. The parents return to Ramallah and the father decides toallow his other son to join the Palestinian organisations fighting Israel.
The protagonists returning in 1967 to the landscape they fled in 1948discover that nothing has changed. The olive groves and the orchards‘are almost as we have left them’, says the husband to his wife. Not onlythe landscape but the house too has remained as it was. So have thestreet, the apartment, the armchairs and even the feathers left in the jugwhen the family escaped. Thus, as in all other films of that era, the pastis preserved in the present.
Reviving the pre-deportation past is one part of the story. Compen-sating for the trauma of the deportation is another. The tale of escape,which is portrayed in black and white, is counterbalanced by the story ofhonour and heroism told by the husband to his wife during the trip toHaifa (also shot in black and white) about a young man called Abada
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who fought and was killed in 1948. His portrait still hangs on the wallof his Jaffa home. The shaming story of the abandonment is counterbal-anced in other ways as well. It is twice narrated in the film. After the firsttelling, at the beginning of the film, the protagonist’s son expresses hiswish to join the Fiddaiyun, but his father refuses to consent. But after thesecond, the son does join the Fiddaiyun and receives his father’s blessing.Mending the past involves aligning oneself with future-orientatedactions. As the film’s protagonist declares: ‘We were wrong when wethought that the homeland is the past and memories. The homeland isthe future for which one bears arms.’
A RETURN TO THE LAND
The cinema of the third period, affiliated with Palestinian organisations,expressed the distress of exile but only vaguely represented the growingsignificance of the Palestinian land itself as a national symbol thatencourages dreaming of unity. Michel Khleifi’s and other films createdduring the 1980s bought Palestinian cinema ‘back to the land’.
Palestinian national discourse, which evolved in the towns duringthe British Mandate era, was nevertheless based on peasant ruralculture as a central national characteristic.23 Traditional village cloth-ing, dance, food, home and land, all aspects of everyday life for themajority of the Arab population in Palestine, were constructed in thepolitical and literary discourse as symbols of the Palestinian nation.24
With the disappearance of the urban centres and the severe injury torural life after 1948, the refugees’ experience replaced the rural one inPalestinian consciousness. Yet, just as the refugee experience generateda united national consciousness, so too out of the exilic experiencerural icons of the past obtained their status as national symbols.25 Thefocus shifted from land as a source of life and livelihood to land as asource of emotional identification.26 Land became a symbol of a periodthat some of those in exile still remembered and most recognised aspart of their heritage.
Against the destruction of the homeland, the crumbling of previous struc-tures of authority (the language and culture), in the face of the impossibil-ity of return, many exiles turn to the structural authority and securitythat only nature can bestow: absence of time, lack of borders, a depend-able universal stability.27
The era symbolised by land is the pre-traumatic period that the exilesrestore in the present as a revival of a lost object from which it is impos-sible to disconnect or separate.28 Edward Said has commented (althoughnot referring directly here to Palestinian works) that the collectivememory invents the geographical space,29 and Elia Suleiman in agree-ment claimed that it is ‘easy to develop relationships with what is lost’.30
The experience of land loss was a greatly significant experience forthe Palestinians who remained in Israel. The widescale expropriation oflands in Israel in the 1950s and ’60s, in addition to processes of modern-isation and urbanisation across the entire region, changed the Arabpopulation from rustic to urban labourers. The Arab village has been
23 Mostafa Kabuha, The Role of Journalism and Journalist Discourse in the National Palestinian Struggle 1929–1939, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, 1996 [in Hebrew]
24 Issam Nassar, ‘Reflections on Writing the History of Palestinian Identity’, Palestine-Israel Journal, 8/9, 2002
25 Kimmerling and Migdal, Palestinians: The Making of a People, op cit
26 Ami Elad, Writer, Culture, Text: Studies in Modern Arabic Literature, N B: York Press, Fredericton, 1993
27 Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2001, p 159
28 Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, op cit
29 Said, ‘Invention, Memory and Place’, op cit
30 Anne Bourlond, ‘A Cinema of Nowhere: Interview with Elia Suleiman’, Journal of Palestine Studies, xxix/2, Winter [1999] 2000, p 97
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transformed from an agricultural community to a ‘dormitory’ for theselabourers who leave every morning to work in Israeli cities. In this casetoo the elevation of land to national symbol refers directly to loss ofland. Furthermore, since the Arab population in Israel has not fullyshared in the prosperity that modernisation brought with it, turning theland into a national symbol does two things: it revives not onlythe period predating the Israeli occupation but also the era that precededthe modernisation associated with Israel.
Only during the 1980s did Palestinian cinema replace the primarytraumatic story with the lost land, the place. This was crystallised mainlyin Michel Khleifi’s inaugural film, Fertile Memories (1980), and in laterfilms by Khleifi and others. Among the earlier films referring to the landare Ednan Mdanat’s Palestinian Visions (1977) and The Dupes (1972),31
which by its filming of land and desert influenced Khleifi’s films.Mdanat’s film delineates through interviews, drawings and song thestory of the artist Ibrahim Ghannam who had been deported from thevillage of Lajoun and continued to paint the landscape of his nativevillage in Lebanese exile.
Palestinian Visions is still structured in the familiar pattern oftrauma: the tranquillity of paradise before the banishment, succeeded bythe disaster and finally the revenge. But each of these individual stages,singly and in combination, is deconstructed, estranged and altered. Inthe paintings we see the old pastoral atmosphere, familiar from otherfilms of exile, reviving the idyllic lost landscapes in which Arabs livepeacefully and Jews do not exist at all. But then the camera enters intothis abstract landscape by emphasising concrete details at the expense ofthe whole. The idyllic fantasy becomes a reality both through the artist’sonscreen reminiscing, confirming what we see in the picture, andthrough the statistical details that support it. A painting of orange-picking, for example, is presented alongside the memories from thatparticular event and the added information about the different types oforanges to be found in the different towns before 1948. The paintingsdepict different locations in the country: Lajoun Village, Sasa, Haifa,Nablus (Jabel A-Naar or, in English, Fire Mountain), Tiberias, Acre, theSea of Galilee, the Mediterranean, the plain and the Jezreel Valley –these are the places in which the painter lived and from which heescaped. In this way, the film marks a widescale geography of the coun-try, shaping the Palestinian map in its entirety, but, as in other ofKhleifi’s works, it is also charged with the actual experiences of thefilm’s real protagonist: village life and the escape from it.
This life on the land allows Khleifi’s film to substitute the traumatictime of the other films for the story of space, which not only encom-passes the lost pre-trauma era but also the mundane and natural flow oftime. Palestinian Visions follows the sequence of the agricultural seasonsin paintings of sowing, harvest and vintage. The film opens with animage of sowing and ends with a wedding (preserving the rituals of thepast) and a birth (signifying the future). Natural time is also inserted intothe paintings by reference to the time it takes for wheat to ripen, the timeto gather olives, etc. This sequence of natural time offers an alternativeto the usual structure of traumatic disruption. A combination ofsequences represents past time as an absent presence, as something thatexists both in the present and in the past.
31 The cinematic version of Ghassan Kanafani’s story, ‘Men in the Sun’ (1978).
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The fixation on the traumatic narrative is further displaced in thisfilm because the story is perceived through estrangement. The serenityevoked by the paintings and the 1948 escape to exile are narrated aspersonal reminiscences rather than as a repetition of the story of thepast. The ‘struggle’ is conveyed only in the lyrics of songs and not in thespoken text. Songs summon the people to ‘rise up and wipe the shame’,to ‘climb from Haifa to the Mountain of Fire’, to be ‘all Fiddaiyun’. Thememory of escape is here a true memory of the past and not a present‘acting out’ of a painful past trauma. Events are delineated both in every-day time and in various media: the paradise lost – in painting, the escape– in interview, and the struggle – in song. Years were to pass before thischange, which returned Palestinian cinema to the land and shaped newmodes of memory, achieved its full expression in the films of MichelKhleifi.
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