Chapter 1 After Al-Aqsa

Abstract

This chapter focuses on three Palestine solidarity films made in North America during the post-9/11 period by filmmakers with an activist bent whose works also evidence interest in the signifying potential of cinematic form for the conveyance of solidarity perspectives. These films are Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land, Zero Degrees of Separation, and Still Life. These films concern media misrepresentation of the struggle; the effect of the struggle on sex/gender identity, relations, and politics in Palestine/Israel; and the immorality of Israeli military violence, respectively. All three films deploy avant-garde techniques in conjunction with documentary modalities in order to convey solidarity cinematically to progressive audiences with Zionist leanings.

Interlude A – The Global Indigenous

Critical attention to cinematic space has increased in recent years, in no small part in light of the burgeoning of aesthetic critiques within the anti-colonialist avant-garde. In addition to Cynthia Madansky’s Still Life, the work of exilic Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari and of formerly diasporic Israeli director Amos Gitai comes to mind. Like Elle Flanders, both Aljafari and Gitai are concerned with the cinematic analysis of divided and conquered (inter)national territory, their films often focusing on the ways in which houses inhabited by Jewish Israelis may appear and be experienced as overdetermined by their historical, politically and racially motivated expropriation and repopulation (Limbrick; Willemen). Whereas these filmmakers, especially Gitai, have received critical acclaim and attention, the ethnographic documentary, The Color of Olives [El Color de los Olivos], directed in 2006 by Carolina Rivas as a Mexican–Palestinian co-production, remains marginalized. Color carries the analysis of divided and conquered—colonized—space into the occupied Palestinian territories (oPts), documenting a week-in-the-life of the Palestinian Amer family, whose house has been targeted for demolition by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in order to make way for construction of yet another leg of the Apartheid Wall, part of which has already completely surrounded the Amers’ house, separating the family from their generations-old olive groves and their neighbors in the West Bank town of Masha.

In contrast to Flanders’ Zero Degrees, though, and recalling Still Life, Color comprises mostly still shots, arranged through a combination of intellectual montage and découpage, and depicting a modicum of action that is often staged and orchestrated in an exaggerated verité style. Significant screen time is given to interior scenes of the Amer family at home (the children studying; the father, Hani, conducting religious lessons; the mother, Monira, cooking and surveying the exterior through a barred window for rock-throwing Israeli settlers), while exterior scenes (usually the space outside the Amer house but within the parameters of the Wall) are intermittent, almost punctuating, as they parallel in their careful framing and shot content both the claustrophobia and utopian security of the home’s interior (Ginsberg, “Bordering”). Typical of Palestinian cinema (although more true of properly fictional works), this paralleling of interiority and exteriority is repeated at the film’s mimetic register, where the traditional line between documentary and fiction is deliberately confused to the point that the diegetic exterior is inflected with a fictive, subjective quality that renders it almost surreal. At the very least, it encourages allegorical readings of the film’s actions and events, and, moreover, marks critically the Wall’s appearance of geographical division as a cynical mechanism of deliberate political indecisiveness aimed at facilitating the permanence of Israeli expansionism (ibid.; see Weizman). A brief analysis of the film’s climactic scene indicates that this critical effectivity within the context of movement confined spatially by the Wall suggests how the Wall’s degradation of the Amers’ very house—describable, much like the genocidal destruction so profoundly upbraided in Still Life, as a space where “eyes used to darkness” see past and present simultaneously, enabling their mutual illumination (Attar)—thwarts Palestinians’ acquisition and allocation of basic vital resources as well as their economic stability and self-determination as people attempting to live at home (Ginsberg, “Bordering”).

The climactic scene occurs towards the end of the film and marks perhaps its only genuine event: Hani Amer’s return to his family after a day spent in the field beyond the Wall. Throughout the film, Hani has been portrayed waiting on the enclosed side of the Wall for the IDF to unlock the gate that opens onto the path to his olive groves. Likewise, Monira is shown repeatedly gazing at the Wall through a gated window, surreptitiously guarding the house from settlers whose observation and surveillance by Palestinians is illegal under the laws of Israeli occupation (Apel qtd. Weizman 188), and awaiting her children’s safe return from school and Hani’s return from the fields beyond the gate (Fig. A.1). Only later do we actually see IDF soldiers open the gate and allow Hani to pass. Even so, multi-angle shooting fragments the pro-filmic space, disorienting perspective on this moment and, especially, on the Amers’ baby donkey running frantically along the Wall’s perimeter, dodging a playful child, Shaddad Amer, as the donkey’s mother departs pulling Hani’s cart. This is, perhaps, the only time during the film in which such spontaneous and vital movement is recorded. Just prior to Hani’s return a few scenes later, a point-of-view shot is inserted from his position astride the cart, behind the mother donkey, who brays, it seems, at the approaching scent of her offspring. The return itself, thusly metaphorized as innocent, natural, and organically rooted (Lippard), is shot from within the enclosed space, yet now visual fragmentation cedes to a motionless, extreme long-take, underscoring the erratic movement of the anxious baby donkey pacing to and fro at the gate. Unlike the aurally disjoined Still Life, however, in which a directorial voice-over shepherds a negational narrative retreat from Palestine as a site of mass destruction, it is largely Color’s camera which in this scene transgresses, almost magically, the property divide marked out by the Wall, as, contrasting Madansky, Rivas returns with her subjects to their prison-house behind the massive and imposing barrier, designating an effectively utopic homecoming as the film’s proairetic impetus. The insert shot is here as momentary—and contextually engulfed/framed by nostalgia—as is the sense of transcendence elicited during an earlier, interior scene, shot Fassbinder-like down a hallway through a doorframe, of Hani instructing his children from the Qur’an; and as are the many shots of Monira watching uncertainly but expectantly through the window of her house-turned-fortress (Ginsberg, “Bordering”).

Fig. A.1

The Color of Olives [El Color de los olivos] (Carolina Rivas, Mexico/Palestine, 2006)

Like Jhally and Ratzkoff’s Peace and Flanders’ Zero Degrees, then, Color thus foregrounds the asymmetrical power relations at the structural core of the Apartheid Wall, but unlike her North American counterparts, the Mexican Rivas links those relations to the indigenous call for return shared by displaced and dispossessed peoples in the contemporary global South (see Abunimah, Battle 250–258). Color’s solidarity with Palestine, that is, is neither the compassionate but distanced moralism of the post-Holocaust Still Life nor the cross-generational/-cultural queering of Zero Degrees nor even the carefully reasoned analytics of Peace. None of these films articulates its critically unsettling intercalations of space, time, and subjectivity as contemporaneously as does Color, where colonized space becomes, finally, the emancipatory concern of La Raza—the popular human race of which the Latina Rivas and the Palestinian Amers are ineluctably interrelated parts (see Abunimah, Battle 249–258; and cnorwood; also Lloyd and Pulido; Bahbah; Beit-Hallahmi 76–107; and Tschirgi). The importance of such contemporaneity cannot be denied in the context of ethnographic filmmaking. As Moors and Wachlin remind us, “With contemporaneity denied between researcher and those researched, the object of anthropology is not only constructed as living in another space, but also in another time” (12). To be sure, Color positions the Wall riving Palestine/Israel as an objective, geopolitical tactic of Zionist imperialism (as if that weren’t bad enough), representing an albeit porous and uneven border between two nominally separate, undeniably unequal territories. At the same time, though, the Wall in the anthropological Color is an existential condition which serves to trace an ideational limit around an exteriority—a space potentially beyond confinement—that is interiority—the relative safety of home—for Palestinians under Zionist occupation, a space that is likewise interiority for Mexicans and Chicano/as in the throes of U.S.-led neoliberalism and “immigration reform.”

It is from this paradoxical space of fraught safety that Monira, perpetually looking out at her jailers, recruits the spectator’s gaze as well, signaling the ongoing resistance of these colonized peoples, even under the most dire and apparently most hopeless circumstances, as global collective praxis.