February 2005

Told with piercing quiet
By Zvi Bar'el©

Egyptian director Yusry Nasrallah and Palestinian-Lebanese writer Elias Khoury, two old friends, were not sure they would be able to translate "Bab al-Shams," Khoury's detail- and character-filled book, into a feature film. However, at the end of a lengthy editing and selection process, they succeeded in creating a screen epic of the Palestinian problem in a large-scale film production, in which companies from Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, France and Morocco took part, with the finest Egyptian actors.

Bab al-Shams," Khoury's ninth book (published in Hebrew by Andalus Books in 2002, translated by Moshe Hacham), describes the Nakba ("The Catastrophe" - the Palestinian term for the events of 1948), the hardships of the refugees and their life in the refugee camps, as told by the refugees themselves.

Adopting the style of Khoury's book, the film - which is four hours and 48 minutes long - tries to present history "from below," from those who remember it as opposed to those who produced the events. The screenplay, which opens with the signing ceremony of the Oslo Accords in Cairo in 1994, was co-written by Khoury, Nasrallah and the critic Mohammed Sweid. The film was shot in Lebanon and Syria over the course of eight months. The film debuted at the Cannes Film Festival last May.

It was important to Nasrallah to make an authentic film, and Khoury, who wanted the film to present the Palestinian problem, agreed to some broad changes for the sake of the screenplay. In a newspaper interview, Nasrallah explained what is meant by "authentic film": "In order to maintain factual accuracy and take up a historical subject such as this, we called in foreign experts to assess the credibility of the explosions in the film. Syrian and Lebanese security people took part in the shooting of the film, to verify that the explosions were authentic." In addition, the myriad accessories needed for the sets and costumes took a long time to collect, Nasrallah explained.
Inevitable rift

Yet despite the prodigious efforts, the film has made little impact in Egypt. In the past few months, it was hard to find any noticeable advertising in the country for the film. The distributor is the International Egyptian Film Company, which is headed by celebrated Egyptian director Yousef Chahine. In recent years, professional and personal rancor has developed between Chahine and Nasrallah. Nasrallah felt that Chahine was responsible for his failure to receive government assistance for his excellent film "Mercedes," which concerned events following the Six-Day War.

Nasrallah, a leftist who was active in the Egyptian student movement and moved to Lebanon at the height of the civil war there, studied filmmaking with the German director Volker Schlondorff and the Syrian director Omar Amiralay. He subsequently joined Chahine, and was an assistant director in many of his films. Nasrallah's success, it seems, and especially his temperament, came between the continued collaboration with Chahine, and the rift between them was inevitable.

Thus, the film version of "Bab al-Shams" became the victim of the dispute between the two directors. Chahine's production company, which received the film rights from the French company that produced the film, printed only three copies of it, which is why it was screened at only three cinemas in Cairo. Advertising was minimal, as was box office success - mainly because the film came out in Egypt one week before Id al-Adha (Feast of the Sacrifice), a time of the year that most of the public prefers to sit at home and watch new television programs.

The Egyptian film critic Ala al-Shaafi wondered if there wasn't anything intentional against "Bab al-Shams" that was reflected in its release date. Shaafi noted that Chahine had done the same thing to Nasrallah's two previous films, "Mercedes" and "Al-Madina" (The City). In any event, the film is likely to gain much wider exposure soon, after the airing of its television version, which is longer than the version screened in cinemas.
Given the lackluster success of "Bab al-Shams" in Egypt, some observers were asking if the Palestinian problem was to blame, and whether it has ceased to be of interest to the public. At least in the cinema arena, the answer to this question is negative: Last year, several important films about the Palestinian problem were produced and released. Their novelty mainly concerns the way in which the problem was presented. Unlike earlier films, the presentation of Palestinian history is no longer rendered by "screams and cries of despair," as the important film critic Ibrahim al-Aris wrote, and not by leaders, but by human stories that focus on individuals who describe what they went through with a piercing quiet.

Who writes memory?

This new perspective encouraged Feisal Darraja, a Palestinian intellectual who lives in Damascus, to pose once more the question of who writes memory. In an article that appeared this month in Al Hayat, the Arabic daily that appears in London, Darraja wrote: "Are these individuals with memories, or historians? Does the professional Palestinian historian have preference over the individual with memories, who wrote about his life experiences before being exiled, without censorship or supervision, far removed from the moral pressures that weighed heavily on the historian, who was tied to his stolen land?"
Feisal's trenchant article shows no compassion for "owners of the official Palestinian history, who are adept at speaking English and along with that are well versed in the ways of cheating and deception." Feisal calls these local leaders effendis, or respected elders, in Arabic, or in the Hebrew of the occupation, by the desultory name "the Balfours of Palestine" - in other words, those who put the Balfour Declaration into practice for the Jews.

Khoury's book and Nasrallah's film, as well as other films made with a similar mindset, are atypical of the Palestinian writing and screenwriting landscape. But nor do they succeed, it appears, in resolving the question of Palestinian identity and overcoming the gap between the way the Palestinians are conceived as a problem, and their identity as ordinary people. For the most part, the film does not succeed in differentiating between Palestinians and Palestinians, that is - between those who fled or were expelled and became the "refugee problem," and those who remained behind and became the "Arabs of 1948," a term that is still not entirely understood by the non-Palestinian Arab public.

Far from Media Spotlights, the Shadows of "Losers"
by Norman Solomon
 
"Maybe fuller realization of vulnerabilities that are inherent in the human condition
 -- and exacerbated by predatory social orders --
can bring more genuine humility and deeper compassion."


A system glorifies its winners. The mass media and the rest of corporate America are enthralled with professionals scaling career ladders to new heights. Meanwhile, the people hanging onto bottom rungs are scarcely blips on screens.

Far from the media spotlights are countless lives beset with financial scarcity, often in tandem with chronic illness, monotony, adversity and despair. The same institutions and attitudes that lavish outsized respect on high achievers (the wealthier the better) are apt to convey ongoing disrespect for low achievers.

The flip side of adulation for winners is often contempt for people with cumulative misfortune, who routinely slog through murky quasi-netherworlds and do their best to keep from going under. According to mass-media calculations, they just don't rate. In a society overdosing on unmitigated capitalism, it's not just a matter of scant disposable income. As a practical matter, the country treats many people as disposable.

When personal dreams of success or even equilibrium sink below horizons, the same media outlets that laud the successful have little use for those defined by the system as abject failures. For mainstream media, the plentiful underachievers are customarily the rough equivalent of flotsam and jetsam.

The downwardly un-mobile may pump gas, wash dishes, trim hedges or do any number of other low-pay no-benefit jobs. They might rent a tiny run-down apartment, sleep in charity shelters or bed down on urban cement; they may wait in emergency rooms or clinics, merely shaking their heads at the immediate question that prompts most Americans to show medical-insurance cards.

In human terms, they may be the salt of the earth, but the corporate-driven system commonly treats them like dirt. And for many of those who've been on a downward spiral for a long time, there's not the slightest whiff of a happy ending. Media disdain for such lives is most vehemently expressed by ignoring them; in the routine calculus of the newsroom, nonpersons get non-coverage.

If you see the new movie "The Assassination of Richard Nixon," you might feel compelled to think again about such matters -- and maybe in a new way. Inspired by a real person named Samuel Byck who went through a personal meltdown 30 years ago, this stunning film makes more difficult our usual psychological evasions about people whose failures include inability to pull themselves out of tailspins.

You may never see a more powerful performance on a screen than the one in this movie by Sean Penn. (Full disclosure: He's a friend.) I agree with Newsday reviewer Jan Stuart, who wrote that the film is "a triumph for its star and the writers, who make us cringe with empathy for a man who taps into the latent loser in all of us."

It isn't just that we would rather not contemplate the dire circumstances of others. We also would prefer not to look too closely at the thin ice that is underfoot for us all. Even the most secure have no guarantees of health, stability or longevity.

While reviews across the country are almost unanimous with praise for Sean Penn's superb acting in "The Assassination of Richard Nixon," their reactions to the overall film have ranged from acclaim to indifference. The discomfort of some reviewers seems to be intertwined with wariness about the movie's great empathy for someone who can't win.

The marriage that the film's main character desperately wants to glue back together has cracked up beyond repair. The political economy that he hopes will welcome and reward his honest work has no use for him. All the outward signposts tell us that he's headed toward the system's destination for what it treats as expendable -- the equivalent of corporate road kill. And his mental deterioration leads him to engage in terrible violence.

Director Niels Mueller, who co-wrote "The Assassination of Richard Nixon" with Kevin Kennedy, has brought to the screen a work of creativity that finds politics in humanity. Given its acute sensibilities, the film is remarkable enough to represent a bit of a cinematic miracle.

Maybe fuller realization of vulnerabilities that are inherent in the human condition -- and exacerbated by predatory social orders -- can bring more genuine humility and deeper compassion.

Norman Solomon's next book, "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," will be published in early summer by Wiley. His columns and other writings can be found at www.normansolomon.com