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| THE HANDSTAND | FEBRUARY 2003 |
arts
reviews HUMAN
INTERVENTION From Exodus to Schindler’s List, the cinema has been to the fore in reminding us of the appalling crimes committed by European Gentiles against Jews in the 20th century. That there has been no comparable exploration of crimes against the Arab world is hardly surprising, given the US domination of mainstream cinema and the intimate nature of America’s involvement with Israel. While anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jews are, rightly, no longer tolerated in the cinema, it is arguable that they have been transferred en masse to the Arabs, on whom it is open season in the New World Order (I’m thinking of such racist trash as James Cameron’s True Lies). Sometimes one
cannot help feeling that whenever the atrocities
perpetrated by an Israeli regime The Pianist
is an austerely beautiful and very European film. One can
imagine what Hollywood would have made of the
relationship between Szpilman and the Gentile woman with
whom he falls in love before the Nazi occupation, and who
reappears unexpectedly (with her husband) as one of his
helpers when he escapes from the Ghetto. But here she
simply moves on, and Szpilman’s descent towards near
destruction is presented harrowingly and without I kept
wondering what impact this film would have on Palestinian
viewers, were there any likelihood of their getting to
see it. On the one hand, it might enhance their
understanding of what the recent forebears of their own
tormentors had been through. On the other, they would
surely feel a shudder of recognition at the sight of a
huge wall being built around the Warsaw Ghetto, the
endless queues at checkpoints, the gratuitous
humiliations piled on helpless civilians by arrogant
soldiers, old men forced to dance in the street at
gunpoint, and the rest of it. After all, when the
Israelis were preparing their savage invasion of the
Palestinian camps in the spring of 2002, did not their
strategists recommend studying the methods whereby the
Germans quelled the Warsaw Ghetto uprising? There is
undoubtedly an element of vicarious revenge in the
ruthlessness of the Israeli occupation, just as there is
a sinister irony in the fact that Germany consistently
impedes the European Union from taking a more muscular
stance against Israel’s crimes. The Palestinians are
made to atone for Germany’s crimes. I wonder if Polanski himself is aware of these parallels? Since he is already persona non grata in the USA (although hardly on political grounds…), perhaps he should be the one to make a film exposing Sharon, Mofaz, and the rest of the gang who so shamelessly exploit the memory of the Jewish dead in order to justify their own barbarism. Meanwhile, back on planet earth, Hollywood has again made an ass of itself by rejecting Elia Suleiman’s film Divine Intervention as a Palestinian entry for the Academy Awards, on the grounds that “there is no such country as Palestine”. This has made the film into a cause celebre, particularly as it won the Jury Prize and the International Critics’ Prize at the 2002 Cannes Festival. Of course this is eloquent testimony to the different mentalities at work in Europe and the USA, yet I can’t help wishing that a more worthy film were at the centre of the storm. I found Divine Intervention highly tedious and irredeemably self-indulgent, and at the end was astounded that only 90 minutes had elapsed rather than 3 hours. According to the summary: “A man, in Jerusalem, is torn between his sick father and the young Palestinian woman he loves but cannot meet because she lives behind an Israeli roadblock.” However, this “plot” takes second place to a series of infantile wish-fulfillment fantasies. A beautiful Palestinian woman, haunches swinging to the accompaniment of loud music, sashays through the Israeli roadblock disregarding all orders to stop; as the soldiers stare after her stupidly, their observation tower creaks, sways, and crashes to the ground… The protagonists release a balloon on which is drawn a caricature of Arafat; to the consternation of the Israeli soldiers, this harmless but lethal projectile floats over their heads and machine-guns until it settles confidently atop the Al-Aqsa Mosque… A bunch of Israeli soldiers at target-practice are confronted by a female Palestinian Ninja who turns their bullets against them and dispatches them all before twirling off into space…While such fantasies may serve some nebulous therapeutic function, they are politically inane and counter-productive. Mahmoud Darwish famously asserted that “The Palestinians don’t want to be either martyrs or heroes; they just want to be normal.” In Suleiman’s universe they just want to be paranormal, a wish unlikely to be granted. Much more satisfying on every level is Rana’s Wedding, or An Ordinary Day in Jerusalem, by Hany Abu-Assad (who, interestingly enough, was executive producer of Elia Suleiman’s 1995 feature Chronicles of a Disappearance), with a scenario by Liana Badr and Ihab Lamey. Yet Rana’s Wedding packs a conceptual punch entirely lacking from Divine Intervention precisely because its political dimension is implicit, unspoken, until the very end when the eponymous wedding is celebrated at a road-block while lines from Darwish’s State of Siege appear on-screen. Rana, a
young Palestinian from East Jerusalem (Clara Khoury), has
been given an ultimatum by her father: she must join him
in his move to Egypt unless she can find a husband before
four o’clock in the afternoon. He has provided a
list of eligible candidates, but Rana is set on Khalil,
an impecunious theatre director from Ramallah (Khalifa
Natour). Her quest for Khalil and his frantic efforts to
organise their wedding in the teeth of checkpoints,
roadblocks, funerals, stone-throwing youths, and an
impossibly ramshackle Volkswagen has been likened to Tom
Tykwer’s Run Lola Run. If anything, this
superficial comparison illuminates to extent to which the
German film is a threadbare exercise in style without
content. Rana’s rejection of her father’s power and her refusal to be driven from her occupied country are symbols of a new Palestinian sumud or steadfastness, requiring no explicit political statements to underline their potency. Her defiance in the face of an implacable, savage and Kafkaesque occupation attains a kind of triumph far more moving than the gyrations of Suleiman’s Ninja. Copyright: Raymond Deane, 2003.
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seem about to provoke an
international backlash that might lead to positive action
on behalf of the Palestinians, along comes a Holocaust
film to remind everyone of why the Israelis must be
allowed to break the rules by which the rest of us are
supposed to abide. In the case of Roman Polanski’s The
Pianist I believe that such cynicism would be out of
place. To begin with, Polanski is himself a Holocaust
survivor, and has taken many years to come to grips with
the subject. The Pianist is the true account of
Vladislaw Szpilman (played with tremendous authenticity
by the English actor Adrien Brody), a minor Polish
concert pianist whose entire family was deported to the
Camps. He himself escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto and,
with the help of – among others – a
music-loving German officer, somehow survived to tell the
tale. The officer, whose name he had never learned, died
in a Soviet prison camp in the 1950s.
hollow given even a little bit
of context. African Americans have been "coming from
nothing" for 400 years. That didn't stop previous
generations of artists, activists, and ancestors from
working toward a better situation for the whole, not just
themselves. It's grotesque to see such selfish
materialism celebrated by a generation who are literally
the children of apartheid. The time has come to re-define
the street and what it means to come from the street.
Yes, criminals & violence come from the streets, but
so do men and women who live their lives with kindness,
and within the realm of the law. The problem with making
'street' or 'realness' synonymous with criminality is
that poor black children are demonized. You never see the
image of middle class white children killing each other
promoted as entertainment.