New developments continue apace in Egypt, and I'll write about them shortly. But I have to take a break from current events to write about Palestinian director Elia Suleiman's latest film, The Time That Remains, which recently screened at Columbia as part of a film festival organized by the new, wonderful Center for Palestine Studies there.
I'm tempted to say The Time That Remains has eclipsed Annemarie Jacir's brilliant Salt of This Sea as my favorite Palestinian film, but that's really an unfair comparison. Salt of This Sea is an extraordinary first feature by a filmmaker who surely has many great things ahead. The Time That Remains is the masterpiece of a mature artist completely in control of his craft. It's rare that you see a director's aesthetic and political vision so perfectly, flawlessly realized.
Suleiman is best known in the US for his 2002 film Divine Intervention, a series of loosely connected tragicomic vignettes (or tableaux, as Suleiman refers to them) about life under Israeli occupation. Metaphorical, surreal, and often bitterly funny, they showed the banal absurdity of Israeli colonization, but many of the subtleties are probably lost on an American audience with little knowledge of Palestine's history.
In The Time That Remains Suleiman brings his trademark visual inventiveness and gallows humor to a far more linear narrative--the story of his own family from 1948 to the present day. It is mostly the story of his father Fuad (Saleh Bakri), who was a young man in Nazareth in 1948, using his basement workshop to make guns for a Palestinian resistance that was hopelessly outmatched by the conquering Zionist militias that became the Israeli army.
Suleiman has an unparalleled eye for the individual moments of domination, humiliation and resistance that make up life under a repressive system. He has a knack for creating scenes that are simultaneously blackly funny and deeply horrifying, as in the case of a madcap chase between doctors and soldiers over an unseen, wounded Palestinian who will end up either patient or prisoner in an Israeli jail. When he turns his gaze to the original moment of conquest, the results are breathtaking. The whole film is good, but the 1948 section is unforgettable. Under the unflinching gaze of his breathlessly still camera, scenes of casual cruelty and brutality play out in long takes, businesslike and implacable, and we are unable to look away, because he won't let us.
There is one scene in particular, a scene of stunning violence that takes place in a postcard-perfect olive grove, that may be one of the best scenes I've ever seen in a movie. It is a perfect microcosm of the dynamics of occupation and resistance. It should be studied by every film student ever as an example of how to film violence effectively. There are no smash cuts or dramatic music here, and none are necessary. At a key moment, the only sound is the wind in the olive trees. The horror of the action speaks for itself.
As I watched the 1948 section of the movie, which is largely based on Suleiman's parents' letters and journals, it occurred to me that I had never seen some of these things on film before. Is Suleiman really the first person to depict the Nakba in a non-documentary film? I can't believe that's true, and yet I can't think of another example.
As we move closer to the present day, the narrative fragments into Suleiman's trademark vignettes, only tenuously connected and often dreamlike or abstract. At the Q&A I attended, Suleiman said this was because the film becomes less his father's story and more his own as it progresses. But I think there is a political message too. The past is vivid, whole, and horrifying, while the present is suspended, fragmented and opaque, its meaning unclear. The past is more real than the present, always there in the margins, as if it too is a present absentee.
Suleiman's family's story, like Palestine's, is a tragedy for now, its ending yet unwritten. Out of it Suleiman has made a splendid film: beautiful, funny, breathtaking, and also heartbreaking. More than anything, it made me want to make a movie, which is the highest praise I can think to give a film.
I'm tempted to say The Time That Remains has eclipsed Annemarie Jacir's brilliant Salt of This Sea as my favorite Palestinian film, but that's really an unfair comparison. Salt of This Sea is an extraordinary first feature by a filmmaker who surely has many great things ahead. The Time That Remains is the masterpiece of a mature artist completely in control of his craft. It's rare that you see a director's aesthetic and political vision so perfectly, flawlessly realized.
Suleiman is best known in the US for his 2002 film Divine Intervention, a series of loosely connected tragicomic vignettes (or tableaux, as Suleiman refers to them) about life under Israeli occupation. Metaphorical, surreal, and often bitterly funny, they showed the banal absurdity of Israeli colonization, but many of the subtleties are probably lost on an American audience with little knowledge of Palestine's history.
In The Time That Remains Suleiman brings his trademark visual inventiveness and gallows humor to a far more linear narrative--the story of his own family from 1948 to the present day. It is mostly the story of his father Fuad (Saleh Bakri), who was a young man in Nazareth in 1948, using his basement workshop to make guns for a Palestinian resistance that was hopelessly outmatched by the conquering Zionist militias that became the Israeli army.
Suleiman has an unparalleled eye for the individual moments of domination, humiliation and resistance that make up life under a repressive system. He has a knack for creating scenes that are simultaneously blackly funny and deeply horrifying, as in the case of a madcap chase between doctors and soldiers over an unseen, wounded Palestinian who will end up either patient or prisoner in an Israeli jail. When he turns his gaze to the original moment of conquest, the results are breathtaking. The whole film is good, but the 1948 section is unforgettable. Under the unflinching gaze of his breathlessly still camera, scenes of casual cruelty and brutality play out in long takes, businesslike and implacable, and we are unable to look away, because he won't let us.
There is one scene in particular, a scene of stunning violence that takes place in a postcard-perfect olive grove, that may be one of the best scenes I've ever seen in a movie. It is a perfect microcosm of the dynamics of occupation and resistance. It should be studied by every film student ever as an example of how to film violence effectively. There are no smash cuts or dramatic music here, and none are necessary. At a key moment, the only sound is the wind in the olive trees. The horror of the action speaks for itself.
As I watched the 1948 section of the movie, which is largely based on Suleiman's parents' letters and journals, it occurred to me that I had never seen some of these things on film before. Is Suleiman really the first person to depict the Nakba in a non-documentary film? I can't believe that's true, and yet I can't think of another example.
As we move closer to the present day, the narrative fragments into Suleiman's trademark vignettes, only tenuously connected and often dreamlike or abstract. At the Q&A I attended, Suleiman said this was because the film becomes less his father's story and more his own as it progresses. But I think there is a political message too. The past is vivid, whole, and horrifying, while the present is suspended, fragmented and opaque, its meaning unclear. The past is more real than the present, always there in the margins, as if it too is a present absentee.
Suleiman's family's story, like Palestine's, is a tragedy for now, its ending yet unwritten. Out of it Suleiman has made a splendid film: beautiful, funny, breathtaking, and also heartbreaking. More than anything, it made me want to make a movie, which is the highest praise I can think to give a film.
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