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(Palestinian) Cinema/Nation/History Felicia Chan Dreams of a Nation: on Palestinian Cinema Dabashi, Dreams of a Nation: on a Palestinian Form This Address Takes

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(Palestinian) Cinema/Nation/History Felicia Chan Dreams of a Nation: on Palestinian Cinema Dabashi, Dreams of a Nation: on a Palestinian Form This Address Takes 8 | VARIANT 30 | WINTER 2007 What dreams may come: (Palestinian) cinema/nation/history Felicia Chan Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema Dabashi, Dreams of a Nation: On a Palestinian form this address takes. Nonetheless, in the goals Edited by Hamid Dabashi Cinema, is situated firmly within this context. for which it sets itself, Dreams succeeds in making Verso, London, 2006, 213 pp. It is part of a wider socio-politico-cultural an important contribution to an understudied ISBN: 978-1-84467-088-8 project called Dreams of a Nation (http://www. cinema in English-language scholarship. Its mix of dreamsofanation.org), which aims to highlight critical articles, interviews, personal observations, and promote Palestinian cinema through film and film analyses, surveys the issues of Palestinian “Palestinian cinema must be understood in this festivals, critical writings, and an online database self-determination from a variety of perspectives. context. That is to say, on the one hand, Palestinians of Palestinian films and film-makers. The project Film-maker, poet and activist, Annemarie Jacir, stand against invisibility, which is the fate they have is set up, in other words, as a cultural resource, provides an account of curating a Palestinian resisted since the beginning; and on the other hand, and the organisers hope, eventually, to provide film festival in New York, the aims of which she they stand against the stereotype in the media: a ‘physical archive’ as well. However, in the case admits to being designed to introduce Palestinian the masked Arab, the kufiyya, the stone-throwing of Palestinian cinema, culture and politics are cinema to the US, and ‘more specifically to film Palestinian – a visual identity associated with terrorism conjoined twins. The website for Dreams of a audiences in New York City’ (29). The festival was and violence.” Nation specifically states that its mission is to an occasion to provide American spectators with Edward W. Said, Preface, Dreams of a Nation provide a space for Palestinian films, which it the opportunity to see and hear Palestinian stories No cultural project from, by or about Palestine defines as those made by Palestinian film-makers, that they have ostensibly never encountered. The escapes questions of its nationhood and self- and not films made about Palestine by non- implications of such a project is then subsumed 7 determination. The formulation of a Palestinian Palestinian film-makers. Thus, the political aims under her account of the civil disturbances that cinema is no exception. Whilst the Golden Globe of the Dreams project are evident – to provide took place on the university campus as the Israeli award for Best Foreign Language Film, and Oscar a space from which Palestinian voices may be lobby gathered to protest the launch of the festival. nomination, for Paradise Now (Hany Abu-Assad, heard, faces seen, stories told, and memories Joseph Massad of Columbia University addresses 2005), may have brought Palestinian cinema to made. Invisibility, as Edward Said argues in his the role of cinema in the struggle for Palestinian the notice of mainstream international audiences, preface to the collection, is one of the obstacles liberation, and provides a useful account of the lack of a comprehensive film history from facing Palestinian self-determination. Cinema, as how the content and narratives of a range of Palestine lies not in the lack of production,1 but in a visual medium, has the potential to counteract films produced since the 1970s gave voice to the the fact of its contested geo-political identity. that invisibility, by making visible that which struggle. He writes: ‘What Palestinian filmmakers The controversy surrounding the 2006 Oscar has hitherto been unseen. Yet, visibility is also have succeeded in doing in the last thirty years is nomination of Paradise Now dramatises the a double-headed hydra. There is such a thing as to tell many important Palestinian stories that the tensions in operation as a cultural identity seeks the wrong kind of visibility, as Said himself notes, world had never heard before’ (44). Michel Khleifi a political one. In a number of online petitions especially the visibility of stereotypes that spread provides an account of his career as a film-maker calling for the film’s withdrawal from Oscar through the media like a virus with no antigen. beginning in the 1980s in the context of ‘anger nomination, detractors argue that the film glorifies Dreams, the anthology, is held in the tension and revolt’ (45) and moving towards the effort Palestinian suicide bombing against Israeli between the two – between providing visibility to reconcile politics with ‘the imaginary’ (57), an citizens.2 Amongst these detractors, several have for Palestinian cinema, and providing visibility effort which demonstrates succinctly the difficulty lost children during the bomb attacks.3 Where the for the Palestinian cause through cinema, which of producing an imaginary, and identifiably Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences cannot help but address all the attendant issues ‘Palestinian’ cinema, without also addressing its (AMPAS), which administers the Academy Awards, surrounding that cause, including the negative political milieu. That difficulty is undergirded by is concerned, though, something altogether more visibility of stone-throwing anarchists and suicide Bashir Abu-Manneh’s analysis of two of Khleifi’s mundane is at work – how can we admit a film bombers. It is a tension that is given expression films, under the frame that ‘[f]or the last twenty- from a place which does not, as such, exist? Or by the inclusion of the text of the keynote speech five years, Michel Khleifi and Palestinian film at the very least, one whose existence is being given by the late Edward Said at the opening have been nearly synonymous’ (58). Abu-Manneh, contested?4 In addition, how do we account for of the first Dreams of a Nation film festival at who also works in Columbia University, concludes the fact that the film was produced by European Columbia University, New York, in 2003. Dabashi that ‘[i]n times of capitulation and surrender funds and made by an Israeli-Arab director?5 credits Said with the inspiration for the festival ... Khleifi’s oeuvre ... stands as an important To complicate matters further, Paradise Now and the Dreams project it is based on (211). That reminder that a better future in Palestine-Israel is catalogued in the Internet Movie Database the first film festival to celebrate Palestinian film is not only desirable but possible as well. And that as being from Palestine/France/Germany/the takes place outside of Palestine is of historical is his single most important contribution to his Netherlands/Israel.6 Whilst it is possible to argue significance, especially when its success enabled people’s struggle for justice and liberation’ (69). against the spuriousness of confining something as the festival to be later taken ‘to Palestine itself’ Ella Shohat, Professor of Cultural Studies at New multifarious and layered as cultural identity under (209). What is equally significant, then, is that York University, takes the political argument to a sticky label, the Palestinian question, by virtue of whilst a great deal of critical attention is paid the feminist cause, eschewing the more traditional its history, frames the argument within the context to the history of the Palestinian struggle in the anti-patriarchal and/or anti-colonial stance for the of its self-identification as a culture-in-exile. history of Palestinian cinema, what is not explored exploration of how gender and sexual identities The anthology of essays edited by Hamid in any depth in the collection is the question of play out in the search for a national one. According to whom these films might be addressed, and what to Shohat, nation, race, and gender ‘intersect’ VARIANT 30 | WINTER 2007 | 9 (71) and cannot be taken separately. Hamid present as a precursor to the freedom of Palestine, me=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull&cid=1139395398 Naficy from Rice University discusses the exilic ‘tomorrow’ (160). 449. As of 18 September 2007, a quick search in Google 8 for ‘Paradise Now Oscar nomination’ will bring up the and accented form of Palestinian cinema, and The collection’s best contribution to English- petitions within the top five search results. his contribution may be distinguished from the language scholarship on Palestinian cinema may 3 Chris McGreal, ‘Bomb victims’ parents petition academy other essays in the collection in that it attempts be to provide bases from which further work in to reject movie’, The Guardian, 2 March 2006, available to address the form employed by Palestinian the field may develop, work which I hope will offer at http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,17 films and the modes of address in which political more interrogative perspectives on, for example, 21212,00.html. resistance may be located, modes of address which the apparent necessity for a Palestinian cinema 4 Xan Brooks, ‘We have no film industry because we have are conditioned by, and further condition, their to be closely identified with Palestinian self- no country’, The Guardian, 12 April 2006, available state of exile. Nizar Hassan, a documentary film- determination, and whether the understanding online at http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepage s/0,,1752076,00.html. maker, offers a farcical account of the bureaucratic of a Palestinian national subjectivity need only 5 Talya Halkin, ‘Petition Slams “Paradise Now” Oscar entanglements he encountered while trying to be about its struggle for freedom. Are there Nomination’, Jerusalem Post, 13 February 2006, available enter his film to an international conference, other ways in which that subjectivity might online at http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagena in which the film ended up being submitted be constituted or addressed? To express the me=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull&cid=11393953984 as an Afghan entry because the organisers did question in another way: to what degree do 49.
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