Hany Abu-Assad's Historical Testimonies

Hany Abu-Assad’s Historical Testimonies History and Identity in Palestinian Cinema of the Everyday

Teuntje Schrijver 5819334 Keizersgracht 637B 1017DS Amsterdam 06-52559976 [email protected]

Dr. A.M. Geil MA Film Studies University of Amsterdam

University of Amsterdam

Table of Content

Introduction ...... 5

1. Rana’s Wedding ...... 10 Journey ...... 14 Control ...... Fout! Bladwijzer niet gedefinieerd. Witnessing ...... Fout! Bladwijzer niet gedefinieerd.

2. Paradise Now ...... Fout! Bladwijzer niet gedefinieerd. Journey ...... Fout! Bladwijzer niet gedefinieerd. Media technology ...... Fout! Bladwijzer niet gedefinieerd. Witnessing ...... Fout! Bladwijzer niet gedefinieerd. 3. Omar ...... Fout! Bladwijzer niet gedefinieerd. Historical narrative ...... Fout! Bladwijzer niet gedefinieerd. Knowledge ...... Fout! Bladwijzer niet gedefinieerd.

Conclusion ...... Fout! Bladwijzer niet gedefinieerd.

Reference List ...... Fout! Bladwijzer niet gedefinieerd.

Introduction

Since 1948 [Palestinian filmmakers] are a resistance movement, and keeping the case alive is a form of resistance. Making these films is like unconsciously making documents that can be kept in history and keep our case alive. (Interview with Hany Abu-Assad. Haider 2010)

Besides some international productions, Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad made three feature films in his native country Palestine. He wants these films to become part of the Palestinian history-writing by making documents about the contemporary situation of the Palestinian occupation. In several interviews the director states his wishes to be a witness of the world and time, and to make films that stay in the world and in that way in history1. By making films as if they are “historical testimonies”, Hany Abu-Assad is placing himself in the position of the contemporary witness of the Palestinian situation supporting the Palestinian cause. Even though Hany Abu-Assad makes pictures about the now, the films reflect a bigger Palestinian history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the depiction of personal contemporary stories of the everyday. The historical trauma that shaped the Palestinian history and identity is reflected in the filmmaker’s films through its stories, images and sound. Therefore, this thesis will explore the way Hany Abu-Assad tells and depicts the Palestinian history and identity through stories of the everyday. Throughout his oeuvre he is trying to establish what his role as a filmmaker means and adds to the resistance against the occupation by making these testimonies. With every new work he makes, a change arises through which means the testimonies are being depicted and told, which reflects the development of the collective Palestinian identity and the filmmaker’s own growth and increased experience. Hany Abu-Assad was born in 1961 in Nazareth in a Muslim middle-class family amid a poor society. At the age of eighteen, he immigrated to the Netherlands to study aeronautical engineering. Later he fulfilled his dream to tell stories and make movies. Together with production company IJswater Films he produced his first feature film Het 14e kippetje (The 14th Chick) in 1998, which opened the Dutch Film Festival that same year. After that, he started shooting both documentaries and fiction films in Palestine. His 2005 production Paradise Now got nominated for an Oscar for best foreign film. By

1 See for instance: Haider 2010; IAmFilm 2013; Radio VPRO 2014. 5

then, Hany Abu-Assad had moved to Los Angeles and started working with American producers. Up until last year, the filmmaker would go to Palestine to shoot a movie and then leave again to the Netherlands or Hollywood where he actually lived. Last year, after finishing the film Omar (2013) the director returned to his hometown Nazareth to live there again. The journeying he did most of his life is represented in almost all of his films and also addresses the exilic character of the Palestinian identity. The situation the people live in under occupation and in exile contributes to the displacement of Palestinians. For many years, they have been approaching life and also history with the “ideology of refugees”. This makes structuring history problematic, because refugees always remain in a temporary and transient condition. In this state there is only room for memory as part of the passing moment. This transiency gave way to a collective Palestinian feeling whereby the only sureness was the expectation and hope for the returning to the homeland and re-immersion in the individual and collective time (Gertz and Khleifi 2). Being a refugee is like being on a perpetual journey. The journeys Hany Abu-Assad made in his life and also depicts in his films refer to this state a refugee is in. Hamid Naficy recognizes journeying as a common theme in what he calls “accented cinema”, which covers filmmakers who have diasporic, exilic or postcolonial experience. This experience is reflected in their films (11). Palestinian filmmakers are also accented because they either used to or still live abroad or because they live as an exile in their own occupied country. The journey, real or imaginary, is a common major topic that has been consistently used by exilic filmmakers and refers to their own history, their travels after exile that took them from their home and shaped their experiences and identity. Naficy, by addressing the journey as common accented theme, however, fails to take the state of a refugee into account. He does not explicitly discuss the fact that journeying leaves one nowhere, in a state of not belonging and therefore timeless. Moreover, he fails to notice the state of a person who is journeying as a refugee. I think that this is also the problem with the application of post-colonial studies to Palestine. There are many different forms for a country to be post-colonial, however when considering the Palestinian situation one cannot address it as post-colonial, since colonization is happening at this moment2. In the same way, when considering Palestinian filmmakers as accented, many concepts do apply to them. The filmmakers

2 See for further reading on the problems of the term “post-colonial”: Shohat, 1992. 6 are in a state of exile, though not all notions suffice. Naficy does not connect journeying to time in a way that clarifies the concept of being in a transient state, loose of temporality. He is more or less focused on the goal of the journey, rather than the current state that a journey brings forth. Palestinians are still in the process of the journey, leaving them in a constant transient state. There is no sight of the journey’s ending, because they refuse to accept that the current state is their destiny. Hany Abu- Assad addresses precisely this situation. In his films, the journeys his characters make are focused on the state of refugees. Abu-Assad’s three Palestinian fiction films analyzed in this thesis are: Rana’s Wedding (2002), Paradise Now (2005), and Omar (2013). All of the films were shot in Palestinian territories in Israel and deal with Palestinian society and daily Palestinian life. Next to one short and two documentaries, these are the only features dealing directly with the Palestinian situation. The three films were all produced amid a society under repression and constrained by tensions, which made the shooting period in the occupied areas a challenge. The situation of the Palestinians is a complex one, and so is their history. Different peoples have been living in the western area of the Middle-East since the last few millennia. Several different rulers have taken the land and borders have shifted multiple times, creating states bearing many different names. The region that is now known as Israel was known in the ancient times as Palestina, a land where Philistines lived: a people that came from Cyprus. After World War I the British had the mandate to rule the region of Palestine after the war against the Ottoman Empire. After World War II a plan was made for the British mandate to become a Jewish state, an Arab state, and a special governed Jerusalem. This last plan led to the war of 1948, after the Jewish settlers accepted the proposal and the Arabs did not. In the end, a Jewish state was established called Israel. In 1967, Israel gained the whole territory. Palestinians reacted to this in 1987 and 2000 with two intifadas. Though little changed since, in 2012 the United Nations changed Palestine’s status into an observer state, after which in 2013 the Palestinian authority changed its own name into the State of Palestine. Last year, in response to the kidnapping and killing of several teenagers on both sides, tensions increased again between Palestine and Israel and resulted in war. Negotiations of peace led nowhere and the rest of the world joined in the discussion about the overall complex conflict. Later on in the same year, Sweden, as the first of the European Union, acknowledged the state of Palestine and several other countries followed. However, the United Nations declined the request for a two-state solution and

Israel did not respond to a peace offering from Saudi-Arabia assuring their support of two states. A solution was still far away. Palestine did, however, join the International Criminal Court in late 2014. Altogether, the conflict was discussed regularly in the news last year and it seems like international news reports are more on the Palestinian side than they ever were. Before, Palestine did not have the means to represent itself properly because, for one, they lacked media institutions and marketing skills as opposed to Israel3. Because of the dominant position of the Israeli government there was little room for the Palestinian story. One way to address the injustice and the cause of the Palestinian people was by means of cinema. For many years, Palestinian filmmakers have been making both documentaries and fiction films about their country and the occupation. “An increasing number of Palestinian exiles in Europe and North America [...] are making films that center on Palestinian life in Israel, in the occupied territories and in the Palestinian diaspora” (Naficy 167). For Palestinians, means to make films are scarce and many movies are consequently internationally produced. The same goes for the distribution of films: there are only a few theatres in Palestine and if there are available screens, distribution channels are controlled by Israel or Hamas which have strict censorship. Therefore, to establish films and reach audiences is hard in Palestine. Nonetheless, several Palestinian filmmakers, such as Michel Khleifi and Elia Suleiman, made a name for themselves. Some of their films generated international attention as well as prestigious awards, like Hany Abu-Assad’s two-time nominations for the Academy Awards. Making films about Palestinian life gives them an opportunity to show audiences all over the world what the situation is like in their country and is thereby a way to add to the resistance. Many Palestinian filmmakers tend to create a cinema of the everyday. Hany Abu-Assad in particular, as one of the newer directors, has a tendency to mix reality with fiction. His documentaries contain staged scenes and his fiction films have a documentary style. This adds to his wish to create testimonies of the reality of the Palestinian people. The three films discussed in this thesis are divided into three chapters. Abu- Assad’s very first fiction film shot in Palestine, Rana’s Wedding, will be analyzed in chapter one. The film is about a teenage girl who is trying to find a husband in order to

3 Read for more information about manipulating the media and the complexity of the conflict in Israel: Het zijn net mensen (People like us: Misrepresenting the Middle East) by Joris Luyendijk, a Dutch journalist who was stationed in the Middle-East for several years. 8 stay in Palestine. The chapter explores the way in which the protagonist’s story is a reflection of the general Palestinian history shown through a personal trauma. In chapter two, Paradise Now will be discussed. It is Abu-Assad’s second fiction film shot in Palestine and displays a story about two friends who have being selected for a suicide mission. Not only does the film refer to the Palestinian past, it also reflects the filmmaker’s own role and ideas in the fight against Israeli occupation. In chapter three of this thesis, the film Omar will be analyzed in relation to the first two films. Omar is the filmmaker’s latest film and, in addition, third feature film shot in Palestine after Abu-Assad went to Hollywood to pursue a career there. It also got nominated for an academy award for best foreign film. The story is about a young man who becomes entangled between distrusting his friends and being blackmailed by the Israeli police after he and his friends assassinated a soldier. Omar, as latest film, shows a remarkable break in the filmmaker’s own work as well as in Palestinian cinema. This third film, produced eight years after Paradise Now, represents the Palestinian history told through the story of the everyday in a different way than the two earlier films did.

Chapter One Rana’s Wedding أخر ي وم ف ي ل قدس

In 2002 Hany Abu-Assad’s first feature film shot in Palestine, Rana’s Wedding, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. The film was made in Jerusalem right after the outbreak of the second intifada. The story, written by Liana Badr and Ihab Lamey, is about Palestinian teenage girl Rana who gets an ultimatum from her father. Either she marries a guy from a list he composed before four ‘o clock that day, or she has to go with him to live in Egypt. Rana does not feel like marrying one of the unknown potential husbands, however, yet does not want to go to Egypt either. So, she sneaks out of the house in the early morning to go look for her lover and ask him to marry her before her father leaves Palestine. Her boyfriend Khalil, who is not on the approved list, unexpectedly slept in the theatre he owns due to bombings the night before, making Rana look for him everywhere in the streets of Jerusalem. After she finds him and makes him agree to marry her before the end of the day, they both start a quest through the city looking for an official to execute the marriage. Once they have found such a person, they go to Rana’s father to have him agree upon their engagement. Her father eventually agrees to let Rana stay in Palestine if she manages to marry before he leaves. The lovers walk and drive around the city to arrange their wedding. In the end, due to a problem at an Israeli roadblock, the official who was meant to fulfill the marriage gets stuck in traffic, making Rana and Khalil move the entire wedding party to the streets. The ceremony then takes place in a car right next to the roadblock filled with Israeli soldiers. The original title of the film, Jerusalem, Another Day, already implies what the filmmaker is so eager to represent: the everydayness of Palestinian life. In the time span of ten hours, Rana journeys through her city, filling the screen with scenes of life in different Palestinian parts of town. Hany Abu-Assad wants to preserve the now, all the while making the film a historical testimony, defining his role as a Palestinian filmmaker, and expressing his identity as a Palestinian. This chapter will look at the way in which in Rana’s Wedding Palestinian history and identity are told in and through the everyday. I will claim that the historical narrative of the Palestinian struggle is

10 reflected in the story of the protagonist Rana. Rana’s Wedding displays a larger story than just what happened that one day. The film starts by telling a bigger history in voiceover, namely the one of Rana’s family history. The story that is told puts Rana’s quest to find a husband before four o’clock in a bigger perspective; reflecting past, future as well as the present. Palestinian history, according to Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi, appears to be like other histories of displacement and exile “in which everyday existence is experienced through the mediation of nostalgia for the lost nature-and-nation unity, and for the utopian homeland that remains untainted by contemporary affairs” (3). This ‘nostalgia’, as Gertz and Khleifi put it, can be seen as a trauma caused by the loss of the nation. The two writers state that one of the most striking characteristics of Palestinian films of the era of the second intifada (when Rana’s Wedding was made), is “the endeavor to become free of the traumatic fixation that presents the past as a hidden image embedded in present existence” (136). The Palestinian filmmakers try to do this by changing historical time with personal time, for example by that of characters living their ordinary lives. The traumatic element from the past, in this film, is masked as the personal story of the character (which appears to be a replacement for a historical narrative). In other words, Rana’s Wedding depicts the collective trauma by presenting an individual trauma of loss. A mental trauma is a wound upon the mind, “a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self and the world” (Caruth 3). It is caused by an event that is experienced too unexpectedly to be fully grasped. In repetitive actions and nightmares, the event, which is unavailable to the conscious mind, unexpectedly exposes itself repeatedly (4). This painful repetition of the traumatic event “can be understood as the absolute inability of the mind to avoid an un-pleasurable event that has not been given psychic meaning in any way” (59). The past traumatic event therefore ‘reappears’ in the present, making it

Still 2 Image of mother Mary in Rana's Wedding Still 1 Rana's reflection in image of mother Mary

11 constantly happen again. In this way, the traumatic event still exists in the consciousness, making time stop. The present is replaced by the past and the future is experienced as a returning to the past. In this way, a historical narrative containing a trauma is hard to compose with temporal linearity or with rational cause and effect. The Israeli occupation and being uprooted from their homes gave the Palestinians a collective trauma. This trauma is confronted by Palestinian cinema through its goal to invent, document, and form Palestinian history. Rana’s Wedding deals with the trauma, on the one hand, because the theme in the film refers to the collective trauma of the Palestinian people who live under repression and experience different horrific events all the time. None of those events are explicitly shown in this film, though the demolishing of houses is exhibited, and represents the demolishing of Palestinian lives. On the other hand, the main character, Rana, has a trauma as a result of losing her mother at a young age. The cause of her mother’s death is not revealed and the fact that her mother has died, which is made clear in the beginning of the film, does not find its way back into the plot. However, on multiple occasions, the holy mother figure Mary enters the frame, recalling the memory of Rana’s own mother. This is explicitly shown when Rana and her friend Mary are going to a church. Rana looks at a picture of the holy Mary and baby Jesus through a glass frame (still 1). Her own reflection is mirrored in mother Mary’s face (still 2), after which the picture is cut to a picture of a woman, which represents a photo of Rana’s mother (stills 3). These underlying references to the trauma-motif draw a parallel between a collective trauma,

Still 3 Rana's reflection in a picture of her mother

12 which contains a certain collective loss, and an individual trauma, which deals with a more personal loss: the lost country, and the lost mother. Thus, Hany Abu-Assad constructs a double historical narrative (a collective and individual one), leading from the past to the present and the future, presenting traumatic past events as both absent and present. By not literally presenting the traumatic encounter and memory, the film gives a representation of a forgotten past that - as Gertz and Khleifi put it for the Palestinian cinema in general - “does not replace the image of the present, but is, rather, seen through it” (3). The traumatic recollection is merely suggested at times and because of its indirect presence - the indication of the trauma in images on screen - the recollection of the trauma immediately steps forward into the present. The references to the traumatic events the characters experienced are never directly expressed in words or in logically caused reactions. However, they are for example visible in Rana’s precarious temper and mental state. The film’s use of music underlines the subtle way the trauma is represented. Hany Abu-Assad chose to have a clear distinction between diegetic music and non- diegetic music. The music used in the diegetic world is always Arabic and played on tape recorders. The non-diegetic music is more universal and classical, played on a piano. The filmmaker tries to make this distinction between the “inside” of the film world and the “outside” with a scene where Khalil, Rana and Ramzy are driving. The Arab music becomes out of key, after which Khalil takes out the cassette and the music stops. This shows that the Arab music belongs to the diegetic world. There is one moment in the beginning where the inner and outer worlds collide with the music. Rana is heard playing on a piano with her mother as a young girl, and tries to play the classical music we keep hearing later on as non-diegetic music. In this way, the universal classical music represents an inner state of mind that refers to Rana’s trauma. The music created by Rana and her mother are the only indications of her mother’s living existence. After the piano lessons, her mother died. The music she used to play and that is heard throughout the film is the traumatic reminder of her mother’s death. Whenever the classical music fills the speakers, Rana is in pain and depicted in an emotional state. The best example of this is when she is alone in the yellow car, right after she has just seen a funeral march. She literally screams to the viewer, but all we hear is the classical music as a traumatic recollection. The non-diegetic world with its classical music represents her inner world on the level of sound. During this moment in the car, the classical music keeps playing, thereby representing her traumatic

13 recollection without hearing the sound of her screaming. The film is still “inside” her emotional world, which is emphasized by the car she is locked in, separating her from the outside world. The traumatic memory is embedded in the minds of Palestinians and in the film one way it is present is through music. The individual and collective trauma in one is a representation of the trauma every Palestinian has, including the filmmaker himself. The depicting of trauma as part of his cultural and individual identity makes way for the development of his role as a filmmaker. This trauma is expressed in the film by the implementation of two major motifs: the accented journey, with a clear goal but with many setbacks on the way; and the act of watching. This last motif of watching is again divided into two separate motifs: the motif of control, which is accomplished by being watched; and witnessing, which addresses the historical testimony.

Journey

Throughout the film, Rana engages in a journey crossing the city of Jerusalem. Journeys not only represent the filmmaker’s own path in life, leaving his homeland when he was younger, but also represent a certain spatial mediation between past and future. Journeys as such are connected to time, “[s]ince each journey has both direction and duration, journeys transform space into time” (Naficy 223). For Hamid Naficy, the journey-motif is typical for accented cinema because it represents the exilic character of the lives of the filmmakers. Hany Abu-Assad himself left his hometown and country when he was in his late teens to go and live in the Netherlands. In the majority of his films the characters are engaged in journeys. The journey that Rana makes with her fiancé is often shot in documentary style. This is accomplished by the movement of the camera following Rana on her journey, showing the daily life of Palestinian society on the streets of Jerusalem. Filming like this creates realism and it feels like the camera, and thus also the viewer, is walking along with Rana through streets filled with Palestinians. There is something rather interesting about the way the filmmaker deals with journeys. As mentioned before, he explores this motif in several of his films: The 14th Chick (1998), Ford Transit (2003), Paradise Now (2005), Do not forget me Istanbul (2011), The Courier (2008), and Omar (2013). All films are engaged in some way with journeying. What is interesting though is that none of these journeys encompass crossing actual national borders. With little exceptions, the characters travel mostly

14 through their own cities. Rana has a goal and a deadline to abide by, for she has to be married by four ‘o clock or she has to leave with her father. She starts a journey in order to marry her boyfriend. The main goal of having a wedding means that Rana wants to build a future with Khalil. More importantly, to her, it means that she chooses a future in Palestine. Before that, she must first find Khalil, then find the official, after which they have to go look for her father and convince him to agree upon their marriage. Lastly they need to make arrangements for the actual wedding. All of this before the clock strikes four. Having a goal implies the notion of a future. By embedding a deadline in the film, the story is very much engaged with the present, because the viewer is often reminded what the time is. Sometimes it is literally put onscreen by means of titles. The deadline in this film, if regarded in a larger sense, implies that there is a belief that there will be an ending to the Israeli occupation. Even though there is uncertainty about what the outcome may be once the deadline has passed, there is still hope for freedom. Similarly, once she has reached the deadline of four o’ clock, Rana will know more about what her future will hold; either she leaves or stays in Palestine. This deadline makes the character and the viewer constantly aware of the “current” time and the near future. On the other hand, it engages the viewer with the future that is attached to her choice of staying in Palestine and marrying Khalil. In this way, the film’s handling of the personal time, refers to the historical time - and also mental state - which addresses the traumatic past of when the Palestinians lost their motherland, and the longing for returning to their land in the future. The present is preoccupied with resolving that trauma by yearning and fulfilling the goal of building a home in Palestine. In other words, the goal attached to the journey is, paradoxically, to be able to stay in Palestine. Rana initiates this quest in order to eventually remain in her current habitat. To a certain extent, this can be seen as an act of resistance for she wants to realize a Palestinian future. Regaining Palestine cannot happen, though, if she leaves it. In that way, the journey the protagonist makes in the present represents a state of not belonging to anything or anywhere - similar to the state a refugee is in - and being preoccupied with getting to a goal in the future. Being a refugee means being in a state of not belonging - of being on a perpetual journey - since one is not at the place where he/she was, or is supposed to be going. The characters are refugees, literally, because they grew up in refugee camps or abroad, but also figuratively because they are traveling without knowing their final destination. This drifting to nowhere also has a

15 conjunction with timelessness, because the present has no foundation of space and time. Rana, on her journey, away from her home, is a refugee because she has no place to go to. She drifts through her city with only a plastic bag with a few of her belongings, no longer part of the place where she was brought up in, nor in the place of her future home. Her not knowing if by the end of the day she is either going to be married or leave for Egypt with her father underscores this idea of being in a state of refugees. Even though Hamid Naficy does not take the refugee ideology into account in his accented cinema, his book does describe the different goals characters of accented films have. These goals all relate to Rana’s journey. Naficy distinguishes three types of journeys: physical journeys of getaway and searching or building a home; quests, journeys of homelessness and being lost; and psychological journeys of homecoming (33). Rana, in her attempt to get married to be able to stay in Palestine, makes an actual journey through Jerusalem in order to find the necessities that allow her to build a home in the future. She is also, by virtue of leaving (or fleeing) her father’s house at the beginning of the film, homeless and lost on this journey. Physically she cannot find the way to her future husband, but mentally she does not know if she is making the right choice at times. This is made clear in the moments she is frightened. The last type of journey, the psychological journey of homecoming, can be found in the relief the wedding brings about at the end of the film. It gives a certain feeling of victory at the end, for she has found her home after the long journey. This victory in the end is a hopeful message of the filmmaker that the regaining of the land may come someday. The wedding is a form of resistance against the occupiers as well. Rana and Khalil’s efforts to organize their wedding can be seen as an act of resistance, as it is the occupation that holds them back. Every successful step toward the wedding is also a successful evasion of Israeli authority (Yaqub 68). The wedding-theme adds a certain hopefulness to the film. Nadia Yaqub argues that “although the inner domain and its practices are profoundly affected by the colonial encounter and the dramatic changes that colonialism brings to the outer domain of political and economic institutions, [a wedding] continues to be an area in which the colonized remain in control and can thereby distinguish themselves in a positive way from the colonizer” (58). This gaining control and exhibiting of their own culture by means of a wedding brings about the reclaiming of spaces in the film. At the end of the story, Rana takes her wedding party to the street next to an Israeli roadblock and all attendees start to sing and dance. This ending creates a certain victory after overcoming the troubles the occupation and having

16 the wedding caused. They claim their victory by conquering - and mocking - this Israeli site of control. They celebrate a Palestinian union - which symbolically means building a Palestinian home and future - where the occupation tried to demolish it. Before the heroine gets to the point of victory, she has to face a series of barriers on the road. For a while now, “as roadblocks and checkpoints have become an increasingly grueling daily experience, as the bypass roads and settlements that crisscross the Gaza Strip have proliferated, and with the introduction of soldiers and tanks to the streets and houses, the problem of borders has become a poignant one in the Palestinian consciousness” (Gertz and Khleifi 152). During the years of the intifadas, borders and roadblocks have made it difficult for Palestinian cinema to set up a harmonious space, and also deconstruct it so that they can reflect the heterogeneity of Palestinian society. Many Palestinian directors, who are more than familiar with life in refugee camps or in exile, are very much inclined to depict a disharmonious space. This disharmonious space is depicted with demolished houses and roadblocks, and represents the splitting of identity as well as geography into isolated segments (153). Gertz and Khleifi dub films that take place at these checkpoints and borders “roadblock movies”. Rana’s Wedding can be placed in that same category. The fragmented unity is shown in the film by the fragmented spaces divided by obstacles like roadblocks. All of this making it harder for Rana to continue her journey. These fragmented spaces connect to

Still 4 Rana and Khaled push the car up the hill

17 the frail unity of time (136), referring to the imaginary past time when Palestinians inhabited their land, or the traumatic time when they were uprooted from it. The hopefulness the wedding-theme brought about is enhanced by the way Rana deals with obstacles on her quest. Every time she encounters a roadblock of some sort she passes it anyhow. At one point in the film a barking dog blocks her way, at another moment a pile of stones and dirt makes the road end, or a checkpoint enters the screen. Each time she finds a way to cross the blockage and continue her journey. The hopefulness is best seen in the moment when Khalil, Rana and Ramzy (Khalil’s friend) sit in the yellow, old car and try to drive up a steep hill. The car cannot make it to the top and the engine stops. Khalil and Rana then push the car up the road and quite literally show that they can conquer any setback (still 4). In this way, the film tries to accomplish an act of harmonizing the segmentation of Jerusalem. At one point, however, Rana gets to a roadblock with a few Israeli soldiers and cannot make it through. Even though Rana is quite determined to get to her boyfriend and marry him before her father leaves, she also has moments of doubt and fear. The film symbolizes the roadblocks as a parallel between a physical setback and a mental one – which metaphorically refers to the impact of the occupation. The roadblocks can be seen as setbacks and moments of weakness when Rana feels defeated, but she almost always overcomes them. When she arrives at the roadblock with the soldiers however, it seems like she cannot make it across. She loses it and tries to literally force herself through the fence and the big Israeli men, screaming and pushing. Whether she actually makes it through (what seems impossible), is not shown. This refers to the subjectivity of the moment. There is no logical explanation that connects this scene to the following shot of Rana in her friend Mary’s house. However, she is still in a state of fear and quite disturbed. This sequence shows the effect the symbolic roadblock has mentally. This is why the outcome is not shown, because she did not overcome this mental setback yet. The scene represents an inner conflict of the protagonist. The fragmentation of spaces caused by the roadblocks in the film and the connection Rana makes between different parts of town during her journey are symbolically supported in the film by the use of mobile phones. Cellphones and telephones in general are able to make a connection between different places. However, one cannot always get this connection. Rana calls Khalil several times in the early morning but never gets a hold of him. Just like the roadblocks, the phone can block the

18 way between two places. Adding a communication device adds an extra dimension to the fragmentation of spaces. It also shows that the accessibility of certain domains is limited, which refers to the containment of freedom for the Palestinian people. In this film, freedom and restriction are represented in several other ways than the physical and mental roadblock and telephones. Rana’s Wedding implies a dual character of one of its major themes: watching. It enables restriction and control but also resistance for the filmmaker. In two ways this thesis will discuss the film’s watching-theme: for Hany Abu-Assad it is the means of witnessing, for the occupier it is the means of control.

Control

The restricted freedom is what holds Rana back physically, but also psychologically throughout the entire film. This is made clear by Rana literally being watched by men, which ensures feelings and images of being locked and controlled. First of all, as mentioned before, roadblocks control where Palestinians can and cannot go.. Furthermore, Rana, walking alone through the narrow streets of Jerusalem, is being watched by men several times, specifically when she loses her temper. Their gaze insinuates a certain control since each time Rana is being watched, she stops with what she was doing. She kicks a can when angry about not being able to find Khalil, after which three men on a bench stare at her shamelessly. In a square a little later on, she yells out of frustration of Khalil not answering his cellphone. Immediately, six Israeli soldiers point their guns at her and keep looking at her. She is literally being watched every time she shows emotion. The control established by being watched is also achieved by the depiction of security cameras. At one point, Rana and Khalil are sitting on a bench in front of a fountain when a security camera pans to the side to frame them. What we see is the alternation of the diegetic camera onscreen, and the black and white images from out of the onscreen camera framed in the entire film screen. What follows is a sequence of images of the city and Palestinian life in documentary style, as if the viewer is watching security camera tapes, enhanced by the sound of a robot moving when the camera moves its angle. The security camera is scanning the crowd and once it has Khalil and Rana in sight, it stays with them and the camera soon dissolves in the normal film camera. Security footage has the potential to control the mass by watching them when they are mostly unaware of being watched. The cameras have a panoptic characteristic

19 in that way4. Khalil, in front of the fountain, mocks the camera, or whoever is behind it, by acting goofy. By doing so, he tries to regain some control. What this sequence addresses is freedom and imprisonment. The scene when Rana sits in the car and we hear the non-diegetic music as a traumatic recollection is also a representation of being watched and of control as well. The camera circles around the car, while Rana turns inside the vehicle to keep looking the viewer straight in the eye through the car’s windows. She is panicking and in pain, as if locked in the claustrophobic little space of the yellow beetle, as if it was a prison. After a while, a little boy, Khalil and Ramzy, staring at her, slowly ‘wake her up’ from her emotional outburst. Rana’s imprisonment in the car is rather panoptic, for Rana can be watched from all sides of the symbolic prison and is yet obliged to regain control of herself because she is being watched. Another obvious example of this panoptic concept is when Khalil is sitting with Rana’s father, trying to convince him to agree upon their wedding. Rana is outside at that moment, walking around the house she is excluded from. She tries to find a peephole in the closed shutters to see what is happening and listens to their conversation. At this moment, the inside of the house represents the watchtower of the panopticon. Of course, the men do not see her and in that way she is not being watched, but they do discuss her future and about that she does not have any control in this moment. The themes of being free and being limited are enhanced by the cinematography of the entire film. The camera shifts often from a wide angle to a close-up, allowing Rana to either move freely in the entire frame of the wide angle or having her body partially imprisoned in the close-up (still 5 and 6). This use of the cinematography

Still 6 Wide angle shot on Rana Still 5 Close-up on Rana after wide angle shot 4 A panopticon is a prison created by Jeremy Bentham in the late 1700s in which it is possible to watch the prisoners without them knowing if they are being watched at that exact moment. This round building holds prison cells on the outer circular wall and one watchtower in the center of the space where one guard can watch the prisoners all the time without them seeing him. The prisoners always have, in that way, the feeling that they are being - or can be - checked upon. It is a very effective way of controlling the inmates, for they cannot know when they are being watched and so they need to control their own behavior. 20 creates a sense of freedom and a claustrophobic sense of captivity. The ultimatum of either staying in Palestine or leaving given to Rana reflects this same notion. She has a choice which as such implies freedom, but it comes with the restrictions of being a Palestinian in Israel. Giving in to her father and leaving into a world of ‘freedom’, has its limits because it means giving up her home, the place where she belongs. No matter what choice she makes, she will have some freedom and some restrictions. Another motif that addresses being watched and also adds to control, is the use of windows and mirrors. The film starts off with family pictures of Rana’s youth. After the dialogue between Rana and her mother is displayed, we hear a dialogue with Rana and her father that indicates the passing of her mother. Underneath these spoken words are static images of the backs of the people seen in the family photographs and motion images of Rana currently in bed behind it. The photographs frame the scene – creating some sort of window where the static characters look at Rana tossing and turning in her bed. The past is in this way looking at her. On many other occasions, the camera frames Rana from outside a window or looking into a mirror. The framing by windows and mirrors functions as a prison; similar to the way the wide angle alternated with close- ups indicates freedom versus imprisonment. The window allows others to look upon a person (Rana in this film), and the mirror refers to the self-controlling characteristic of a panoptic prison. Rana, watching herself in a mirror at times, looks through a frame upon herself.

Witnessing

The second motif connected to watching is witnessing. First of all, Hany Abu-Assad wants to turn his films into a historical deposition. The film itself in that way is intended to become a product of witness-writing. Hany Abu-Assad mentions in some interviews that he wants to be a witness of the world and of time (IAmFilm 2013). He hopes for his products to become part of history, making himself a historical source and a first-hand witness. As a witness, the filmmaker himself writes a testimony by means of a film. Making a film in the documentary style, as Hany Abu-Assad often does, can be viewed as a testimony of the Palestinian environment. The depiction of the literal (security) camera and the act of viewing also represents the filmmaker’s occupation and therefore himself. The presence of the filmmaker is made clear in the beginning of the film, when one of the first photographs of Rana’s family is actively pulled into focus onscreen. For

21 a filmmaker, his camera is his weapon. Hany Abu-Assad witnesses the Palestinian situation around him and captures it in order to show the world what he witnesses. Filmmaking is his means of resistance, his means to take some control as a witness of what happens around him. Hany Abu-Assad, by creating this testimony, makes the viewers witness the captured images constructed into a fictional narrative. The film as such is a means of witnessing. In Rana’s Wedding, the viewer gets to peek into the life of the controlled Palestinian society. The filmmaker hereby creates a certain idea of the film being the everyday reality of the Palestinian people, because we quite literally look upon the Palestinians through ‘windows’.

Hany Abu-Assad, like other Palestinian filmmakers, tends to tell a personal story, a story about the everyday of Palestinians. This personal story connects to the history of Palestine: being uprooted from one’s home (as Rana leaves her father’s house), and engaging in a forced journey of exile in order to reclaim one’s land (Rana marries so she can stay in Palestine). It is the story of the traumatic past, the present situation, and the intended/wanted future. The trauma of a lost country is represented in Rana’s Wedding through the personal loss of a mother. This construct enables the repeated return of the traumatic memory, depicted as a frightened, emotional Rana and the use of non-diegetic “inner world” music. The film, in different ways, draws a distinction between the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ in order to represent freedom and imprisonment. For example, by using wide-angle shots versus close-ups and with the use of windows. It also depicts this inner and outer by creating a difference between an inner mental state and an outer world of “reality”. This is shown by, for instance, the use of two different musical scores and the roadblock as both a physical delay on the road and a metaphorical setback in the mind. The implanting of a distinction between ‘in’ and ‘out’ underlines the presence of the collective history told through an individual story. For whatever the outer state shows, the inner, although not always visible or very clear, is still there. The theme of watching restricts the inner and therefore the traumatic memory, which is represented by the staring men and resulting in Rana controlling her emotions. In this way the act of watching represses the traumatic recollection of the past.

Chapter Two Paradise Now نآلا ننجلا

Hany Abu Assad’s feature film Paradise Now premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival on the 14th of February 2005. The Palestinian filmmaker co-wrote the script with Dutch producer Bero Beyer. It was shot in Palestinian parts of Israel with a crew of both European and Palestinian people. Paradise Now and Rana’s Wedding are both stories about everyday Palestinians. And even though they both deal with similar themes, Paradise Now shows differs from Rana’s Wedding regarding the drives of the protagonists on their journey and the tone of the resistance. The story is about two childhood friends who have been selected by an unknown Palestinian resistance organization to perform a suicide bombing in Tel-Aviv. Said and Khaled work at a garage and spend time on a hillside overlooking the city of Nablus, living a boring life. Things stir up a bit when Said meets human rights activist Suha, a Palestinian girl who grew up in France and Morocco and had just journeyed back to her father’s homeland. They soon begin to fall in love. One night, Jamal, a member of the resistance group, visits Said - while Khaled in his turn is also visited by a member of the organization - and brings him the news about them being selected for a suicide mission. The organization wants to revenge two killings by planning a bombing on Israelis. After the preparations, the friends go on their way, but somehow the mission immediately fails and Khaled and Said lose each other. Khaled makes it back to the organization, which consequently flees to another location, making Said come back to a deserted place. He starts wandering the streets of his hometown searching for Khaled, still wearing a bomb underneath his clothes. Khaled starts looking around the city for Said as well, also aware of the danger Said is in. Though Said had his doubts at first about the mission, in the end he feels it is the only way for him to change the future of Palestine. Khaled, on the other hand, acted as an excited child when they were selected, but during his search for Said changes his mind and wonders whether this is the right option for them. They both get confronted with their beliefs and doubts by Suha. Suha clearly does not sympathize with violence and wants to keep them both from going through with the suicide bombing.

According to Gertz and Khleifi, Palestinian filmmakers have a tendency to ignore the present by trading it for the memory of the past and the yearning for a bright future (2). However, Abu-Assad, wanting to capture the present situation of the Palestinians in the occupied territories, would like to create films about the present that will sustain time and eventually become part of Palestinian history. Nevertheless, although the film plot only comprises about forty-eight hours and is set in contemporary time in the city of Nablus, the other two categories of temporality - past and future - are embedded in the film as well. The use of time addresses the Palestinian identity, which the film allows the viewer to witness. This second chapter will discuss the way the film expresses the filmmaker’s role and identity in the cause of the Palestinian resistance as a witness of historical events. To do so, the analysis is based on three major themes in the film of which two are similar to the themes discussed in Rana’s Wedding: the journey, which produces experiences of time that show a state of refugees; media technology, which captures and preserves experiences; and witnessing, which acknowledges and addresses the experiences. The title of the film, Paradise Now, refers to two things. It refers to the present, as ‘now’ explicitly states, but also, looking at the first part of the title, to the careless, beautiful place where the first man and woman lived according to the Genesis in the Bible. Furthermore, paradise is the place where, according to various religions, people who have lived a good life go after they die. Also, the title is a reference to Apocalypse Now (1979), and implies in that way that the end of the world is in the very near future. Thus, the title is a collision of the past, present and future, and even though it is in fact not an image, it does refer to Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the crystal-image. Deleuze was actively interested in the fight for de-colonization, like the one in Palestine, and sympathized with the Palestinian struggle. At the core of his support for the Palestinian situation was his regard toward people without a country (Dosse 308). 5 However, I would like to address another concept of Deleuze’s philosophy from Cinema 2: The

5 Deleuze had this interest and got familiar with the Palestinian struggle because of his friend Felix Guattari who introduced him to Elias Sanbar. The chapter “Indians in Palestine” of his book Two Regimes of Madness contains an interview between Deleuze and Sanbar about the deterritorialization and the colonizers’ intension of the disappearance of a people (194-200). The two friends discussed spatial displacement in relation to Palestine. “The outside-space-and-time created by being uprooted [...] had made the Palestinians invisible in a way, a form of dissolution in space and over time” (Dosse 310). Several times Deleuze refers to a people who are landless or in fact missing. “The acknowledgement of a people who are missing”, Deleuze writes in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, “is not a renunciation of political cinema, but on the contrary the new basis on which it is founded, in the third world and for minorities” (217). For further readings on Deleuze’s involvement in the Palestinian fight and his theories about deterrritorialization see: Dosse 2007; Deleuze 2006. 25

Time-Image. This concept is not part of Deleuze’s writings about Palestine, but applies better to Paradise Now and the importance and meaning of the temporal references in the film: that of the crystal-image. Hany Abu-Assad’s film incorporates several crystal-images addressing temporality. It shows the state of the Palestinians drifting through life like refugees, as explained in the first chapter. Gilles Deleuze describes the concept of a crystal-image as past, present and future coming together. To clarify what the crystal-image is according to Deleuze, we must first briefly elucidate his philosophy on time. For Deleuze, time is experienced in a non-linear manner. At the moment that the present passes, the past is always taken into account as one automatically connects memories and events that happened in the past to the present. In that way the past is part of the present. In order to explain the role of the past in the present and how the splitting of time is facilitated, we must turn to Henri Bergson whose work inspired Deleuze. Bergson writes about time in the way it is subjectively perceived. Memory is divided by him into two separate forms: spontaneous memory and habitual memory. Spontaneous memory, through images and representations, deals with the past and is completely virtual. Habitual memory engages with the present. Thus there is a distinction between the virtual pure memory and the actual which is mere perception. The past exists simultaneously with the present and the upcoming future splits into a preserved past and a passing present. The mind constantly makes linkages between past and present which creates the subjective perceiving of duration. Deleuze states that these so-called “internal circuits”, when incorporated in cinema, show us how we move in time (Deleuze 2). In cinema Deleuze recognizes different images6. Two fundamental images that relate to the perception of time are the movement-image and the time-image. Movement-images can be seen as habitual memory; the time-image as spontaneous memory. What the movement-image characterizes is that the movement emerges from a rational linkage between cause and effect. This cause-effect linkage occurs in an chronological way. According to Deleuze, after World War II, the cinema’s image mutated into time-images, whose linkage appeared less rational. For time-images, time functions in a way that temporalities are represented by subjective states, such as dreams and fantasies, that refer to the past and future. “The time-image tracks a

6 Deleuze’s study of cinema contains a taxonomy of different so-called images. For instance the explained movement-, time- and crystal image from this chapter, but also perception-, affection- and action images which are part of the movement-image. See: Deleuze Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. 26 cinematic lapse from active extension into the intensity of the brain, memory, and thought” (Flaxman 6). Images do not necessarily follow each other chronologically in the plot, like memories and fantasies do not in the mind. A crystal-image is part of the time-image, where it captures the movement of the past, present and future in the same picture as a representation of the splitting of time. What comprises the purest crystal- image is when the “actual optical image crystallizes with its own virtual image” (Deleuze 2), thus when movement- and time-image come together. The crystal-image is in that way a coexistence of the present and past. The crystal-image, representing multiple temporalities, also brings about a certain confusion of time. There is not only the here and now, but also at the same time the past happenings and the forecasts of the future. This collision and confusion causes a certain excess of time, or timelessness, which enhances the fact that the characters in the film are refugees throughout their lives. This fleeing is represented in the film by the journey theme.

Journey

Although the film takes place in one location, namely the city of Nablus, the main characters are all journeying throughout the story, either physically or psychologically. This is different than in Rana’s Wedding. As explained in the previous chapter, someone who makes a journey is engaging in a certain action that brings about time and produces experiences. The physical journeys the characters make takes them, and the viewer, to places in Nablus and Israel that tell something about the past and current times. But there are also psychological journeys made by the characters of the film while on their physical journey. The characters undergo their journeys all in a slightly different way. Said makes a physical journey through the streets of Nablus to find either the organization, or Khaled. While he is traveling, he also undergoes a psychological journey that leads to his accepting of his fate. He started his journey together with Khaled to go on a mission, but they each took another turn and parted for a bit. They are totally estranged from one another when they meet again due to their individual mental changes. Khaled is also in search of his friend after they have gotten lost. He as well undergoes a mental journey, doubting what he was going to do. The journeys the characters make differ from the journey Rana made in Rana’s Wedding. There is less

clarity about a goal or deadline Khaled and Said would have to abide by. Their journeys are more focused on the confusion of the direction: what do they need to do in order to resist occupation and what is the symbolic path they need to take in their lives. They have to deal with these issues which adds to the state of refugees. The idea of the journey-motif in Paradise Now represents the refugee ideology. In the film it is clear both in the mental as well as the physical journeys of the characters that they are drifting timelessly and are confused about their goals. This is mainly because of their traumatic past, which is among other things made clear by the collision of temporalities, shown through crystal-images. On a few occasions in the film, Said walks through an abandoned part of town with only ruins on the side of the road (stills 7 and 8). These places without people reflect past events. The ruined buildings as a result of bombings and shootings are amplified by the silence and the solitude of the character walking through; as if it has been like this for a long time. These scenes aim at the time when the destruction happened, at the war that has been fought in this part of town, but also metaphorically at the duration of the occupation. It seems normal that Said walks through the ruins, no longer noticing that a house should actually have walls standing up. In these scenes where Said journeys through deserted places in town, the past collides with the present as the ruins represent previous bombings. The fact that the remnants of the buildings have not been cleared and rebuild shows a certain time-stand-still. It depicts the past event preserved in the image of the ruins as Said walks along them in the passing present. Another moment of crystalized temporality presents itself when Khaled and Said are sitting in the car, geared with bombs, on their way to Tel-Aviv to perform the mission. The camera shows the Palestinian nature from behind the glass of the passing car. Mountains and fields of green fill the screen. Mountains, according to Hamid

Still 7 Ruined buildings in Paradise Now Still 8 Ruined buildings in Paradise Now

Naficy, “express nostalgia for an authentic “world before” and the desire to return to that world” (160). Said is staring out the window at this scenery on his way to the suicide that will lead to him entering paradise. What he is about to do, in his eyes, shall also bring Palestinians closer to owning the land he is now watching. The window functions here as a mirror through which Said is confronted with the scenery. The land that used to be owned by Palestinians is shown and represents times in the past and the will to go back to that time in the future. Not only are the past and future visible in the images of the film, the characters talk about the past and their intended futures as well. For instance, another crystal- image occurs when Said meets his mother for tea. He is asking about the past, about his father. His mother responds: “the past is over”. She then states that she wants to predict Said’s future in his teacup. He longs to know about the past, whereas his mother wants to see his future, all of this taking place in the present. Remarkable is that Said’s mother does not see his future, because he puts his thumb in the tea remnants. His future is blank, foretelling his final destiny. It also indicates his belief that if he stays alive, there will be no prosperity for him, no fair opportunities for his future. This is the same reason why Hany Abu-Assad left Palestine about thirty years ago: the motivation of his own journey.

Media technology

Where the journey-motif addresses the concept of time and timelessness in the history- writing goal of the filmmaker, the second motif characterizes the capturing and preserving part of creating a historical testimonial. Hany Abu-Assad’s use of technological devices is quite obvious and says in different ways something about time, the content of the film, and the filmmaker himself. The use of the media technologies shows a certain self-reflexivity of the filmmaker. In using recording devices he addresses his own occupation, and explores the role of films and filmmakers. On several occasions we see recording devices and -material on screen. Said has his picture taken with an old camera, for example, but also before Khaled and Said are going to perform the suicide mission, they tape a martyr’s statement on film camera. One thing almost all the artifacts of media technology in Paradise Now have in common, is that they are old and most of the time malfunctioning. Some devices

29 exhibited in the film show other times because they are so old. The photo camera with which Said’s picture is taken does not represent the modernity of 2005-societies everywhere else in the world, and the stereo installations in cars are still working on cassettes instead of CDs. It is as if time has stopped in another era. Even the filmmaker himself used 35mm film to shoot the movie instead of digitally. In his own words, this is to avoid getting the same images as television news. The malfunctioning of the media technologies is shown, for example, by the film camera Khaled and Said’s testimonies are recorded with. It fails to work several times. The Palestinian documentary Five Broken Cameras (2011) of Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi also addresses this idea of cameras and the meaning that is attached to their brokenness7. Metaphorically, the defective props refer to the Palestinian situation, the difficulty to function in life under occupation, not able to afford reparation. As mentioned before, media technologies are characterized by their ability to capture and preserve in order to transmit. At one point in the film, Khaled and Said are stating their final words in front of a camera. By referring to film gear, the film is representing its own makers. Seen in that light, the malfunctioning of the devices makes a statement about capturing events on film. It is better explained by another example. Earlier in the film, Said goes to a shop to have his picture taken. The photographer moves him a few inches to the front and then to the right, trying to make the picture perfect. Said has a grumpy look in his eyes and the photographer asks him to smile. He even says, “if you do not smile, there will be no picture”. The photographer only wants pretty, happy photos. A smiling Said, however, would not be the truth; he does not want to show any happiness. What happens here is an indication of realism, but it also defines a choice the filmmaker made. It is generally hard to depict horrific events. Abu-Assad does not show any violence or direct interaction with the occupiers in his film. The Israeli’s are almost never in sight and the acts of occupation are merely implicitly present. For example, when Suha in the beginning of the film enters Nablus, she is soon stopped by a roadblock forcing her to walk along a side path. We then hear a bomb explode and everybody ducks and hurries along. By whom the bomb was set off and where it landed is never shown, but the sound and the reaction are perceptible. The

7 Five Broken Cameras is a documentary about a Palestinian man, Emad, who got a camera and started to film everything in his village. The town decided to march every week to the border of the village to peacefully protest against a wall the occupiers wanted to place there and Emad filmed it all. During these protests five of his cameras broke as a result of Israeli violence, attaching the malfunctioning of the camera to the actions of the occupiers. 30 viewer immediately knows the status quo. The photographer’s dilemma is one that a filmmaker has as well. Abu-Assad chose to show the Palestinian situation, not by depicting violence, but only by suggesting it. However, like Said’s unhappy face, he cannot avoid it. The failure of the camera to capture the statement of Khaled also represents this difficulty to capture the horrors that occur. Once Khaled is finally standing in front of a working camera, Jamal’s eating distracts him, as if the thought of people eating popcorn in front of the screen watching the atrocities of the occupation makes no sense. In the same way, Suha is almost disgusted by the idea of people renting collaborators- and martyrs videos for entertainment. The goal for Hany Abu-Assad is capturing the current situation of Palestinians and create a historical document. However, the film shows the struggle how this is supposed to be done. The other characteristic of media technology is the ability to preserve for transmission. First of all, in order to create a historical document that can be preserved; the film accomplishes a certain realism in order to establish the Palestinian situation. One way to accomplish this realism is found in the way the film incorporates music and sound. All the sounds in the film are diegetic. The music behind the scenes is incorporated in the onscreen action by musical devices. For example, when Said and Khaled are sitting on the hillside overlooking the city, Said puts a cassette in a tape recorder after which music fills the speakers. Once we leave the scene, the music stops. The only occasions we hear music is in cars or in a shop because tape recorders are playing. This incorporation of the music in the diegetic world gives a certain authenticity to the film. Another example of realism in the film is the way the filmmaker, like in Rana’s Wedding, chose to implement some sort of documentary style whenever a character is in a car. The camera alternates from the person in the car and his expressions, to a point of view out of the car showing the everydayness of the streets of Nablus. In this way, the film camera creates a window into the current daily lives of Palestinians looking out of the window of the car.

Secondly, the documenting of events means that they have been captured and recorded, and that there is the possibility to re-view them in the movie-theatre or our homes. Canadian-Armenian filmmaker Atom Egoyan has said that the “containers we use to store experience express as much meaning as the experiences themselves” (Burwell and Tschofen 21). The containers Hany Abu-Assad uses, like film camera’s, photo camera’s, and musical devices, address not only his own role as a filmmaker, but also the act of viewing by spectators. In several other films Hany Abu-Assad makes use

31 of the film camera as a motif. At one point in Rana’s Wedding the film shows a security camera taping Rana and her fiancé, alternated with the images shot from the camera’s point of view. The same technique is used in a short film for a human rights initiative: A Boy, a Wall, and a Donkey (2008). Three young boys seek a camera to make a movie of their own. They find the eye of an intercom camera and an Israeli security camera, because they do not have access to any other means. Among other things, this reflects the filmmaker’s own task of documenting and quite literally we enter his line of sight. The same applies to the statements of Khaled and Said. They talk into the onscreen camera, but seen from the front, they look the viewer right in the eye, as if we are the onscreen camera. The filmmaker’s camera and the diegetic prop become one, creating deeper levels in the film, addressing the viewer quite literally. This act of recording and documenting addresses the viewer. The act of viewing provides an opportunity for the audience to be a witness of the captured event in Paradise Now.

Witnessing

Media technologies enable the act of witnessing. Hany Abu-Assad captures the fictional events and allows the viewer to become an indirect witness in some sort. As mentioned before, he tries to accomplish realism in Paradise Now in order to establish a document of the Palestinian situation. He does so by, for example, the use of diegetic music and sound, and documentary style pictures of the Palestinian situation on the street. However, a political view that tries to make the viewer a witness of the Palestinian- Israeli situation is embedded in the film as well, and provides a counter history to that of the Israeli’s. The film shows that there is not just one side to a story, and also not one option for people in society. For example, in the beginning of the film the spectator sees Said working in the garage on a car. The owner of the car is standing right next to him, arguing that the just fixed bumper is crooked. Said disagrees and a dispute arises, in which Khaled soon joins. After showing the owner with a level that the bumper is not crooked but that the car merely stands on lean ground, the man still insists they are wrong and asks Said to get his boss. Nouri Gana explains that this sequence represents the dispute between Israel and Palestine (27). Even though it is proven that the man is wrong, he - representing Israel - takes the position as being wronged, and Said and

Khaled - representing Palestine - are in the end being punished. “While it must seem prima facie quite irrelevant to a film about two potential suicide bombers, this sequence poignantly captures the historical logic of violence, its genesis in concrete grievances and in the everyday travails to sustain dignity in the face of an adversarial power” (28). Once again, this scene connects the film to a certain temporality. It also suggests something else. Even after showing the car owner that the bumper is indeed straight, the man keeps his foot down and compares the bumper to the crookedness of Said’s father who was a collaborator. Later in the film Said explains that it was not even the fault of his father, he was weak and the colonizers used his weakness against him to make him a collaborator. This shows that one cannot judge anything in black and white. Just like the car owner is in a way right that the bumper is crooked, because it looks crooked as a result of being on lean ground. The man is both wrong and right. The same goes for the entire film’s narrative. Abu-Assad tells a story about suicide terrorists, a controversial subject in a period only a few years after 9/11, and tries to humanize them. He gives the bombers a face and tells the story from the terrorists’ point of view. By doing so, the film is also showing another side of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hereby the claim is made that there are more sides to a history as well, making the viewer a witness to the Palestinian one. In addition to this, the characters are all struggling with the different options they have in the fight against the occupation. For Said it turns out that he can see only one solution: suicide. The film displays the various paths different Palestinians take: collaborators, martyrs, suicide bombers, resistance organizations, human right groups. There are many options for people to try to resist or live under the occupiers. The film tries to express its neutrality by making a rental video about collaborator cost just as much as a martyr’s video. They all fight for the same cause, but, as the film also expresses, it is not clear which fight? is the right one. In this statement lies also the filmmaker’s quest for his own role in the resistance against occupation. To him, witnessing and capturing are a filmmaker’s means of contributing to the fight. Furthermore, he contributes by making the viewer a witness as they watch the film. This is also reflected in the documentary Five Broken Cameras where the filmmaker refers to his act of filming as witnessing. The film addresses the means of a filmmaker’s resistance. The filmmaker Emad Burnat of Five Broken Cameras feels the need to take his camera whenever something occurs in his town. With his camera he fights the occupiers, just as another man’s words or fists do. It becomes a weapon. For Hany Abu-

Assad his talents of storytelling and capturing are his weapons against the resistance. This is addressed by the onscreen cameras. They enable witnessing which is the result of the weapon’s action.

The three themes together is exhibited in the supporting role of the character Suha. Her persona confronts and represents the filmmaker’s own identity and role as a Palestinian. Suha is an international traveler representing a worldlier view on things. At the beginning of the film she enters by coming into the city through a checkpoint. She speaks the Arab language but with an accent, making her an outsider, but also indicating Hany’s different tongues8. At the start of the film she ends the journey that brought her back to Palestine. However, a new journey starts that forces her to figure out what her role as a human rights activist can mean for the Palestinian cause. She meets Said at the garage because her car broke down. The broken car makes her unable to travel to other places. She did not intend to leave when she entered the city, but is also literally forced to stay because of the broken car. She enters a world that she is not familiar with. This makes that she is in a situation where time stands still because she is not able to physically move forward, and psychologically unable to figure out what her contribution can be for Palestine. At one point she freaks out, yelling: “what am I doing here!” She complains that everything is broken and messed up in Palestine, but also shows the struggle to find her purpose there. Suha is a woman of the world. She has seen things Palestinians have no access to. She addresses Hany Abu-Assad’s occupation and use of media technologies by exposing her knowledge of cinema. At one point in the film she is talking to Said and tries to figure out what he likes. She asks him what kind of movies he likes. This sequence shows her knowledge of culture and cinema, but it also expresses something about the role of films. For Palestinians, films are scarcely available. Said tells Suha that the only movie-theater in town was blown up years ago. Suha quite literally witnesses all the things that are wrong with the Palestinian situation as an outsider. Although she is Palestinian by blood, she is a foreigner who does not wear a headscarf, lives in a big fancy house and is astonished by what she finds in her father’s land. In this way she also represents the viewer of the film, since Palestinians generally do not go to movie-theatres. Moreover, they do not have the power over the distribution channels (Gertz and Khleifi 34-5).

8 See for more readings about the meaning of language to an accented filmmaker: Naficy 22.

Paradise Now shows the filmmaker’s identity and role in the fight against Palestinian resistance through the journey (which shows the state Palestinians are in as refugees that brings about a certain timelessness), media technology (which captures and preserves documents in time but issues the difficulties of addressing certain events), and witnessing (which addresses the situation captured and preserved, making the filmmaker and the viewer a participant of the documented event and creating a certain idea about histories). Abu-Assad tries to use his ability to make films and tell stories in order to capture the Palestinian situation as a weapon in the resistance. He is still dealing, however, with the way he is supposed to depict certain aspects of the occupation. For the protagonist in Rana’s Wedding the reason for her undertaking a journey is paradoxically to stay in Palestine. This story refers to the wish of returning to the Palestinian nation owned by their own people. The film deals with not knowing how to accomplish the return. In Rana’s Wedding the wedding theme creates a symbol for the hopeful resistance and the entire film enhances this symbolic fight. In Paradise Now, the wedding theme does come back, but it is in the form of a disguise from the occupiers whom the protagonists want to bomb. The hopeful symbol of rebuilding their nation turns into a fake play/an act. This in turn enables the harsh act of violence: hope becomes revenge. The journey shows that everybody is searching in his or her own way what the resistance should be. Not knowing the right path makes the characters goalless and transient for they do not know where they are going, nor where they came from. Besides that, the camera that tried to control the Palestinians in Rana’s Wedding changed into a camera that could help them and work for them. Trying to find out how one should capture the whole situation and the acts of occupation and resistance in order to show it to the world. In conclusion, the journey shows a state of timelessness, media technology is used as a weapon and witnessing displays another side of the story.

Chapter Three Omar رمع

Eight years after the completion of Paradise Now, Hany Abu-Assad finished his latest film Omar (2013). This film differs from Abu-Assad’s other films in several ways and forms a break in both the filmmaker’s oeuvre and the general Palestinian cinema. This is due to the increased experience of the filmmaker, both professionally and personally, as well as because of changes in the Palestinian situation. Between finishing Paradise Now and creating Omar, Hany Abu-Assad had moved to the United States to work. However, this was not as successful as he had hoped. In Palestine the second intifada came to an end during this time with the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Political movements started to fight each other instead of the occupiers. Both changes led to the distinction between Abu-Assad’s films. This third chapter discusses how Hany Abu-Assad’s last film Omar differs in expressing the Palestinian history and identity in order to establish a historical testimony. First of all, in addition to directing it, Omar is the first feature film for which Hany Abu-Assad wrote the entire screenplay himself. Due to the paranoia and trust issues he felt on set in Palestine when filming Paradise Now, he wrote Omar as a very personal film about these feelings (IAmFilm 2013). Secondly, Omar is entirely produced and financed by Arab and mainly Palestinian funds. This is fairly uncommon since there are not many Palestinian film institutions that can establish this (Gertz and Khleifi 33). Most Palestinian films are, as a result, internationally produced and funded. Another major distinction between Omar and the other films in Hany Abu-Assad's oeuvre is the depiction of violence. For the first time, beating and harassment are shown directly, instead of the more indirect suggestion of the Israeli’s presence in his other films; Rana’s Wedding and Paradise Now9.

9 After the completion of Paradise Now Hany Abu-Assad moved to Hollywood and directed a film called The Courier (2012) which takes place in New Orleans and in general has nothing to do with the Palestinian situation. This film flopped internationally and is nothing like his movies set in Palestine, however it does show violence. It could be interesting to see this 2012 Hollywood film as a certain preview or exercise for the depiction of violence in Omar.

Still 10 Wounds of Omar in one scene ... Still 9 ... have disappeared in the next scene.

Perhaps most interesting about this film in relation to the other two analyzed in this thesis is that the time span of the story is not just a day or two. The actual time is not given as clearly in Omar as it was in his earlier films but takes months to years. The only information the viewer gets about the time frame is that Omar does not see his friend Amjad for about two years after Tarek’s death, for it is stated in dialogue. The passing of time is shown through the healing or gaining of wounds between scenes due to violence. Omar is beaten in prison and him having no injuries in a next scene in that same prison indicates that he has been there a while (stills 9 and 10). In this way the wounds help create a sense of time. The changes in Omar contribute to a development in the general Palestinian cinema as well. Gertz and Khleifi defined four different periods in Palestinian cinema. The fourth period covers the 1980s till the early 2000s since they finished their book in 2003. Omar was completed ten years later and does not entirely fit into the last period they describe. This last period is characterized by the land as an important symbol of Palestinian nationality and identity. “Filmmakers tended to tell stories of the actual land, the real place and the life being played out there, rather than evoking it out of the traumatic, abstract, perpetually repetitive revival of its destruction” (4). The Palestinian films were inclined to depict the past in the present and to revive the lost harmony of national identity. The films - both explicitly and in-explicitly - concurrently preserve different levels of reality through the fusion of the everyday and the traumatic past, which are the realities of the present; the reality of the past; and that of the past within the present (5). The directors of the fourth period captured ordinary Palestinian life through personal memories by means of interviews, individual histories, and testimonies. “The attempt to construct the nation’s unity through recognition of the heterogeneity of Palestinian society and to shape the flowing time of memory instead of historical time was disrupted to a large extent by the two intifadas” (191). The

37 consequences of the second intifada assured that the more the economic, political, and social situation worsened, the more Palestinian films endeavored to establish a national unity (6). For one, the Palestinian cinema represented a history starting from the past towards the future. This is very clearly seen in Rana’s Wedding’s entire structure - which is made in the years right after the outbreak of the second intifada – through the journey Rana makes from leaving her father’s home towards building her own Palestinian home. Secondly, filmmakers held on to images that recreated the past and its loss in the present. They strove to unite the heterogeneous nature of Palestinian society and to produce shared national symbols that would lead to a collective fight. This is seen in Paradise Now, which addresses and displays different paths Palestinian people take in their society. Paradise Now, however, was produced right after Gertz and Khleifi wrote their book. The film, as the two writers state in the epilogue, already shows an evolution by being entirely preoccupied with the boredom of the present. This slow time is part of the beginning of Paradise Now and is depicted through familiar images and symbols from Palestinian cinema, such as lines at roadblocks and smoking a water pipe. According to the writers, it is a time ready to explode in all of the fourth period films. “Yet, while in the other films the camera or symbolic and even surrealistic absurd images enact the blast, in Paradise Now the detonation is an actual suicide attack” (194). However, as the goal of the suicide marks an act resulting from a boredom ready to explode, the depiction of the actual “explosion” does not happen. In Paradise Now the literal busrt is only suggested, never shown. Omar on the other hand takes it a step further and really puts the bursts into imagery by the direct depiction of violence and the killing of the Israeli handler. Moreover, Gertz and Khleifi argue that Paradise Now is only engaged with the now. This is true in some way but the drive, as I explained in chapter two, arises from the past. Past and future are still part of the film. Though with Omar it seems like the past is less visible and the future is soon disabled. As a result, Omar can do nothing but engage in the boredom of a hopeless life as a transient refugee without direction in the present time. The past is only visible in the film when Omar looks back on the occurrences of the first half of the story at the end of the film. The very passive state of boredom – or hopelessness – becomes active in the end with the so-called explosion. This time the act of shooting Rami, the Israeli handler, is filmed right before the screen cuts to a black screen - indicating the end of the film. For the first time, the actual explosion is depicted instead of merely suggested.

With Omar we have therefore entered a new period after the fourth period described by Gertz’ and Khleifi. The unity which filmmakers tended to create evolved into a depiction of the fragmentation of Palestinian society and geography. At the beginning of the film, Omar defies a big wall that symbolizes the occupation by climbing it effortlessly. In this way he unites the different spaces and creates a harmonized one, like Rana in Rana’s Wedding did as well. As the story passes, the friendship of the three characters in Omar is questioned and we witness ruptures in society that bring about distrust and betrayal. The unity the audience so desperately wanted during the second intifada has gone and the film starts to reflect a fragmented society. This Palestinian film therefore not only shows the conflict between Israel and Palestine through its direct depiction and presence, but also conflicts within Palestinian society. In the end Omar is not able to climb the wall anymore and therefore harmonizing the segmented geography – the fragmented spaces created by roadblocks and the wall - has become harder as well. In Paradise Now, a variety of the society’s different options were showed. However, in that film, all the characters wanted to achieve the same main goal - the regaining of the land - which united all the characters. This unifying goal is overshadowed by something else in the 2013 film. It is overshadowed by the urge and drive to gain information. This is the main theme in the overall complex storyline. The film tells the story of a young man named Omar, who on a regular basis climbs a big wall that separates different parts of the city to go see his Palestinian love interest Nadia, the younger sister of one of his best friends Tarek. While Omar on the one hand is exchanging handwritten love-letters with Nadia and is secretly planning a future with her, he is also preparing an attack on Israelis with Tarek and their other friend Amjad. After Amjad shoots an Israeli soldier, Omar gets caught by the Israeli police and is taken into custody. He is then tricked into confessing he is part of the mission, and forced to give in Tarek - whom the Israelis mistakenly suspect to have killed the soldier. Omar is set free to collaborate with the occupiers. However, he plans an ambush with Tarek and the resistance organization instead, after they find a rat in their midst. Unfortunately the ambush fails, probably due to another traitor. Omar is caught again and returns to prison. There he is beaten up by the torturer, but also by Palestinian prisoners who believe he is a snitch. He is given another chance by his Israeli handler to bring the Israeli police Tarek and is set free with a tracking device. Once he is out he notices that his imprisonments and subsequent release have led to

39 suspicions among his Palestinian friends and even Nadia. Dealing with both the Israelis and the Palestinians and not knowing whom to trust, Omar finds out that Amjad betrayed them all because he impregnated Nadia. Although in pain and angry, Omar and Amjad tell Tarek of Amjad’s mistake, but in an unexpected struggle Tarek is killed. For the sake of Nadia’s reputation, Tarek’s body is given to the Israelis and Amjad marries Nadia. Omar and Amjad part ways and do not see each other again. A few years later Omar is forced to go to Amjad after he gets a visit of his Israeli handler. The handler blackmails him so that he will help the Israeli’s again. He finds Nadia alone with her two children at the house and discovers that Nadia was not pregnant at all at the time. Amjad had been lying to him all along. The content of the film differs from Rana’s Wedding and Paradise Now in two respects. First of all, it uses differs in the way the Palestinian historical narrative is told through the personal story. Secondly, it differs on its major theme knowledge. Instead of the watching-motif of the other two films, this last film is concerned with gaining information and having knowledge as means of power. The disruption of the unity in Omar is due to this power. According to these two arguments the chapter will be set out.

Historical narrative

Hany Abu-Assad uses temporality a little differently in Omar than in the other two films. The film engages more with Omar's present, driven by the future home he is going to build with Nadia. In the first part of the film Omar has a clear vision of the future: spend it with Nadia and build a home. His actions are driven by that image instead of by recollections of a past trauma. For example, the scene where he tries on a suit in a store does not connect to any other scene in the film. Instead it tells the audience something about his drive to use it for his own future wedding10. When that future is made impossible to achieve, he spends his days in the bakery, working. In this way the transient state of being and the timelessness of a life of refugees is achieved. The inability to grasp the passing time in the film enhances the feeling of being a refugee.

10 After seeing Paradise Now we know the connotation Palestinians have with suits. Said and Khaled both wore suits and all the Palestinians they came across asked if they were going to a wedding. Besides, that was also their cover, their disguise. 40

The journey in this films represents fleeing more so than the other films discussed. As a refugee in his own city, Omar runs from the police and tries to outsmart them on multiple occasions. His escapes are characterized by the roads he travels: the narrow streets demarcated by high walls. It seems as if he cannot go anywhere in those streets but he makes it through anyway. The most significant wall is the actual wall that separates his part of town from the part of town where Nadia lives. He climbs it several times effortlessly. However, when he tries a final time when Amjad and Nadia have been married for a few years he is no longer able to climb over. The fact that he does not have the strength to cross it marks his lack of purpose, for love (and a future) used to give him the strength to get over that wall the first few times. Being an exile in your own city is something all the characters experience in the three films. Omar runs away and goes on a journey to be free; free in his own country. He literally says to Nadia that he does not want to leave the country when she does. His journey of fleeing, like Rana’s, needs to paradoxically result in staying. Every film shows that the characters become more exilic. In Omar there is no deadline he has to abide by, time is even not seizable, but the goal of his journey is freedom and that is why he flees. The film leaves Omar futureless and hurt, living isolated in his timeless, hopeless life. That is the picture the film gives the viewer to witness: the present circumstances Palestinians have to face. While in the beginning Omar is driven by the future, later he is crippled by the past. In other words, the first part of the film lacks a past, the second part leaves him without a future. The first two films referred to the past to show the historical trauma which causes pain and is the drive for present-day actions. In Omar the depicted violence shows the actual pain. Thus, by keeping the Israelis absent from the earlier films, the depiction of the historical trauma was the only way to clarify the Palestinian everyday situation. Because of the fact that the occupiers and their actions are viewed directly in Omar, the film engages even more with the now. Even though the film engages more with the now and the plot does not explicitly refer to a past trauma, the structure of Omar’s story does reflect the Palestinian traumatic history. The first part of the film that represents normal life with hopeful elements of love and the wish to build a Palestinian home, reflects the memory of a utopian Palestinian past when there was no occupation and national unity. The second part, when Omar is being chased by policemen, imprisoned, and forced to work with the enemy, represents Palestinians being uprooted from their homes by the arrival of the Israelis. Omar is literally forced to flee from his house one time when the Israeli police

41 invades his home. After Omar loses Nadia and his friends, he enters a life of boredom without any prospects. A life that is common under the occupation. In the last part of the film, he organizes an attack on Rami, and therefore achieves the explosion that is stirring in Palestinian contemporary society. In 2007, two Palestinian movements, Hamas and Fatah, were violently fighting each other instead of the occupiers, resulting in the disruption of Palestinian unity. These events could possibly add to the depiction of the fragmented society in Abu-Assad’s latest film.

Knowledge

The theme of watching in Rana’s Wedding and Paradise Now is in Omar replaced by knowing. The film Omar deals with the value of information and knowledge and uses it as means of control. The characters are mainly occupied with either gaining or withholding information. Throughout the film characters are exposed to or engaged with truth and lies and fiction and reality. This adds to having true or false information. Hany Abu-Assad himself had some experience with these themes when he made the documentaries Ford Transit and Nazareth 2000. Some of the scenes were staged which was not well received by audiences and film institutions. Hany uses a combination of fiction and reality/ documentary in almost all of his films (both features and documentaries) and in this way plays with the boundaries between real and staged information. Omar too combines fiction with reality in letters he writes to Nadia. In that way the protagonist is connected to the filmmaker. Gaining information is accomplished by the use of communication devices. The communication through letters is one option for Omar to get in touch with people. He exchanges hand-written letters with Nadia several times. Other means of communication are present in the film as well. The payphone on the street represents a terra incognito for Omar: a place where he can keep in touch with Rami as well as the way to stay in contact with his friends. It therefore also symbolizes the fragmented society. It is not the means of communication or the device that is important, but rather the way information is transferred. It enhances the theme of trust and paranoia in the film. It seems like the Israelis know everything about everybody. Their intelligence sources are really good, although we do not always know how they get their information. Nadia and Omar only exchange letters when they see each other, but

42 somehow the Israeli handler knows some of its content. Another way Omar transfers messages is by a hole in a wall of a building with a sign containing “tic-tac” on it. He and his friends leave letters there if they need each other. The “tic-tac” on the sign is intriguing, because Rami eats this candy all the time, which indicates that the enemy has access to secret messages. Knowledge means power in this film. The knowledge and information different people have, helps them to gain some leverage or control over other people. In the complex plot, no one knows who to trust as anyone can be a traitor. Spying, collaborating and betrayal are part of the Palestinian society and Omar is torn between whether he should trust his friends, and doubting his own role. The knowledge that Rami has about Nadia gives him the power to control Omar. In turn, the knowledge that Omar has about the real shooter of the Israeli soldier gives him leverage and some power over Rami, whose trust he wins and in the end tricks into giving him a gun. This control adds to the concept of imprisonment which is also part of this third movie. Even though Omar gets out of prison, he is never truly free. First because he is Palestinian in Israel, but also because he is torn between his friends, his love, and the handler’s pressure who all have different information about him, and Omar about them. His journeys through the high-walled streets also give a indicate a type of imprisonment. Moreover, the act of watching in order to gain information adds to the motif of imprisonment. In this film, however, it is only Omar we see that watches others. He follows Nadia and watches her from a distance talking to Amjad. This peeking into her life is what the Israelis do too: spying and following are the concepts connected to controlling by means of knowledge. The heterogeneity of Palestinian society is caused by knowledge and the power it brings about. Hany shows the fragmentation of the society instead of the united community realized in fourth period films of Palestinian cinema. In the story, looking at the Palestinians alone, the fear of collaborators and the issues brought about by not knowing if one is telling the truth, creates ruptures in the unity of – first of all – the Palestinian resistance organization. Besides, after a while Tarek loses trust in his two friends and once Omar is caught again after their failed ambush, Omar suspects and distrusts Amjad. Therefore, the story entails a complex network of different people sharing and withholding information from enemy and friends without anybody knowing who is talking to whom or whether information is being intersected by others or not. One does not know if one can be trusted or not and everybody can be a traitor working

43 for the other side. Even Omar, at one point, seems to work for both Rami and Tarek as a result of not knowing whom to trust: Rami or his friends. Knowledge has a dual character of being both friend and enemy. It can help to create some leverage in the fight if one has vital information, but it can also cause issues and damage at home. This ambiguity arises on several other fronts as well. The film itself is quite ambiguous. On one hand it is an intense love story that shows a strong and trustworthy friendship. On the other hand the love changes into a trauma of a loss of love and a future, and the bond of friends becomes betrayal. The two sides of this film – love, friendship and trauma, and betrayal - are closely connected. This is turned into imagery nicely with the scenery behind the public payphone where Omar occasionally calls his friends or the Israeli handler (still 11). Behind the phone lie many ruins of demolished houses and buildings. Amid these ruins stands a perfectly modern billboard stating the words Planting hope: social responsibility of Paltel Group – a Palestinian company for communication services. The contrast of the modern billboard placed amongst the ruins is quite remarkable and similar to the contrast and interconnectedness of the before mentioned different themes of the film. The viewer witnesses in this film the friendly and nice part of Palestinian society, but also the tragic part, which seem really close to each other. The control and power gained by knowledge addresses the act of witnessing as well, but in a slightly different way than in Rana’s Wedding and Paradise Now. Those

Still 11 Public payphone with billboard in Omar

44 who witness something have the knowledge. Cinema is also a means of communication. The information a film contains is transferred to an audience. On the one hand we receive the same information Omar does, we know what he knows and can be surprised by plot twists. On the other hand we can get information about the situation Palestinian people in general have to face. In that way the film is less occupied with the act of watching, but more with the result of watching and the act of knowing. The information the viewer gets is way more specific than the filmmaker’s earlier films. Abu-Assad has evolved his struggle with showing violence. Omar is his first Palestinian film that depicts actual beating and harassment. When Omar is captured he hangs with his hands tied up to the ceiling in a dark room. His naked body in a spotlight to a dark background imitates a carcass in the slaughterhouse (still 12). Bullying and beating are directly shown in the film, other than the other films Hany Abu-Assad made. The presence of the Israelis is also very direct and more obvious than in the previous films where they were basically absent. The interaction between Israelis and Palestinians is depicted mainly through the relationship of Omar and Rami. Interestingly, the handler and Omar have a complex relationship. Sometimes there seems to exist a father-son bond. Like with the modern billboard among the ruins, comradery and hate exist right next to each other. The two are stuck in some sort of game in order to gain each other’s trust. The putting into images of the Israelis and the literal violence is a choice Hany Abu-Assad made and is related to his changed look upon the role of the filmmaker. Hany bases his film on research, interviews and personal experience to get truthful stories. In that, this new Palestinian cinematic period does not differ from the fourth

45 Still 12 Omar in the torturer's room period. The change is mainly visible in the exhibition of violence and the occupiers, and the fragmented society caused by the main theme of knowledge. The film is much more direct and less hopeful.

Omar reflects the collective Palestinian history through the structure of the individual story of its protagonist. The Palestinian traumatic past of losing their land and becoming refugees in their own country is represented by Omar’s lost love and being controlled by Israelis and Palestinian resistance organizations. The past trauma is therefore created within the film and not something that the characters are reminded of through recollections. In this way the individual story is engaged with the present even more so than the other two films and the entire story is a representation of the Palestinian history of occupation. Omar is a story told and depicted through other means than the previous films. First of all the filmmaker focused on the knowledge-theme instead of the watching- theme. It refers to the importance of the content of the film instead of exploring the role of film, filmmaker and audience. When Hany Abu-Assad went to Hollywood he found out that the people were more concerned with the business of filmmaking than with the content of the film and life itself. He did not like this about the film society there. If it did teach him anything, it would be that his disliking of the Hollywood ideology showed him to care more about the information of the film and therefore the knowledge the film brings to his audience. On the other hand, the changed situation in Palestine, with different Palestinians fighting each other, led to losing faith in a national unity. The depicted knowledge in the film refers to this lost harmony. The three films of Hany Abu-Assad’s oeuvre are incorporated in Omar to show some sort of development as well. Omar starts off with hope: Omar and Nadia have wedding plans and want a future home in Palestine, for Omar and Nadia have been saving to spent their lives together. This is similar to Rana’s Wedding where Rana and Khalil go on a journey to realize their wedding and spend their lives together. For Omar, hope fades when he has to figure out who to trust and what to do, and results into having no future prospects whatsoever. In Paradise Now Said undergoes a journey in order to figure out what his actions should be. He decides to go along with the suicide because he does not have any prospects in Palestine. Omar, in the end, takes measures into his own hands and kills Rami. This represents the burst mentioned earlier and therefore transcends the last two films. The period the three films were made in – 2002

46 to 2013 – resembles the films’ development in a way and thus also the structure in Omar. Rana’s Wedding is made right after the outbreak of the second intifada when people were hopeful that change would come. Paradise Now already shows the loss of hope since the Palestinians did not get the result they wanted. Omar enhances the disappointment and lack of belief in better times. One motif that is present in all three films is connected to this development. All of the films contain a wedding. In Rana’s Wedding it is portrayed as means of resistance, a hopeful element and a symbol for a Palestinian future; in Paradise Now the wedding-motif is merely present as a disguise, the symbol of a Palestinian future gets turned into fakery; in Omar, lastly, the wedding is wanted but not achieved and turned into a traumatic past.

Conclusion

Director Hany Abu-Assad reflects a larger Palestinian history through his stories about everyday life of Palestinians. The plots of the three films discussed in the thesis are all individual stories in short time frames of the contemporary Palestinian situation. They all represent a bigger Palestinian historical narrative in their own way. The exilic past which is part of the collective Palestinian identity is reflected in the films by the journey-theme. Moreover, the filmmaker’s own history of leaving his homeland and traveling back and forth to make films is represented by the journeys the fictional characters make. Just like the characters, who initiate the journeys in order to stay in Palestine, Abu-Assad left the country to stimulate his personal development, but returned multiple times and in the end – after the latest film Omar – moved back to his place of birth. As mentioned in chapter one, the nature of trauma requires indirect depiction. The representation of the Palestinian trauma in Abu-Assad’s films is shown through the individual stories and refers to the collective Palestinian history. Rana’s Wedding uses the distinction between inner and outer to underscore the presence of the collective history told with an individual story. The film addresses the unconscious trauma of being uprooted from one’s land through an individual trauma of a dead mother. This story revives the past traumatic event into the present. The trauma is not a plot driven motif, only a given that is part of Rana’s context. It is pictured as Rana’s fears and sorrows. In Paradise Now the individual trauma drives the characters to make decisions. Their reason for the suicide mission is derived from past events that formed their characters, like Said’s father who is killed for being a collaborator and the occupation that made him the collaborator in the first place. In addition, Hany Abu-Assad makes use of multiple elements to underline the uncertain temporality of refugees. First of all, the crystal-image appears in the film to express the timelessness a person in exile is in. Secondly, the film contains props that are from different times, like old camera’s and cars. Finally, Omar is the film that deals with the present the most. In fact, the film lacks a past the characters look backs on. The traumatic past is created within the film by referring to a trauma that occurred in the first half of the story, the loss of love and a Palestinian safe home. The love Omar has in the beginning of the film represents the utopian past before invasion of the Israeli handler and police, and the imprisonment

48 addresses the past occupation of the Palestinian home. In Omar, there is no reference to a past before the film, but the entire Palestinian historical narrative of the occupation is represented within the story. The uncertain temporality is reflected by the unclear time frame of the film, which adds to the timelessness of the state of being a refugee. Abu-Assad’s films, in order to express his cultural identity, capture Palestinian life and reflect the task a filmmaker of Palestinian origin has. This task contains the urge to make historical testimonies and in that way lets the viewer be a witness to the Palestinian situation. Hany Abu-Assad’s films are therefore filmed realistically in Palestinian territories. The filmmaker witnesses the Palestinian situation and transmits it via cinema to audiences all over the world. The audience therefore gets to see the Palestinian side of the Israel-Palestine story and in this way their knowledge is increased. Even though all films are stories about the now that reflect a larger narrative, the films also show differences. The means through which the historical testimony is being told varies between the films. Hany Abu-Assad’s first two films, for instance, show a struggle with capturing certain parts of the reality of Palestinians. The collective trauma they have is hard to depict and it took the director some time to be able to put the hardness and violent side of the conflict into images. Rana’s Wedding and Paradise Now, as mentioned above, deal with a violent past that has become a trauma that the characters look back on from the present. The occupation is merely shown by metaphors like roadblocks or images of ruined buildings. Paradise Now uses media-technology to express the struggle of representing the atrocities of repression. Interaction with Israelis is hardly ever given and therefore these films really only engage with Palestinian life and relations. The film Omar puts the violence and interaction very directly into images. The depicted violence replaces the more indirect notion of the historical trauma that revived the Palestinian past in Rana’s Wedding and Paradise Now. The filmmaker addresses his role and own occupation by searching for what it means to watch and be watched. To be watched restricts the inner and therefore the traumatic memory, as is seen in Rana’s Wedding. This is also represented by the staring men which results in Rana controlling herself. On the other hand watching refers to witnessing which helps the Palestinian cause and is a means for filmmakers to fight the occupation. Hany Abu-Assad addresses his own profession and the supplementary products it brings about with the depiction of media-technologies. The media- technologies enable audiences everywhere to witness its content. Therefore watching helps to raise awareness of the situation the Palestinians have to face. Watching evolved

49 into knowing in Abu-Assad’s third Palestinian film. Knowledge too has a dual character. Knowledge in the hands of the enemy is dangerous for it gives the Israelis power and can destroy the Palestinian unity. However, it means that the knowledge can bring more power to the Palestinians as well. In addition, films can bring viewers knowledge about the Palestinian repression and therefore help their cause. The change from watching into knowing can be seen as an increasing importance of the content of what is being watched: the information the films contain. All these changes can be explained by the developments in the Palestinian situation and Abu-Assad’s own biography during the last fifteen years. The filmmaker’s first two films were internationally produced and made in the time he lived in the Netherlands. He travelled to Palestine to shoot the film and returned to his land of residence after. The more he experienced during these film periods in the occupied territories, the more his films started to become less hopeful with endings lacking a happy future or any future at all. After Paradise Now, Hany Abu-Assad moved to Los Angeles and started working with Hollywood producers. He lived there for two years but did not like the American ideology of filmmaking; which is based on business rather than on the content and life (IAmFilm 2013). He directed one film there that flopped, The Courier, after which he made Omar in Palestine. After his Hollywood adventure, Abu-Assad changed his way of filmmaking. Omar handles the filmmaker’s task of creating a historical testimony very differently than his two earlier films. On the set of the 2005 film Paradise Now, Abu-Assad started believing there was a traitor in his crew and had to deal with the Israeli police as well as Palestinian resistance groups that both distrusted the film production’s intentions. This resulted in an intense political story: Omar. The Hollywood experience could have influenced and also schooled him to be more direct with the depiction of violence. Moreover, Omar is produced by mainly Palestinian funds which could have been a reason for the different means by which the film is depicted and told, because it did not have to go through non-Palestinian hands. During all these years a few things in the Palestinian situation have changed as well. First of all, the second intifada started in 2000 and lasted until 2004/2005. In 2002, the year of the release of Rana’s Wedding, the Israelis took the Palestinian territories. The next year Israel placed barriers in the land to separate Palestinians from Israelis and also different Palestinian communities from one another. In 2004, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat died and a little later, different Palestinian movements started to fight one another. By the time Paradise Now was made, the faith in a happy ending of the second

50 intifada had crumbled down. This is reflected in the tone and ending of this film, and by the time it was released, the intifada was over. Omar reflects the internal fights of Palestinian governmental groups and how they crippled the national unity. The film shows that the Palestinians are not well organized nor unanimous. This is the main argument for why this film differs from earlier Palestinian films and why it argues for a new period for Palestinian cinema.

Reference List

Literature

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Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. London: The Athlone Press, 1989

Deleuze, Gilles and Elias Sanbar. “The Indians of Palestine”. Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995. Gilles Deleuze. Columbia University Press, 2006. 194-200

Dosse, Francoise. Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari: Intersecting Lives. Columbia University Press, 2007

Flaxman, Gregory. The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema. Ed. Gregory Flaxman. University of Minnesota Press, 2000

Gana, Nouri. “Reel Violence: Paradise Now and the Collapse of the Spectacle”. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 28.1 (2008): 20-37.

Gertz, Nurith and George Khleifi. Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma and Memory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008

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Naficy, Hamid. An Accented Cinema. Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001

Shohat, Ella. “Notes on the Post-Colonial”. Social Text 31/32 (1992): 99-113.

Yaqub, Nadia G. “The Palestinian Cinematic Wedding”. Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 3.2 (Spring 2007): 56-85.

Films

A Boy, a Wall and a Donkey. Dir. Hany-Abu-Assad. Dorje Film, Hazazah Film, Kinofabrika, 2008.

Apocalypse Now. Dir. Frances Ford Coppola. Writ. John Milius and Frances Ford Coppola. Perf. Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall. Zoetrope Studios, 1979.

Do not Forget me Istanbul. Dir. Hany Abu-Assad, Stefan Arsenijevic, Aida Begic, Jesefina Markarian, Eric Nazarian, Stergios Niziris and Omar Shargawi. Writ. Hany Abu-Assad, Stefan Arsenijevic, Aida Begic, Gul Dirican, Nazli Elif Durlu, Josefina Markarian, Eric Nazarian, Stergios Niziris, Omar Shargawi. Altinsay Film Works, Argonauts Productions S.A., Asi Film, 2011.

Five Broken Cameras. Dir. Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi. Alegria Productions and Burnat Films, 2013.

Ford Transit. Dir. Hany Abu-Assad. Writ. Hany-Abu-Assad and Bero Beyer. Augustus Film, 2003.

Omar. Dir. Hany Abu-Assad. Writ. Hany Abu-Assad. Perf. Adam Bakri, Leem Lubany, Iyad Hoorani. ZBROS, 2013.

Paradise Now. Dir. Hany Abu-Assad. Writ. Hany-Abu-Assad and Bero Beyer. Perf. Kais Nashif, Ali Suliman, Lubna Azabal. Augustus Film, Lama Productions and Razor Film Produktion, 2005.

Rana’s Wedding. Dir. Hany Abu-Assad. Writ. Liana Badr and Ihab Lamey. Perf. Clara Khoury, Khalifa Natour, Ismael Dabbag. Augustus Film and Palestinian Film Foundation, 2002.

The Courier. Dir. Hany Abu-Assad. Writ. Brannon Coombs and Pete Dris. Perf. Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Til Schweiger, Mickey Rourke. Films In Motion, 2012.

Interviews

Haider, Sabah. “Palestinian Cinema is a Cause: an Interview with Hany Abu-Assad”. The Electronic Intifada. 2010. 15-11-2014. < ttp://electronicintifada.net/content/ palestinian-cinema-cause-interview-hany-abu-assad/8708 >

IAmFilm. “Hany Abu-Assad”. Youtube. 11-11-2013. 15-11-2014. < https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=XZy-rFFGy0c&hd=1 >

“Verliezen is veel leuker dan winnen”. Nooit meer slapen. Radio VPRO. 20-8-2014