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Julian Schnabel Directing Miral. 2010. © Jose Haro

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Julian Schnabel Directing Miral. 2010. © Jose Haro Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00048/1753498/octo_a_00048.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 Julian Schnabel directing Miral . 2010. © Jose Haro. Julian Schnabel’s Miral : An Exchange Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00048/1753498/octo_a_00048.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 YVE-ALAIN BOIS This morning, March 25, 2011, the lead article on the front page of the Arts Section of The New York Times is an interview with Julian Schnabel, whose latest film, Miral, is opening in several American theaters. A week ago, the film had its U.S. premiere in the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations—in front of more than a thousand diplomats, journalists, and other guests. The projection was followed by a round table moderated by Dan Rather, which included Schnabel and his Palestinian companion, Rula Jebreal, the author of the auto bio - graphical novel on which the film is based. Other participants were Yonatan Shapira, a former Israeli Air Force Captain turned peace activist, as the co- founder of Combatants for Peace; Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian born Palestinian journalist; and Rabbi Irwin Kula, the president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership . This event almost did not happen, as the American Jewish Committee tried to bully the President of the UN General Assembly, Joseph Deiss, into canceling it. The context could not have been more dramatic, more charged: this screen - ing took place only a couple days after the massacre of a settlers’ family by Palestinian terrorists prompted the Israeli government to vow to expand a settle - ment in the West Bank by several hundred new houses. The context: plus ça change, plus c’est pareil —or, rather, the worse it seems to be getting. Ever since my adolescence, ever since I awoke politically, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict has been looming large on the horizon—larger and larger as despair kept growing, every opportunity of peace missed one by one, every avenue of dialogue shut one by one. I heard about Miral from David Moos, curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario, as he was organizing an exhibition devoted to Schnabel and film. 1 As I expressed my interest—a Palestinian story filmed by a New York Jewish artist whose mother was an active Zionist militant!—David got me invited to a private screening of the film (it was during one of those dreadful snowstorms we weath - 1. Julian Schnabel: Art and Film , curated by David Moos, Art Gallery of Toronto, September 1, 2010 to January 2, 2011. The script of Miral is published in the catalogue of the exhibition. OCTOBER 136, Spring 2011, pp. 192–195. © 2011 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 194 OCTOBER ered in January on the East Coast—coming to New York from Princeton, I barely made it). I met Schnabel and Rula Jebreal on this occasion, and in the discus - sion that followed Schnabel mentioned two letters he had received about the film, one by Rabbi Kula (whose name and good work for peace were unknown to me at the time) and an other by Rachid Benzine, a highly respected Moroccan- born French philosopher and theologian, a specialist in Islam, who was com - Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00048/1753498/octo_a_00048.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 menting on Rabbi Kula’s long missive, which was itself a detailed analysis of the discussion that had followed a previous private screening of the movie, under the auspices of the Council on Foreign Relations (in New York, at the Soho Hotel on Dec. 9, 2010). At my request, Schnabel sent me a copy of these two texts the next day, and I thought they were both extraordinary and needed to be published—that they had a life of their own, independent of the film itself. After my fellow editors at October agreed with me (and as I write this, none have seen Miral yet), I passed the two letters along to my friend and colleague at the Institute for Advanced Study, Avishai Margalit, one of the founders of Peace Now (the oldest organization in Israel of its kind, founded immediately after Anwar Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in 1977). Avishai too found the letters remark - able. As he is someone who has written extensively on Israeli politics, particular - ly on the treatment of Palestinians—he finds reasons for hope even more elusive than I do with regard to the situation—I asked him to contribute a few pages, and add his voice to this dossier. I have no particular expertise on film. In France, where Miral came out in the fall, it was criticized for its sentimentality perhaps more than for its “one-sid - edness.” There is no way the film could be other than one-sided—it tells the life story of a teenage Palestinian girl from childhood to the first Intifada and the Oslo negotiations, written by the woman she became: there is only one Israeli character that is cast in a positive role, a young woman in love with a Palestinian man, in full horror of her military father. (It should be noted, however, that not all Palestinians in the film are positive heroes and that the Palestinian man Miral loves is brutally assassinated by other Palestinians—unambiguously depict - ed as bad guys—precisely at the moment when he turns his back to terrorism, labeled by them a traitor because he endorses the negotiations for peace). As for the other reproach: no doubt the film is sentimental, but it is probably there that its efficacy resides. In all of Schnabel’s declarations about the film to date— no doubt there will be more as it will generate much in the way of polemics—he has stressed that all he wanted was his film to initiate a dialogue. And why not? Nothing else seems to have worked so far—the situation in Israel today is worse than ever, despite the countless efforts of peace activists. “At the foundation of history, there are feelings” ( au fond de l’histoire, il y a des sentiments), as the great French historian and founder of Les Annales , Lucien Febvre, used to say. Schnabel’s bet is that, given that everything else seems to fail, sentiments can pro - vide the spark that initiates the long overdue dialogue. Miral : An Exchange 195 Six or seven years ago, I heard a public discussion at Harvard between Margalit and his Palestinian counterpart, so to speak, Sari Nusseibeh, a philoso - pher who is president of Al-Quds University in the West Bank. During the Q & A session, a student asked something like, “Why is it so impossible to solve the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, to have something like the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission?” To the surprise of everyone in attendance, both Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00048/1753498/octo_a_00048.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 Avishai and Sari Nusseibeh cried, in unison, “No!”: “First reconciliation,” they said, “then, only later, much later, perhaps after one or two generations, truth can emerge.” I think that Schnabel’s strategy partakes of a similar view: first empathy, and then, maybe, just maybe, reason might finally take hold. .
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