Salaam Cinema

42 The Nation. October 7, 2013 four symphonies in him. A part of him had he told Goodman, “is just one little stupid 1958. He’d been listening to the Juilliard always felt that jazz had been a detour, and an language hanging out there as a sign of unfair String Quartet’s recording of Bartok, marvel- imposed one at that. Although he had done employment. Jazz means ‘nigger.’” ing at how they could “transform in a second more than anyone other than Ellington and “My identity is mixed together with a listener’s soul and make it throb with love Monk to set jazz on an equal footing with Beethoven, Bach and Brahms,” he told Sue; and beauty—just by following the scratches European art music, jazz was the music that it pained him somewhat to be described as of a pen on a scroll.” It reminded him of his he’d been forced to play when the doors to a jazz musician. In Beneath the Underdog, he “original goal,” he said, but “a thing called the concert hall were shut: even the word reprinted a touching letter he wrote from ‘jazz’” took him far off his path, and he didn’t reminded him of that original exclusion. Jazz, Bellevue mental hospital to Nat Hentoff in know if he’d ever get back. n FABIEN DANY/WWW.FABIENDANY.COM FABIEN Mohsen Makhmalbaf during the Vesoul International Asian Cinema Festival, 2009 Salaam Cinema by ADINA HOFFMAN n Jerusalem these days, reality seems day I invite all of you to Iran!” The whistling for a democratic Iran, and political exile to be breaking through reality. It’s the lifts to tea-kettle pitch as the crowd rises to from his homeland has come to Jewish West cultural equivalent of a sonic boom: “I its feet and he bows, palms pressed together, Jerusalem—that is, Israel. A guest of the thir- love you!” A hailstorm of applause show- Namaste-style, then prostrates himself— tieth Jerusalem International Film Festival, ers the slight man in black, who has just possibly he’s joking, but maybe he’s not—and which in July screened his newest movie, The Ibounded down the theater aisle and leapt promptly springs back up to the microphone, Gardener, as well as a selection of his earlier onto the stage like a game show host or a declaring in his lilting, Persian-tinted Eng- work, Makhmalbaf was also in town to accept mega-church preacher. “Let’s have a hope lish, “I don’t know what to say after seeing a special award from the festival, “In the Spirit for peace between Israel and Iran!” The clap- your reaction, but I love you, I love you, I of Freedom.” He may be the first director ping grows still louder. “I have a dream one love you!” from the Islamic Republic to have visited the The great Iranian film director Mohsen Jewish state; he is certainly the first to have Adina Hoffman’s books include My Happiness Makhmalbaf has come to Jerusalem. The made a movie in this country. (Ostensibly a Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s former Islamic militant and death-row pris- documentary meditation on Bahaism, The Life in the Palestinian Century. oner under the shah, current secular activist Gardener was shot in Israel with a few digital October 7, 2013 The Nation. 43 cameras by Makhmalbaf and his son May- entertainment compound featuring chic res- has, in addition, cut East Jerusalem off from sam.) There is no doubt that he is the first to taurants, an airy gallery, and a pretty, land- the West Bank, rendering this once-thriving stand before a large crowd of Israelis and grin scaped foot and bike path that runs, High urban hub of Palestinian life little more than beatifically as he professes his love for each Line–style, along the old tracks. Mahaneh a demoralized and demoralizing backwater. and every one of them. Yehudah, the outdoor market, is booming. This is no doubt one of the main reasons It’s hard to believe that he has come, but Alongside the well-established vegetable and why so many Palestinians have decided this the unreality of his arrival seems somehow spice stands, funky bars and trendy cafés have summer to go west to eat ice cream and shop fitting, since most of Makhmalbaf’s movies popped up; the place is teeming with locals in pop-music-blasting Jewish shoe stores. are playfully serious (or seriously playful) and tourists, old ladies dragging shopping It’s a chance to pass through the looking meditations on actuality and illusion. Earlier carts and young hipsters taking drags from glass that this city often is and spend just a in the day, he said that in being here, he was their hand-rolled cigarettes. few day-tripping hours on the cleaner, more happy to have “land[ed] on [the] moon,” and Palestinians, too, mingle easily in this mix, prosperous side of town. from my seat in a packed auditorium at the in large part because of the municipal light Systematically neglected by the munici- Jerusalem Cinematheque, surrounded by a rail, which has been running for two years pality and battered by the larger political and mostly Jewish audience, it feels as though now. For almost a decade, the construction of economic situation, East Jerusalem is home we’ve all just taken a collective leap onto the rail line and its protracted delays threat- to 39 percent of the city’s total population, a mysterious but alluring extraterrestrial ened to destroy already depressed downtown though its people receive only a small fraction landscape—a tranquil, reflected image of the West Jerusalem by rendering it a dusty, nearly of the city’s resources. West Jerusalem has tense Middle East we actually live in. Lest we impassible building site. Now, winding like forty-two post offices, East Jerusalem, nine; forget: the day after the festival ended, Prime some great electric eel down Jaffa Road, the the West boasts seventy-seven municipal pre- Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared on rail line cuts a sleek, silvery figure that, in the schools, the East has ten; eighteen welfare CBS’s Face the Nation, looking like the Grim gritty context of Jerusalem, appears almost offices function in West Jerusalem, while the Reaper in a businessman’s blue tie and warn- fantastical. The gentle tolling of the train’s bell whole of the East counts three. Since 1967, ing that he “won’t wait until it’s too late” to adds to that enchanted feel—as does the ut- a third of Palestinian land in East Jerusalem take military action against Iran because “all terly mixed population riding the train itself. has been expropriated. According to Israel’s the problems that we have…will be dwarfed Twelve years ago, at the height of the National Insurance Institute, the poverty rate by this messianic, apocalyptic, extreme re- second intifada, when suicide bombers were among the city’s Palestinians is 79.5 percent. gime that would have atomic bombs.” blowing themselves up with scary regular- Of East Jerusalem’s children, 85 percent live For all the grandstanding of Makhmalbaf’s ity in the middle of downtown and the very below the poverty line. (The percentage of Jerusalem charm offensive, he does have a way presence of a Palestinian on an Israeli bus poor Jewish Jerusalemites is 29.5 percent.) of cutting through the notorious “difficulty” was enough to make most of the Jewish The numbers are at once shameful, slightly of Middle Eastern diplomacy, to say nothing riders squirm, it would have been next to numbing and somehow too banal to register of the hatemongering and saber-rattling that impossible to imagine the scene on the light with most of the world at large, though this attend it. “I love you!” he insists in the sim- rail this summer: ultra-Orthodox women is the way a viable Palestinian Jerusalem ends: plest, most unwavering terms. “I love you!” in wigs and Muslim women with their hi- not with a bang but a bureaucratic whimper. Or is such simplicity itself—in this jabs, miniskirted Jewish teenagers and young Not one to be swayed by such sad sta- pathologically gnarled context—the most Palestinian men in jeans not only sitting tistics, Israel’s public security minister must slyly sophisticated sort of complication? and standing calmly side by side, but often have felt it his duty to protect the people of Like his movies, his presence here sends one packed together without panic as the train Israel from the existential threat posed by a wandering down a fascinating, disarming glides its way from stop to stop. They rarely children’s puppet festival that was scheduled hall of mirrors. exchange a word, but there they are, shoul- to open at the Palestinian national theater in der to shoulder, in the air-conditioned slither East Jerusalem on June 22. Claiming without hese are strange days in Jerusalem. toward de facto “unification” of the city. proof that the festival was being sponsored On the eve of the month of Rama- Each station is announced in Hebrew, Arabic by the Palestinian Authority, in violation of dan and at the height of summer and English, which in any other town might the Oslo Accords, the minister banned it vacation—as, nearby, Egypt seethes seem an ordinary nod to the linguistic needs and ordered the theater shuttered for eight and Syria smolders—the city is both of the various people using the train. But in days and its director summoned for question- moreT bustling and more bewildering than traumatized, sectarian Jerusalem, the co- ing by the Shin Bet.

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