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  Voiceless Sounds and Disfigured Bodies in Paradise Now.

by Sobhi al-Zobaidi

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When it comes to Palestinian cinema, I think that when a film is  
being screened in local settings, part of the screen becomes a  
mirror. People see themselves not in the narcissistic sense that  
figures in the pleasure-economy of film, but in the didactic manner  
we experience through reflexive devices in cinema.  This virtual  
mirror is constituted from certain common-ness that runs through the  
audience, an audience that is composed not of individuals dissolved  
in the darkness of the theater and the diegesis of the film but as a  
community in danger where each one watches for everyone.

  I don't  mean here to portray Palestinian spectators as a  
homogeneous and unified group that anticipate and look for the same  
meaning in the image, no. Each spectator has their own individual and  
unique 'rules of engagement' with the film, but in addition to this  
personal engagement there is for Palestinians  a 'shared national  
anxiety' stemming from political realities.  This 'national anxiety'  
calls into perspective a certain set of references against which the  
film is experienced. While Palestinian audiences like all others seek  
all the pleasures that are packaged in a film, yet, and unlike any  
other audiences, Palestinians look for redemption in any film about  
them. For decades now, we have been misrepresented, misunderstood and  
mistreated.  From 1948 until now we have been denied to articulate a  
national identity. Our cultural identity have become a war zone,  
where we had to defend ourselves against a machine that have  
systematically worked to disfigure us. So when you watch a film about  
Palestine amongst Palestinians you can feel this 'national anxiety'  
straight forward, in bodily gestures and voices that interact with  
the film and in the brief comments people usually exchange after  
viewing a film. You don't need theory to locate the thread that ties  
the audience together.

  When Paradise Now was screened in Ramallah the first time in front  
of a couple of hundred people, one did not need to wait for the film  
to end to guess how people felt about it. In the brief commentaries  
and discussion that followed between the director and the audience,  
it was made clear that the film had upset the majority of the people  
present.  The film was upsetting to the people for quit few reasons,  
but the main reason was the fact that although the film was shot in  
Palestine by a Palestinian but it did not speak Palestinian. It was a  
foreign voice that spoke in the name of a community made voiceless.   
Voice we know comes from a body situated in time and space.  The  
problem with the film is that ‘space is disfigured’ it was  
ahistorical, not real, like props in a musical. Shapes and volumes  
that help to choreograph movement in time.  There were places where  
action took ‘place’ but all of the places in the film where not  
situated in a historical space. This is why the film is voiceless  
because those bodies in the film could not speak anyway.  They had no  
memory, no history, and no future, so how could they speak.

Because if they were able to speak then they would say that suicide  
bombing is not a Palestinian national hobby where a psycho looking  
leader sends his brain-washed followers to their death while eating a  
sandwich.  The only well shot scene in the film is the scene in the  
old public bath where the two would-be suicide bombers where being  
loaded with explosives.  It is made to look like a ritual, where the  
‘natives’ celebrate some ‘incoherent’ and ‘strange’ costumes. They  
are ‘good natives’ with ‘bad habits’ which must be cured. This is the  
sound of the film.

The sound of the film come from the director’s head and not from the  
character’s bodies. And the director’s head is located in Amsterdam,  
not in Gaza.  Because if he was in Gaza then he would have been able  
to notice all those people made desperate and hopeless by a merciless  
military power.  On many occasions we heard Israeli officials saying  
that if they had to live the life of a Palestinian that they would  
probably do worse ‘than a suicide bombing.’  Concealing this fact  
does not help to deal with the issue in a correct way. I am one of  
the many Palestinians who raise their voice against suicide bombing,  
but to justify my view I don’t need to pathologize the suicide bomber  
him / herself,  but I need to fight the very conditions that have  
nurtured the growth of such phenomenon, the very desperate and  
helpless conditions for millions of young Palestinian men and women  
created by Israeli occupation and systematic destruction of  
Palestinian’s lives.

  I recall some of the comments that were exchanged after the  
screening of the film. I remember one person saying how sad he was  
not to see Nablus in the film. He was saying he knows how beautiful  
this city is in its geography and architecture. But there was nothing  
of that in the film. All what we saw was a disfiguration of the city.  
Another stood and raised a serious question about the choice for the  
Algerian actress who spoke a very thick accent, not Nabulsi, not  
Palestinian, then having to justify this in the film by saying that  
she was a returnee. She can be a very good actress but her presence  
in this film and the way she spoke enhanced only our sense of  
estrangement of ‘space’ and how it ‘sounds.’ To a Palestinian she is  
disorienting, but for foreign spectators this makes no difference  
‘they all speak Arabic.’  Even that only kiss between her and her  
lover is one of the coldest and non-sensual kisses I’ve ever seen in  
film. It is not love what’s between them, they are incapable of love.  
It is cartoonish love, and so is the kiss, and the characters. They  
are cartoons, they are not real. I know for fact that the director  
had to change the shooting location in the middle of production  
because of some complications in the city where he was shooting.  
People wanted to stop the making of the film. But so quickly did the  
director change locations without almost no disruption in the film.  
How telling can this be as for the absence of a real space in the film.

One other person shouted in the hall in response to another; “this is  
not author cinema, this is funder’s cinema. I thought this person  
raised a very serious issue, not a new one though. All Palestinian  
films are made with European money. Not Palestinian, not Arab money.  
This is a fact. On the one hand one would say great, thanks God there  
is Europe that provide us with means to make films, but once in a  
while one can see the price. I say once in a while because there are  
films that were made with European and even Israeli money (like films  
by Elia Suleiman and Tawfik Abu Wael) but their films are rooted in  
the real historical world. The people in their films are real people  
with real existence and real problems. While in Paradise now the  
space is constructed from mental notions, stigmas, stereotypes, and  
pre-conceived, media-manufactured world of terror and terrorism.  
Tawfik Abu Wael and Elia Suleiman do not glorify or romanticize  
Palestinians, on the contrary, in their films is a cruel critic of  
social and political realities. Yet, their critic was never taken by  
local Palestinian audiences as ‘misrepresentation’ no, we all laughed  
and understood the irony that was meant to help us see ourselves better.



©WOZ. Switzerland. October 2005

www.woz.ch






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