Cinema Politico: Mid-East’s Cinematic Achievement

From partisan protests on college walk to rockets in Gaza, antagonism between Palestinian and Israeli factions seems more entrenched than ever. The escalating tension has arrived during a fecund period for both Palestinian and Israel cinema, and the instability has mixed with the artistic flowering to create an impressive crop of contemporary Middle Eastern films.

The Israeli side of this renaissance—with films garnering greater-than-ever popular attention and critical praise at home and abroad—began around 2000 when Israel increased its public film funding. About the same time, director Amos Gitai released the visceral film Kippur, which follows two army reservists suffering through disastrous fighting during the Yom Kippur War. Gitai never crafts his film like a normal war movie, instead using long, meditative takes to elicit the brutal carnage. This unsensationalized war footage is sandwiched between two sequences from a stylized sex scene involving one of the reservists and his girlfriend. The bizarre structure makes the film riveting.

Nearly ten years after Kippur, the golden age of Israeli film is in full swing, exemplified by another unusually formatted film—the Oscar-nominated documentary Waltz with Bashir—which is sketched like a graphic novel, an innovative choice for a nonfiction work. Waltz recounts director Ari Folman’s attempts to recover memories from the 1982 Lebanese War. His chief goal is to reconstruct his involvement with the Sabra and Shatila massacre, a notorious massacre of Palestinian refugees.

Kippur, a fiction film shot like a documentary, and Waltz, a documentary shot like a cartoon, both raise disquieting issues about the effects of warfare on the Israeli psyche, and while both films focus on wars from thirty or forty years ago, each is imbued with commentary about the modern strife.

Not all notable Israeli cinema from this prodigious decade has been about war. The Band’s Visit, a melancholic 2007 comedy, has nothing in the way of armed conflict. Instead, the subject is a bumbling Egyptian police orchestra marooned in a podunk Israeli town after taking the wrong bus. A few Israelis grudgingly offer to house the musicians, and, for one night, the Israelis and Egyptians endure each other’s company. The most debonair band member spends the night assisting his tactless male host in seducing a homely darling at a disco roller rink. A few others sing Sam Cooke around the dinner table, while the austere conductor goes on what may or may not be a date with the flirtatious woman putting him up for the night. While funny, The Band’s Visit also transmits a shared sense of cosmic loneliness among the desert dwellers which may have as much to do with politics as anything discussed in Waltz or Kippur.

The past few years have also seen an impressive slate of Palestinian films. The most renowned work is Paradise Now, an Oscar-nominated drama about two West Bank residents selected to be suicide bombers. The film is one-dimensional and mawkish at points, failings that are excusable given the painful subject matter. But overall, the film does a brilliant job investigating the psychology of its subjects. Neither bomber is a religious man, and both have obvious doubts about paradise. In contrast to what one would assume, their motivations are secular and personal.

Along with the groundbreaking humanization (without justification) of its main characters, Paradise Now is also an important film because it explores the artistic dilemma of Palestinian filmmakers. In one scene, the bomber Said visits his love interest Suha, who is unaware that Said is scheduled to die later that day. The two discuss cinema, noting that “there’s no theater” anywhere near their homes. Indeed, the territory’s only real cinema is in the city of Ramallah. The people who see films from Palestinian directors—who generally work with European or Israeli funding and crew—are almost entirely foreigners. The most prominent Palestinian film festival is in England, and though filmed amid real gunfire and violence in Palestine, Paradise Now was subsidized by the public Israeli Film Fund.

Though it is unfortunate that Palestinian filmmakers lack homegrown support, Israeli involvement in their films is a bright spot in an increasingly gloomy political picture. While the political situation deteriorates, Arab-Israeli film collaboration keeps the possibility of cooperation alive.

David Berke is a Columbia College first-year. Cinema Politico runs alternate Tuesdays.