CULTURE
THE SILENT AND THE ABSURD: MEDITATIONS ON THE TIME THAT REMAINS by SOPHIE CHAMAS
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lia Suleiman’s The Time that Remains is a partially biographical film composed of four historical segments beginning in 1948 and stretching into the present. It is the story of Suleiman’s family, recreated through the stitching together of memories, accounts from his father’s diaries and letters his mother sent to relatives. The opening scene sees Suleiman, who plays himself in the film, sitting silently in a taxi with a loquacious Israeli driver (Menashe Noy), when they suddenly get caught in a monstrous storm. As the driver begins to lose his way, he starts to complain about the constant construction of roads and interchanges that have made it difficult to recognise Israel. “Where are the kibbutzes and the collective farms?” He asks. “They were everywhere. Did the earth swallow them up?” He radios in to his partner ‘Elie’ at the taxi base, but no one answers. Anxiously staring into the distance, he asks, “Where am I?”
photo from davidbordwell.net
This farcical prelude in which an Israeli complains to a Palestinian about the burial of the kibbutzes and collective farms of Israel’s bygone days beneath the hyper-modernity of highways and high-rises, while losing his way in formerly familiar territory, culminating in a distressed admission of utter estrangement, poignantly sets up the next scene. In it we meet Suleiman’s father Fuad (Saleh Bakri) in Nazareth in July of 1948, on the day that the city surrendered to the Israeli Haganah. Suleiman’s ‘representation’ of 1948 is not what one would expect precisely because it does not purport to ‘represent’ or to ‘recreate’ a cataclysmic, multi-faceted, and collectively experienced and historical event in its totality. Instead, Suleiman gives us a bright, sunny day in Nazareth, a lone, imbecilic soldier from the Arab Liberation Army on his way to free Tiberias and Haifa, a radio announcement dictating the arrival of the IDF to “liberate” the people of Galilee from “criminal gangs” posing as a liberation army, and a confused Mayor given instructions by an Israeli soldier in a language he doesn’t understand. His films, Suleiman explains in a 2010 interview with Electronic Intifada, are not only about Palestine. “They are Palestine,” he tells the interviewer, “because I am from that place—I reflect my experience, but in identification with all the Palestines that exist. The word ‘Arab-Israeli Conflict’ is alien to me in terms of the poetics of the word. I don’t think my film is about that altogether.” Speaking as an artist, he adds that, “You should have faith that first of all your experience is not local; it is a universal experience...When you compose an image you should never think about the boundaries of that image. If this image exists in one locale, it should transgress the boundaries of that locale...So this is not about moulding or summing up an experience located in Palestine. This is about all the experiences that can be conceptually called Palestinian-ally.”1 In his somewhat comical depiction of the surrender of Nazareth, Suleiman does not make a mockery or parody out of a tragedy, nor does he not undermine the seriousness and horror of the Nakba. Instead he magnifies an aspect of it that transcends its particularities, shared not only by most conflicts, but by state-society relationships and nationalist movements which are often left undiscussed. It is that thing we feel when we hear Bashar Al-Assad continue to call innocent protestors armed gangs despite 1 From “”A different kind of occupation”: An interview with Elia Suleiman”, by Sabah Haider, published in The Electronic Intifada on 1 February, 2010
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photo from blogs.indiewire.com