ROUGH DRAFT—NOT FOR CITATION!!!

(PUBLISHED FORM IN HOLY LAND STUDIES, 2.1 (2003): 110-16)

 

 

 

Palestinian Life and Politics as Feature Length Cinema:

A Review of Divine Intervention[1]

 

Thomas E. Phillips

Colorado Christian University

Assistant Professor of New Testament

Colorado Christian University  

180 South Garrison St.

Lakewood, CO 80226

enctom@yahoo.com

 

Divine Intervention: A Chronicle of Love and Pain
Cast: Elia Suleiman, Manal Khader and Yaef Fahoum Daher
Directed by: Elia Suleiman
Screenplay by: Elia Suleiman
Distributor: Avatar Films
Running Time: 92 min
Year: 2001

 

One need not be an expert on either the Holy Land or the Western media to be aware that the major media outlets in the West are notoriously misleading sources of information about current events in the Holy Land.  The US media’s misrepresentation of the Holy Land pervades both the 'information' side of the media (e.g., many news programmes presented images of the very few Palestinians who rejoiced in the aftermath of 11 September as images typical of all Palestinians even though such scenes were emphatically atypical of Palestinian response to those tragic events) and the 'entertainment' side of the media (e.g., Arabs are commonly presented as symbols of threats and terrorism as in the recent big budget film, The Sum of All Fears, which had Arab terrorists conspiring to smuggle a nuclear bomb to the US from an Arabian-like desert preposterously identified as the Golan Heights). 

            In the face of the mainstream media’s often geographically, culturally, religiously and politically misleading representations of the Holy Land and its people, it is refreshing to find a highly-skilled Palestinian director giving us an aesthetically pleasing (though realistically painful) view of Palestinian life and politics.  Elia Suleiman, a Palestinian who lives in the Occupied Territories, wrote, directed, co-produced and starred in a moving fictional drama entitled Divine Intervention.  This is one of Suleiman’s first major films, but if all of his work is this delightful and profound, he will surely give the Palestinian people an eloquent voice in alternative cinema.

            Although Divine Intervention makes no claims to being a documentary, it is saturated with the realism of that genre.  The film is driven almost entirely by images of the ordinary.  In fact, it has very little dialogue, and none of the characters is named.  Their individuality (and thus their names) is insignificant to the movie, which is about the Palestinian people as a whole, rather than their individual personas.  Many scenes are devoid of dialogue, presumably because the film is about how the Palestinians live, rather than about what they think and say.  Although the dialogue (when it does appear) is primarily in Arabic (with English subtitles), the film was created for non-Arabic speakers. The film has the emotional quality of political satire. Although it is not traditional in style we have here masterful movie making.  The main character speaks only in the final scene, and the events in his life neither interact with, nor directly impact upon, the actions of the other characters.  Rather, Suleiman’s unnamed central character (who is played by Suleiman himself and identified in the credits as 'ES') provides the hermeneutical framework which makes the actions of the other characters comprehensible. 

The structure of the film (I would be reluctant to call it a plot) is deceptively simple.  The movie is essentially a two-act play with Suleiman not appearing until the second act.  The opening scene features Santa Claus engaging in what appears to be a humorous game of chase with several young children.  However, as the scene progresses, it becomes clear that the man in the Santa suit is fleeing the children.  Then, when the exhausted Santa collapses, the viewer is allowed to see that Santa has a large kitchen-knife protruding from his chest.  The children who were pursuing Santa do not reappear in the film after this first scene, and the man in the Santa-suit reappears only in a cameo shot.  Such open-ended and rich symbolism is typical of this complex film.  In this case, Santa almost certainly represents good-will which is severely injured, but not dead, in the Holy Land.

After this opening scene, the remainder of the first act is composed of several brief scenes in which people are going about their 'normal' activities in the Israeli-occupied portions of Jerusalem and the Palestinian-controlled city of Ramallah in the West Bank.  Most of these actions are similar to ones conducted by people all over the world.  For example, one man waits for a bus; another carries out his trash; a boy plays with a soccer-ball; a woman cleans rubbish out of her garden; a man arranges things on the flat-roof of his house and two men argue over parking spaces.  As the film progresses through a series of 'normal' days, however, these actions become anything but 'normal' by the standards of the affluence and relatively peaceful first world.  The bus never arrives to take this man (or anyone else) to work; an angry old man stabs holes in the boy’s soccer ball; the woman is fighting a losing battle to remove the trash that her neighbour is constantly dumping in her yard; the man has placed hundreds of empty beer bottles on his roof so that he can hurl them at Israeli police; and one of the men eventually tears the licence-plate off his neighbour’s car.

The point of these images in the first act—and this film is dominated by images, rather than discourse—is simply to emphasize that the Holy Land is like everywhere else on earth, but also unlike any place else on earth.  The peoples of the Holy Land—and in this first act, few characters can be clearly identified as Israeli or Palestinian—engage in many of same activities as do people all over the earth, but they also live in an environment where distrust and animosity are an almost unconscious part of the cultural framework. 

Nearly all of these images are intriguing and masterfully presented, but let me highlight a few in order to illustrate the themes and style of this film.  The man who so diligently collected the beer bottles on his roof is discovered to be in an ongoing argument with his neighbour over the proper limits of a driveway.  The beer bottles are collected to discourage the police from intervening on the side of the man’s neighbour (whom they evidently view as the 'proper owner' of the disputed driveway space).  The clear parallels between this minor dispute over land and the ownership disputes between the Israelis and Palestinians is so completely transparent that Suleiman can leave the analogy unstated. 

Similarly, the dispute between the man who continuously tosses his trash in his neighbour’s yard and his female neighbour comes to a boil when she begins tossing his garbage back into his yard.  In what he believes to be righteous indignation, he asks why she would throw trash in his yard.  In what she believes to be righteous indignation, she answers that it is his trash to begin with and that she is only returning what he has previously thrown her way.  He then responds by insisting that even if it is his trash, it was 'unneighbourly' of her to throw it back in his yard without first negotiating with him.  Again, the analogy to contemporary political and military events in the Holy Land is so transparent, that Suleiman can leave it unstated.  Suleiman has mastered the art of subtle political satire.  The theme of this first act is summarized by the opening words of the entire movie (the opening scene with Santa Claus is completely without dialogue), as a character (who is identified as neither Palestinian nor Israeli) observes: 'What a fucked day.'  For Suleiman, everyday in the Holy Land will be 'fucked' until there is a just peace.

In the second act, Suleiman begins appearing in the film as the main character, an Israeli man in love with a Palestinian woman.  Suleiman’s character, like all the characters, is unnamed, but provides the hermeneutical lens through which the rest of the film is to be viewed, the lens of an Israeli who loves the Palestinian people.  For a Palestinian director like Suleiman to adopt this perspective is truly ingenious.  It enables him to present the story of Palestinian oppression without demonizing the Israelis.  By adopting this perspective, Suleiman is able to oppose the political and military oppression of the Palestinians without being anti-Jewish or anti-Israeli.  (After all, we should not lose sight of the fact that many Israelis do, like Suleiman’s main character, view the Palestinian situation through the eyes of love and sympathy.)  

Suleiman introduces his Palestinian girlfriend into the film at an Israeli checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah.  She is there to meet ES, the name given to Suleiman’s character in the credits.  On this occasion, the Israeli soldiers are forcing all Palestinian vehicles to turn around and return to Ramallah.  While the Israeli soldiers are threatening the various drivers at gunpoint, she simply parks her car and fearlessly walks through the checkpoint on foot.  Although she catches the attention of several soldiers, she stares them down and proceeds to her date with ES.  (Their 'dates' consist of sitting silently together in his car at the checkpoint.)  Whereas the first act provided images of various people living their respective lives in the Holy Land without clearly identifying their political and national identities and without ever portraying people interacting with one another as Israelis and Palestinians, the second act is dominated by images of interaction between Israelis and Palestinians.  Many of these images are seen through the eyes of ES as he sits silently with his Palestinian girlfriend at the checkpoint.

ES is silently shaken as Israeli soldiers at the checkpoint steal the designer jacket of a young Palestinian boy and as they force other Palestinian men to wait for hours and repeatedly subject them to humiliating searches.  In one powerful scene, Israeli soldiers, who are leaving Palestine, stop to wipe the dust off their shoes before passing through the checkpoint back into Israel.  In another scene, a Palestinian ambulance with its lights flashing is stopped and carefully searched on its way to a hospital in Israel while a couple of Israeli police vehicles speed through the same checkpoint in both directions.  Such scenes are made more powerful because they are viewed through the eyes of a sympathetic Israeli rather the eyes of an angry Palestinian.  ES’s silent observations at the checkpoint have a profound effect on him.  For example, after he witnesses an Israeli soldier command a Palestinian to turn off his Arabic music (apparently for no other reason than to suppress the man’s assertion of his cultural heritage), ES finds himself at an intersection next to a man with an Israeli flag on his car window.  In an act of defiance, ES begins loudly playing an Arabic tape (apparently for no other reason than to assert an individual’s right to express a cultural identity).

Of course, the distrust and animosity in the Holy Land is not the exclusive property of the Israelis, and Suleiman’s film is true to this unpleasant reality.  ES’s neighbour, an Israeli, is the victim of repeated violence (presumably at the hands of Palestinians).  In one scene, ES’s neighbour responded to a fire-bomb in his driveway by walking calmly outside and extinguishing the flames—as if such activities were 'normal', and, in another scene, he discusses his purchase of a new car while the police investigate a machine-gun attack which shattered all the windows in his house.  ES views both sets of images, violence against Palestinians and violence against Israelis with equal sadness.

Although all injustice and violence sadden ES, Suleiman presents the military occupation of Palestinian territories as the core of the problem.  In an ironically humorous scene, ES tosses a peach-stone out the window of his car, only to have it land on an Israeli tank—which is promptly blown to bits.  A similar theme is present in a subsequent fantasy sequence when ES’s girlfriend imagines herself at an Israeli military training facility where she silently transforms into an invincible Christ-figure (with a 'crown' of bullets, and arms outstretched as on a crucifix).  As this Christ-figure, she kills all the Israeli recruits.  (She and the Israeli instructor survive, as apparent symbols of how the people at the top use the lives of those beneath them as cannon-fodder in their ongoing orgy of violence).

In spite of these violent fantasy sequences, Suleiman clearly sees violence as the problem, not the answer. In one scene, Suleiman brilliantly exposes the falsity of the common assumption that Arabs are inherently violent.  The camera focuses upon three men who are beating an unseen victim with clubs.  (The unfortunate victim is hidden by a retaining wall.)  They continue their beating until a fourth man comes with a gun and fires three shots to finish off the victim.  Then the victim, a snake, is lifted above the wall.  Many audiences who presume that the men are beating a human being will find their presumptions checked by Suleiman’s brilliant film-making.  In this scene, Suleiman demonstrates that violence is not inevitable in the Holy Land, and in a subsequent scene, he shows that it is not productive.   The victims of earlier violence are shown recovering in a Jerusalem hospital (the valley of Gehenna is visible through the hospital window).  Then, the patients, consisting of both Palestinians and Israelis, get out of bed one by one and crowd the halls as they join various members of the hospital staff smoking in the hallway.  Suleiman uses this powerful image to show that the people of the Holy Land are slowly killing themselves together.  Perhaps the strongest image of the new, non-violent Holy Land that Suleiman seeks is found when SE takes his girlfriend away from the checkpoint for the first time and she returns to his apartment with him.  Co-existence is possible.

Although Suleiman’s vision is—in my interpretation of this complex set of images—non-violent, it is not uncontroversial.  Suleiman presents a clear political solution to the current violence.  He imagines a Jerusalem controlled by the Palestinians.  Thus, when ES releases a balloon embossed with Yasser Arafat’s image, it floats peacefully through an Israeli checkpoint and lands on top of the Dome on the Rock.  In this and other scenes, Suleiman imagines a Palestinian-controlled Jerusalem, but this is not to say a Muslim-controlled Jerusalem.  In keeping with the actual culture of Palestine, the film is rich in Christian imagery and shows no tendency to suppress Christian culture in Palestine. 

In a particularly humorous scene, an Israeli policeman is sitting in his vehicle listening to the radio when an English-speaking tourist asks him how to find the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.  The soldier mumbles to himself, 'That’s a Christian site.'  Then after straining to come up with directions to the site, he goes to the back of his vehicle and gets a handcuffed, blindfolded Palestinian, who gives the tourist directions—even while he remains handcuffed and blindfolded.  In a subsequent scene, when the same tourist asks directions to the Dome on the Rock (an obviously Muslim site), the same soldier goes to the back of his vehicle only to find that his prisoner is gone.  The soldier then drives off with sirens blaring, presumably to recapture his Muslim escapee.  With these three scenes, Suleiman seems to imagine a Jerusalem ruled by Palestinian Christians and Muslims.

In the closing scenes of the film, SE’s father dies.  It very well could be that Suleiman thinks the Holy Land will not experience its non-violent future until the present violent generation passes away.  In the meantime, Suleiman closes the film with a final disturbing image.  SE and his mother are sitting in his father’s kitchen watching his father’s pressure-cooker build up steam.  SE and his mother each encourage one another to turn the cooker off, but neither moves.  Both sit and watch the pressure continue building up. 

In the opening scene, good-will is assaulted.  In the closing one, pressure is building up, and no one seems able to act.  Hence the title 'Divine Intervention.'