Palestinian anti-narratives in the films of Elia Suleiman

The ongoing nature of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has had a marked effect on Palestinian literature and film. Palestine has been and continues to be an intensely political and politicized subject matter. As the youngest of the art forms to treat the conflict, the medium of film raises a number of questions on art and politics. With many claiming that wars are being fought as much on our TV screens and in the media as they are on the ground, documentaries and fiction films have played a vital role in challenging stereotyped media images of the conflict. In this paper I will focus on the Palestinian-Israeli filmmaker Elia Suleiman, whose films have pioneered a reflective meditative cinematic language, introducing a new visual vocabulary to images of the conflict. Born in Nazareth in 1960, Suleiman began by making short films in the early 1990s during his self-imposed exile in New York. He later resettled in Jerusalem, out of which emerged his two full-length fiction films, Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996) and Divine Intervention (2002). Suleiman’s hallmarks are non-linear episodic narratives that rely less on plot and characterization and more on the combination of film structure, editing and soundtrack to create meaning. The emphasis on form and the non-verbal is in stark contrast to many other Palestinian films where the spoken word plays an important role, and understandably so. The oral tradition surrounding the conflict is brimming with stories waiting to be told, documented or covered. In fact, the ongoing occupation of Palestinians is like a story-factory, with countless stories being produced every day

Art · Literature · Narrative · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts · Middle East Politics and Society

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