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THE STONEATTHETOP OF THEMOUNAIN:THEFILMSOF RASHIDMASHARAWINURITH GERTZ

Thefilms of Rashid Masharawi, one of the leading Palestinian "exilic"directors of the younger generation, are set almost entirely in the occu-pied territories, especially in refugee camps, and unfold in a seeminglytimeless present shaped by a past catastrophe (1948) never explicitlyevoked. The author examines Masharawi's some dozenfilms, both doc-umentary andfeature, thematically and technically, showing how the

films' structure and camera work emphasize the sense of confinement,narrowing horizons, andpsychological siege depicted. The author con-cludes that though almost relentlessly bleak and stripped of any hintof romanticism, the films also convey a stubborn will to survive andendure, and togetherpresent a powerful allegory of life in the occupiedterritories.

"With many a weary step, and many a groan,Up the high hill he heaves a huge round stone;The huge round stone, resulting with a bound,Thunders impetuous down, and smokes along the ground.Again the restless orb his toil renews,Dust mounts in clouds, and sweat descends in dews."

-Homerfrom the classical myths*

RASHIDMASHARAWI,though less well-known than Michel Khleifi or Elia Suleiman,is widely considered to be one of the best Palestinian filmmakers working today.Born in 1962 in the Shatti refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, Masharawi has made

NURITHGERTZis professor of cinema and literatureat the Open Universityandprofessorof cinema and television at Tel Aviv University. She is the author, most recently, ofMyths in Israeli Culture:Captives of a Dream (VallentineMitchell;2000). This articleis taken from a chapter that will appear in a forthcoming book on Palestiniancinema,coauthored with George Khleifi,whom the authorwould like to thank forhis commentsand insights on Masharawiand his work.*H.A. Guerber,Greece and Rome, trans. Ruth Ruzgas(1986; London:BrackenBooks,1992), p. 144.

Journal of Palestine Studies Vol. XXXIV,No. 1 (Autumn2004), pp. 23-36 ISSN:0377-919X; electronic ISSN:1533-8614.o 2004 by the Institute for Palestine Studies. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permissionto photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of CaliforniaPress'sRightsand Permissionswebsite, at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.


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close to a dozen films, a number of which have met with considerable success invarious international film festivals. His first feature film, Curfew (Hatta Ish'aarinAakhar, 1993), won the Golden Prize in the 1993 Cairo Film Festival and wasshown at the Cannes Festival as part of Critics' Week. His second full-lengthfilm, Haifa (1996), was screened at Cannes in the framework of "A SpecialLook," which presents films selected by the festival's directors but not shownin the official competition. His most recent feature film, Ticket to Jerusalem(Tathkara Ila-l- Quds, 2002), was screened at the New Directors/New FilmsFestival in New York in 2003. He was the first Palestinian filmmaker to workalmost exclusively in the occupied territories, and his first feature film, becauseit was made with a Palestinian-based production house, has been called the "firsttruly Palestinian film."1

Palestinian film critics often compare Masharawi's work with that of Khleifi,the best known Palestinian director who is credited with opening a new eraof Palestinian cinematic creativity. But while Khleifi's films mainly documentPalestinian life inside Israel proper, Masharawi's films take place primarily inrefugee camps. And while Khleifi, like other Palestinian directors who grewup in the landscapes of old Palestine in Israel, presents idyllic reconstructionsof traditional village life,2 Masharawi's films depict a bleak struggle for survivalin a dead-end present. Though he rarely evokes the world left behind by theolder generation in what is present-day Israel, this lost world, and specificallyhis parents' town of Jaffa, is clearly an important part of his identity. Thus, inan interview: "I am from Jaffa, from Manshiyya. Half of the Dolphinarium [themarine-life observation area] was ours. I grew up in Gaza, in a refugee camp,but it was always clear to me that I am from Jaffa, and that we are poor becausewe are not in Jaffa."3

Masharawi moved to Tel Aviv when he was twelve, leaving school and hometo support his parents and six siblings after his father became incapacitated. Heworked as a construction worker, dishwasher, and waiter before getting a jobbuilding sets in the Israeli film industry. But although he left the camp early (anddespite long periods living and working not only in Tel Aviv but also in Hollandand Ramallah), it was his years in the camp that established his cinematic pathand shaped his vision. The structure of his films, where hope invariably turnsto hopelessness, where disaster is followed by even greater disaster, wherethe protagonists' situation goes from bad to worse, and from worse to evenmore terrible, is reminiscent of existentialist literature of the 1940s and 1950sdepicting the human condition as a kind of prison. In Albert Camus's TheOutsider (L'etranger), for example, the protagonist passes from freedom toprison and finally to a solitary cell on death row, with the diminishing spaceparalleled by evaporating hopes. In Camus's novel, however, the narrowing ofspace and loss of hope are accompanied by a transition to enlightenment, akind of higher freedom and acceptance of human destiny, while in Masharawi'sfilms human destiny is intertwined with political destiny and leads to neitherfreedom nor enlightenment. This unsparing depiction of an ever narrowingworld and implacable dead ends metaphorically reflects Palestinian life in the

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camps of today, and this is what makes his films simultaneously compelling anddifficult to watch.

SHRINKINGSPACES,DECLININGHOPESRashid Masharawi's bleak vision was already hinted at in his very first produc-

tion, a four-minute short film entitled Partners made when he was nineteen.It shows an Arab from Jaffa who drives a garbage truck and a Jew who tellshim where to stop-an interaction that constitutes the totality of their "part-nership." But the harshness of his vision is perhaps most clearly exemplified inhis first feature film, Curfew. The film opens with a high-angled long-shot viewof the city of Gaza, after which the camera descends to a refugee camp. Thisis a very static camera, its immobility emphasizing the absence of motion inthe camp, which is shown as an unpeopled, lifeless world, bare and strange,a place of exile. The camera then zeros in on a small playground where somechildren are playing, proceeds from there to a narrow apartment into whicha family is crowded, and remains "stuck" there for the rest of the film. Groupshots capture the family members confined in these tiny lodgings, but withoutany close-ups that could create a sense of personal space; the family seemsimprisoned behind frames and bars, blocked by closed compositions, alwayscrowded together within the enclosing walls.

Space, then, plays a crucial role in the film (as it does in third world cinemain general4). Having progressively narrowed the scope from the broad space ofGaza City, seen only at the beginning and the end of the film so as to indicatethe location of the events, the camera, too, is imprisoned within these walls,highlighting the confinement of the people, who never reach the wider spacebeyond the camp. Masharawi's camera, to borrow Einaim's formulation, tellsthe painful stories of those who live in spaces that "have vanished and instead,only a void."5

The difficulties Masharawai encountered while making Curfew could be saidto reflect the film's subject matter. It was shot in 1993, toward the end of thefirst intifada. As it was not possible to film in Gaza at the time, the director hadto shoot the panoramic views of the city from hidden lookouts or rooftops. Thestreets of the refugee camp were filmed in Jenin camp in the West Bank, whilethe interior scenes were filmed in a house in Nazareth, in Israel proper. In thisway, the film's on-site locations themselves suggest a state of siege, distances,and exile.

The film's plot is simple. The family sits in its small, cramped home whilea young son, Radar, reads aloud a letter sent by his older brother in Germany.The brother's letters, like those of so many refugee sons working abroad, arriveperiodically from distant exiles and are shared by the entire family; the son'sdistant exile seems an extension of the family's exile depicted in the film, whichhas been shrunk to this one camp and to this one small apartment. While Radaris reading the letter, a curfew is declared. If up to now the camp's alleywayswere more or less empty, now they are utterly deserted. And if before it was

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possible to leave the cramped house, now it is out of the question. The resultis a heightened sense of claustrophobia and suffocation, an inside with nooutside. What is happening outside can only be guessed at from the sounds(shots, pursuits, house demolitions) or from what Radar reports as he peepsfrom an aperture high in the wall. The family leaves the house only once duringthe entire film, for a military search, and then the narrow apartment seems aprotected nest compared to the darkness outside, the wall against which peopleare lined up, the fear of the Israeli soldiers.

The family's situation, then, worsens as the space diminishes, from beingcrammed into the house, to being placed under curfew, to being immersed intotal darkness when the electricity is cut. Later, the apartment fills with teargas, and the family is not only in darkness but their eyes are shut tight againstthe stinging gas. Later still, soldiers break into the neighbors' house, expel theresidents, and blow it up. When Akram, a younger son, complains, "Eat.Sleep.Prison. Gas. We can't do a thing," his father replies, "Do you want to die? Doyou want to go to prison? Do you want the house you live in to be destroyed?"Indeed, at the end of the film one of the family's older sons, Raji, is hauled off toprison. Apparently every situation can be worse, the only "consolation" beingthat the previous situation was also terrible ("What difference does it make?"says one of the brothers about the curfew, "We'renot doing anything anyway")or that the future may be even more terrible ("There are people who have losttheir sons, and they're not crying," says the father to the mother, who weepswhen her son is taken away).Under such conditions, the yearnings and dreams of the protagonists donot concern the distant past in Palestine or a future return to it. The focusis on what has just happened, the moment before the curfew, the momentbefore the darkness. Palestine has no explicit existence in the film. The placesthe characters of the film want to reach are in more distant exiles, such asGermany, where the oldest brother is living, or in Israel, where there is work.The unending series of calamities in itself underscores a basic sameness in thecamp residents' lives: the house was ill lit even before the electricity was cut; theoption of leaving Gaza for work in Israel is terrible, but that of staying at homeis worse; everyone was imprisoned in the camp even before the curfew-Rajicould not leave because he had to look after the family; the daughter, Amal, wasnot allowed to go out because she is a girl; the father cannot move because ofhis back pains; the younger men cannot work outside because of the intifada,and so on.

A similar downward progression is found in Masharawi's 1991 documentaryHouse or Houses (Dar-aw-Dour).6 The film's subject is a man who was oncea metal-smith but who lost his livelihood when the Israelis destroyed his shopwhile widening the street. He now works as a housecleaner in Tel Aviv, far fromhis home. The sharp cinematic transitions between his house in the camp inGaza and his workplace in Tel Aviv emphasize the endlessness of his exile:Tel Aviv, which had absorbed the neighborhood (Manshiyya) where he hadlived until 1948, is now a place of exile where he has to stay during the week,

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cleaning other people's apartments while he longs for his home in Gaza. ButGaza, too, is a place of exile, a foreign space. From this impasse he sinks evendeeper during the Gulf War,when he loses his job and is penned up in the camp,with no possibility of leaving. This new situation of curfew and imprisonmentunderscores the distress of his previous state of exile and separation ("Wewere conquered even before the Gulf War,"he says) and the hopelessness ofimproving the situation in the future ("God willing, tomorrow will be a betterday,"he says, before adding, "When will it be any better?"). He is troubledeverywhere: in Tel Aviv where he works, far from his family; in Gaza where hecannot support them; in his house in the refugee camp, where Israeli soldiersthreaten to seize him; and outside his house, where he has to hide from them.The continual narrowing of space-from the open sea, through the yard, intothe house, and finally to the plate of food on which the entire life of the familyis focused-underscores the dead end.

An impression of diminishing space occurs even in Masharawi's films shotout of doors. His 2002 feature film A Ticket to Jerusalem, made during the sec-ond intifada, opens and closes with traveling shots of the open spaces throughwhich the protagonist, a man named Jabber, is driving. But there, too, the cam-era soon becomes "stuck,"when Jabber arrives at a roadblock. The now staticcamera closes and cuts the open spaces while Jabber remains trapped betweenbarriers in much the same way that the characters of Masharawi's other filmsare confined to their apartments or camps. Like in the other films, the man'simmobilization underscores the hopelessness of his situation: he tries to earnhis living traveling from place to place projecting films to children, but is re-peatedly told that people need bread and work, not movies. And even if theywanted his films, he is unable to reach them, spending most of his time tryingto get through roadblocks. Meanwhile, his wife is alone in an empty apartment,his parents are angry at him for leaving her alone, and everyone around himscorns his work. Following Masharawi's usual pattern, things become evenworse: the closure is tightened, the roads are cut off entirely, everyone is con-fined to their homes (so even those who might see his films cannot), Jabber'scamera breaks down, he stops going to work, and his relations with his wifereach the breaking point. And the background is filled with nonstop explosionsand shootings, signaling endless house demolitions, injuries, killings.In all Masharawi's films, the structure of unending disasters-the viciouscircle of dead-end situations-is further emphasized by the monotonous rep-etition of the same actions (coming together for meals, wandering in emptystreets) and the same disruptive disturbances. The monotonous music, the tap-ping of a bouncing ball, the ongoing clicking of dice in a game of backgammon,the echoes of distant gunfire heard on the soundtrack-all serve to magnify thechangeless tedium of everyday life in the camp. This repetitiveness also appliesto the longer time span: a newborn son is named after one who had died, a childborn during the curfew reminds people of a previous birth during a previouscurfew. The feeling of inescapable imprisonment within the camp is reinforcedby the film's circular structure: it both starts and ends with a long shot of Gaza;

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it begins with the postman delivering the letter from the son in Germany andends when the reading of the letter is completed; a curfew is announced earlyin the film and another is announced at the end. Time in the camp has stopped;the lives of the protagonists have gone nowhere.

Loss AND REPOSSESSION OF TIME AND SPACEMasharawi's films focus on the present lives of the camp dwellers; there

seems to be no past or future. And yet, beyond the harsh-and by no meansexaggerated-depictions of the present7 are echoes of the past; the traumasof war and expulsion that are not expressly portrayed are evoked indirectlyas an echo of something imagined.8 Old traumas inscribe themselves as thefilm's "historical unconscious" and reappear "as filmic images"9 in the present.This is the blurred memory of the "second generation," memories of the lostcountry passed on by parents or grandparents. The connection of the newPalestinian directors with Palestine, then, is not constructed from their ownexperiences but from inherited memory and imagination. Marianne Hirsch callsthis "postmemory":

Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who growup dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whoseown belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previ-ous generation, shaped by traumatic events that can be nei-ther fully understood nor re-created.... This memory createswhere it cannot recover. It imagines where it cannot recall. Itmourns a loss that cannot be repaired.10

Imagining what it "cannot recall," postmemory in the case of these films revealsitself as an acting out in the present of the traumatic past; Kaes refers to thesame phenomenon as "a mask that hides the traumatic experience . . . thatcould not yet be visually articulated.""l The extent to which postmemory isexemplified in Masharawi is made clear in a 1993 interview, where he says:

Jaffa is always present in my subconscious. It is true that Ilove Jaffa, but I do not have to mourn over it in a blatant andacrimonious way. It won't help if I shout all the time "Iam fromJaffa and this is my house!" The boring repetition of my storyas a refugee will only diminish the power and importance ofmy story. It will also diminish its reliability and will cast doubtson my beliefs and on the justice of my claims.12

Thus, instead of dealing directly with the loss of Jaffa, Masharawi's films evokethe past catastrophe through their very structure of deterioration and evernarrowing space. The original trauma reverberates behind the succession ofcalamities and can be reconstructed by sporadic hints about the past. It can

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also be understood by an allegorical interpretation of the ongoing events as rep-resentative reenactments of repressed traumatic experiences, an interpretationthat brings to the surface the "political sub-conscience"13 that the text has sup-pressed. The relentless deterioration of situations, combined with the crampedspaces in which the protagonists live, convey a general sense of devastation andendless exile that transcends each film's specific timeand space. This transition beyond the specific makes it The relentlesspossible to find in the unfolding events depicted in the deterioration of situationsfilms allegories for the first disaster, which is imitated and the ever shrinkingand repeated in a process of "acting out." spaces convey a sense ofHints of the past are most explicit in Masharawi's devastation and endlesssecond feature film, Haifa (1995). This film is more exile that transcends eachcomplex in structure than either Curfew or House or film's specific time andHouses, and, unlike them, includes both memories of space.the past and hopes for the future. The memories arethose of Nabil, the camp's "village idiot" who is nicknamed Haifa becausehe wanders half mad through the camp's narrow alleys shouting "Haifa! Acre!Jaffa!"The hopes for a better future, shared by many in the camp and expressedby Abu Said, another of the film's principal characters, hinge on the coming ofpeace. These memories and hopes coalesce in a certain national continuity thatgained strength during the Oslo process, when the film was made. However,the succession of disasters that occur in Haifa, as in the two films describedabove, shatters this narrative or casts it, together with its memories and hopes,in an ironic mold. Although the misfortunes depicted in the film are personal,relating to individual life stories, they are also allegories for the collapse ofPalestinian national aspirations.Even after everything has been lost, and even in a refugee camp, the madmanHaifa still clings to the hopes and memories that sustain him: he remembersthe past in Haifa, Jaffa, and Acre; he remembers his aunt whom he loves; and hedreams of marrying his cousin in a ceremony he imagines in his rememberedcity of Haifa. His aunt, too, is sustained by hopes: throughout the film she neverstops waiting for the return of her sons who, like so many Palestinian sons, arescattered throughout the world. Each time Haifa enters her house the aunt issure that one of her sons has returned, and when he leaves she is overcome byloss: "Everyone is leaving. No one is staying." Her disappointments end withher death, the last and final loss. And with her death, Haifa's mainstays alsocrumble, for at the same time his cousin is married off to someone else; hisprivate loss mirrors the national loss.

Abu Said, the film's other main character, is similarly caught in a downwardspiral. Formerly a policeman, he has lost his job and now sells sugar candyto camp children. Still, he is hopeful: he has faith in the peace process andbelieves that he will be able to return to his job, that his son will be releasedfrom prison, that the shooting will cease, that "there will be no more dead."However, all these hopes dissipate. One day, he becomes paralyzed after suf-fering a stroke while selling his sugar candy. Now that he is unable to leave

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his bed, he is notified that he has been accepted for a position as a policemanin the Palestinian Authority. Although Abu Said's personal catastrophe is not aresult of the national story, it seems a mordant commentary on the Palestinianaspirations that he shares, mirroring the loss of collective hopes. In a later in-terview, the director, referring to the Oslo process, summed up the connectionbetween memory of the past and hope of the future-and their relationship tothe political scene-as follows:

When they made the agreement they knew that it would leaveus in the camps. In the camp, my land was Jaffa. It justifiedmy life. I would have preferred to finish my life in the dream.The peace took Jaffa away from the refugee camp.14

Thus, the camp residents in Haifa expect that the peace process will leadto a restoration of Palestinian rights. The deterioration in the lives of theprotagonists-Haifa, the aunt, Abu Said-occurs against the background ofthese hopes. The collision between the private and public spheres is exem-plified in the film's climax, when a demonstration crossing the camp inter-sects with the funeral procession of Haifa's aunt coming from the oppositedirection-in the middle, between the two crowds, stands Haifa. The cam-era moves in for a close-up, and the expression in his eyes reveals the total-ity of the collapse in both the personal and the collective spheres. Althoughthese would appear to contradict each other, they are, on the allegorical level,inseparable.

Just as Masharawi's heroes do not succeed in escaping from present time intomemory and dream, so they are unable to go beyond present space. In Haifa,two spaces are linked to the refugees' hopes: Washington, where the peacetalks are taking place, and Palestine, the land left behind. Both are presented asequally unreachable. In an absurdist scene, Washington is shown in a newscastthat the camp dwellers try to watch on a broken-down television cooled bya fan. Palestine, meanwhile, seems to exist only in the mad Nabil's cries of"Jaffa!Haifa! Acre!"-and when he tries to recollect specific details about theseplaces, he can recall only conquest and expulsion. The impossibility of eitherescape is prefigured in the film's opening footage, where Haifa is seen sittingin an old wreck of a car, turning the steering wheel and making the motionsof driving without, of course, going anywhere. The editing carries the camerafrom the car to the landscape just beyond, to the broad open spaces of thedesert that Haifa never reaches. Like the other protagonists of this and earlierfilms, Haifa remains "stuck" in the camp, a lifeless place filmed in static shotsthat take in deserted alleyways and passers-by that seem to float in and out ofthe frames, or to advance, very slowly, from background to foreground. And,again as in Masharawi's other films, the camera has an ever narrowing focus,passing from empty streets to cramped apartments to one small corner of acramped apartment-in this case, to where Abu Said lies paralyzed. The broadspace seen as the film opens, evoking promise and memories, diminishes step

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by step as the film progresses, to close in, at the end, to the narrow confinesof a sick man's bed.The disappointed hopes (or actual results) of Oslo are also visible in the so-

called "roadblock movies"--Palestinian films of the late 1990s whose plots re-volve around Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks and which express feelings ofhistorical and psychological siege and of geographical enclosure. Masharawi'sshort documentary of life in Gaza, Stress (Tawattor), is one of the darkest ofthese films. Made in 1998, it appears to foresee the second intifada that brokeout two years later. It, too, begins and ends with long shots, opening with aview of the Erez checkpoint at the northern exit of the Gaza Strip, and endingwith a view of a Gaza camp.The entire film takes place out of doors; unlikeMasharawi's earlier films, there is no indoor location within which the film'scharacters can feel that they are in a safe haven (however suffocating). But eventhe out-of-doors seems cramped as the camera segments the space into smallelements through the use of close-ups and high-angle or medium shots, as wellas by cut-off images of a stomach, a face, a hand, an ID card-details that arecrooked and broken, disconnected from any organizing framework and not pre-ceded by an establishing shot. The space is also truncated repeatedly by imagesof soldiers, settlers, and settlements that dissolve into, or are cut off by, imagesof Arab towns and refugee camps. While Masharawi's earliest films deal withthe diminishing borders themselves, Stress deals with the shattered reality dic-tated by these borders. While in the film Haifa the Oslo accords are presentedas a surrender of the broad boundaries of the dream of return, Stress presentsthem as setting new boundaries that delimit Palestinian identity and shatter itfrom within. The film documents what happened in the seven years after thesigning of Oslo: the expanding and proliferating settlements; the splintering ofthe designated Palestinian area into small parcels; the cutting off, by roadblocksand bypass roads, of Palestinian urban from rural areas, of villages from theirlands, of the West Bank from the Gaza Strip, and of these last from Israel.15

MAQLOUBA, OR THEWORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWNMost of the directors of Masharawi's generation who grew up in the Pales-tinian exile or in the refugee camps of the occupied territories, and who be-came active at a time when spaces were increasingly divided and dislocated

by borders and roadblocks, settlements, and bypass roads, found it difficult todepict an idyllic harmony of a now lost past. Unable to emulate the harmonious"recreations" of Khleifi or other Palestinian directors born in Israel in calmerdays, many "exilic" directors of the new generation utilized symbols of thepast: traditional foods, dress, stone houses, the al-Aqsa mosque, and other em-blems of unity in Palestinian history and identity. The documentaries of LiannaBadr, Fadwa (1999), Zeitunaat (2002), and The Green Bird (At tayr-al-akhdar,2002), are the best examples of this type of film.But in Mashawari's bleak world there is no room for a reverential treatmentof these symbols. His short film Upside Down (Maqlouba, 2002) parodies them

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by turning them into surrealistic fantasies. The film opens with an old womanin traditional village dress climbing the stairs of a ruined old stone house. Sheenters a room whose walls bear faded bits of indistinct color typical of roomsin the old houses abandoned in 1948 that fill the new Palestinian cinema asrecollections of the distant past. The woman prepares the traditional Arabdish called maqlouba,16 with the camera lingering on the ingredients-rice,chicken, eggplant, lemon-the kitchen utensils and stone walls and occasion-ally passing to views seen through the window. At first this seems to be aninventory of shopworn Palestinian symbols: village woman, the stone house,the preparation of traditional food, cleaning of rice, dreams of open spaces,floating vision of the al-Aqsa mosque-all representative of the destroyed Pales-tinian past and the hope for a future revival. However, all these elements areout of place or seen from an unlikely angle, much like an unfinished puzzlewhose pieces are scattered around every which way: the maqlouba is seenthrough the bottom of the pot; the views from the window are constantlychanging-mountains, fields, refugee camp, city, the sea. As the film nears itsend the maqlouba is ready, with the camera showing it from below, and is thenup-turned onto the serving platter-so that it is now right side up. But the serv-ing platter, instead of being placed on a table, begins to soar above Jerusalemand above the mosque, with the empty pot floating above it. The maqloubais a national symbol representing, and restoring, the national past. But whenit is floating in the sky, like Arafat's picture on the balloon in Divine Interven-tion (Yad Elahiyya, 2002)-Suleiman's film which was shot a bit later-it looksridiculous and loses its symbolic meaning. Yet at the same time, it regains thatmeaning by being revitalized through the effect of estrangement. Thus, whilethe film exposes the banalization of the Palestinian national symbols, it alsorenews them by giving them a visionary surrealistic dimension.It is Masharawi as director who overturns traditional symbols in Maqlouba,but an integral part of his films is the depiction of a society where tradi-tional hierarchies of authority and identity have already been overturned in the

general collapse. The adult men fall the farthest. TheyAn integral part of have been expelled from the public sphere where theyMasharawi'sfilms is the were active. They cannot leave for work (because of the

depiction of a society curfew in Curfew, the closing of the border passes inwhere traditional Dar-aw-Dour, physical paralysis in Haifa) and cannothierarchies of authority determine either their own or their families' fates. Theyand identity have already are restricted to their homes-women's space. The menbeen overturned in the are completely passive (a feminine trait), a passivity ex-

general collapse. perienced as a backache or paralysis that confines themto their beds (in Curfew and in Haifa) and apart fromtheir wives' beds, a passivity that is a form of castration. Although both thebackache and the paralysis are real, they serve as allegories for the collectivesituation of the adult generation. The male identity as a whole is presentedas a mere semblance of a masculine identity, with the men clinging to manlyfunctions they are unable to fulfill. Thus Haifa, armed with a cardboard gun,

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children who, hiding in an abandoned building, draw pictures, tell stories, andweave dreams; in the second, through the films thatJabber projects. Thus, fromthe despair and hopelessness of the refugee camp (in Haifa), and the ceaselessanxieties of subsisting (in Ticket to Jerusalem), the protagonists draw, tellstories, project films. This struggle is strongly reminiscent of the quest for lovein Divine Intervention and in Rana's Wedding ('Ors Rana, Hanni Abu-Assad,2002), where the lovers have to meet at roadblocks. A number of other films-among them Kalandia Roadblock (An Ta'bor Qualandia, Subhi el-Zubeidi,2002)-also depict this struggle through imagination and dream.Masharawi's films do end in a victory of sorts, but it is of the kind won bythe protagonists of Camus's The Plague (La peste) or Solzhenitsyn's A Day inthe Life of Ivan Denisovitch. These are triumphs based on stubborn nonaccep-tance, on the ability to continue, day after day, simply to survive. Bhabha speaksof "the everyday life" of a nation as a continuous, circular, and repetitive pro-cess that breaks the national narrative, which progresses in a linear continuumtowards the defined goal.18 Everyday life in the camp represents the optionof a different kind of resistance, one that carries no hope of national redemp-tion but is simply a ceaseless struggle to maintain a strong hold on life itself.This hold on life is a passive form of opposition for the subjugated, endowingthem with an independent sphere of their own where they can both evadeand undermine the hegemonic power of the rulers.19 This hold on life itselfendows the well-known term sumud (refusal to leave the land; steadfastness)with additional meaning.

The deep opposition depicted in these films also expresses itself in anotherway: by ignoring the very presence of the occupier.20 The Israelis dominatePalestinians' lives by controlling time and space-determining the intervalsbetween curfews and between searches, between pursuits and between thedestruction of homes. They reduce the refugees' space further and further,imprisoning them in this enclosed area, and even this small space they penetratewith their bullets and tear gas. But the Palestinian-as-cinematographer rebelsagainst the occupiers by driving them out of the cinematic frame and makingthem nonexistent. In Haifa, the Israelis are seen only fleetingly, in the openingscene as they pursue one of the characters; in Curfew they are not seen at all;and in Dar-aw-Dour they are placed geographically at the margin of the space,which centers on Gaza where the protagonist lives rather than Tel Aviv wherehe works.

Palestinians for years have claimed that the Israeli narrative has erased theexistence of the Palestinian Arabs.21 Masharawi exemplifies this erasure in hisshort film The Magician (1992), in which an Arab worker in aJewish restaurantis made to disappear by a conjurer, who then is unable to bring him back.In an interview, Masharawi explains this as follows: "One hundred thousand[Palestinian Arabs] work [in Tel Aviv] and as if with a magic wand they aremade non-existent, they are not there ... non-existent. It's like with a televisionremote control... as if someone from the government came and went 'click,'and that's it."22 Two films, Curfew and, to a lesser extent, Haifa, reverse this

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picture by eliminating the Israeli or turning him into a blurred "other"-aninchoate, deconstructed being. Instead of controlling the Arabs with his gaze,the Israeli is turned into the object of the Arab gaze (e.g., the boy, Radar, who,like actual radar, looks out of the aperture in the wall and describes what theIsraeli soldiers are doing outside). Though a palpable being, the Israeli is hereperceived only by the sound of his gunshots and the aftereffects of his actions;the Israeli who in reality dictates the cinematic narrative exists in the cinematicframework only in fragmentary form, as a disembodied voice.23 Certainly, anabsence from the screen cannot conceal the power wielded or the oppressionexerted, but it does make it possible to undermine these power relations andconstruct a definition of Palestinian identity that is independent of the ruler'svision.

In Michel Khleifi's films, as in those of other Palestinian directors, most ofwhom grew up in Israel, the cinematic camera serves as an instrument of rebel-lion: it is used to strike back at Israeli "closures" and to conquer lost spaces andtime. These directors use cinematic means to depict a lost, nonexistent world.The reality in Rashid Masharawi's films, however, is much harsher, and it ismore difficult to recreate the lost harmonious reality from it. It is an existential-ist reality, a realistic portrayal of oppression and siege, of recurrent calamities,of hopelessness. In this reality the trauma of the conquest, and not the idyllicpast that preceded it, is revived. But even in this reality, there is resistance,however Sisyphean, the huge stone being pushed repeatedly to the top of themountain, only to roll back down, over and over. In this case of these films, theSisyphean fate is personal and individual as well as public and collective; theendeavor is not only existential but also national. In the real world, as depictedin these films, the Sisyphean stone could be said to have shattered into the manysmaller stones hurled by the "children of the intifada."Masharawi's films are notpolitical tracts: they are cinematic descriptions of the impossible reality livedby the individual who created them and by the collective of which he is part.NOTES

1. Samir Farid,Palestinian Cinema inthe Conquered Land [in Arabic] (Cairo:Public Administration for Culture, 1997).2. See Khleifi's Wedding in Galilee('Ors-il-Jaleel, 1987) and The Tale of ThreeJewels (Hikayat al-Jawhiral-Thalath, 1994);similar treatments of the Palestinian pastcan be found in Ali Nassar's Milky Way(Darb-et-Tabanat, 1997) and The NinthMonth (Fish-Shahr-et-Tassee,2002), and inNizar Hasan films Independence (Istiqlal,1994) and Legend (Ostura, 1998).3. Rashid Masharawi, telephoneinterview, 1 February 2001.4. Teshome Gabriel and George Khleifialso discuss the process of diminishing andreducing in Masharawi's films. See

Teshome Gabriel, "Toward a CriticalTheory of Third World Films,"in Questionsof Third Cinema, eds. Jim Pines and PaulWilleman (London: British Film Institute,1989), pp. 1-30, and George Khleifi, "AChronicle of Palestinian Cinema" [inHebrew], Theory and Criticism 18 (Spring2001), pp. 177-93.5. Hamza Einaim, "Before Birth, AfterDeath-an Essay" [in Hebrew], Roof 3(Winter 2000), p. 15. For a much moreconventional use of the camera, seeMasharawi's films Long Days in Gaza andVoice of Palestine.6. Dar-aw-Dour means "House orHouses" in Arabic, but it is also the nameof a children's game.

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7. See also Viola Shafik, "Cinema inPalestine," in Middle Eastern and NorthAfrican Film, ed. Oliver Leaman(New York:Routledge, 2001), pp. 509-32.

8. A parapraxis, in Elsaesser's terms,leaning on Freud. See Thomas Elsaesser,"Absence as Presence, Presence asParapraxis, Parapraxis as Mimicry,"AssafKolnoa 3 (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University,forthcoming) and Sigmund Freud,"Remembering, Repeating and WorkingThrough," in The Standard Edition of theComplete Psychological Works, vol. 12(London: The Hogarth Press and theInstitute of Psychoanalysis, 1909 and1974), pp. 147-56.

9. Anton Kaes, "Cinema andMigration,"AssafD, 1 (1998), pp. 101-16.10. Marianne Hirsch, "PastLives,Postmemories in Exile,"Poetics Today 17,no. 4 (Winter 1996), pp. 659, 664.11. See also Anton Kaes, "Holocaustand the End of History: PostmodernHistoriography in Cinema," in Probing theLimits of Representation, ed. SaulFriedlander (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 1992); Anton Kaes,"Cinema and Migration";Freud,"Remembering, Repeating and WorkingThrough"; Dominick LaCapra,"Revisitingthe Historians' Debate," History andMemory 9, no. 1-2. (Fall 1997),pp. 80-113; Homi K. Bhabha,"Dissemination: Time, Narrative, and theMargins of the Modern Nation," in Nationand Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha(London and New York:Routledge, 1990),pp.291-323.12. Ali Wakkad, "ARealisticallyDirected Director: An Interview withRashid Masharawi" [in Hebrew],Hadashoth 1, no. 6 (1993), pp. 1, 6.13. Frederic Jameson, The PoliticalUnconscious (Methuen: London, 1981),p. 49.14. Rashid Masharawi, telephoneinterview, 1 February 2001.15. Rima Hamami and Salim Tamari,"Anatomyof Another Intifada,"in RealTime: El Aqsa Intifada and the IsraeliLeft, ed. Adi Ofir (Jerusalem: Keter, 2001),pp. 69-89.16. Maqlouba means upside down in

Arabic. It's a name of a national dish that,when it is cooked and ready to serve, isturned upside down from the pot into theserving plate.

17. See MayaPinchasi, "The 'Other' ofthe 'Other'-On How the Israeli IsPresented in the Films of Masharawi andKhleifi" [in Hebrew] (Seminar Paper,Department of Cinema and Television, TelAviv University, 1999). Orli Lubin relates tothis phenomenon in her discussion of theIsraeli film Point of View, by DinaZvi-Riklis. See Orly Lubin, "The Image ofthe Woman in Israeli Cinema" [in Hebrew]in Fictitious Looks at the Israeli Cinema(Tel Aviv: The Open University of Israel,1998), pp. 223-46. See also Orly Lubin,"Schurr"[in Hebrew] in Fifty to Forty-eight(A special issue of the journal Theory andCriticism), (2000), pp. 423-28.18. Bhabha, "Dissemination." See alsoHamid Nacify, An Accented Cinema(Princeton: Princeton University Press,2001).19. Bhabha, "Dissemination."20. The discursive battle of "cinema inexile," as described by Naficy is thus notfought here by an ambivalent subversiveimitation of the ruler, but by an attempt toshape an independent narrative.21. See, for example, Edward Said,"Reflections on Twenty Years of PalestinianHistory,"JPS20, no. 4 (Summer 1991),pp. 5-22, and Elias Sanbar, "De L'identiteculturelle des Palestiniens," in Palestine.L'enjeu culturel, eds. EliasSanbar, SubhiHadidi, and Jean Claude Pons (Paris: Circe,institute du monde arabe, 1997), p. 15. Seealso Haim Bresheeth, "Tellingthe Stories ofHeim and Heimat, Home and Exile: TheFilm Ustura as an Iconic Parable of theInvisible Palestine,"Intellect 1, no. 1,(2002), pp 24-39; and Haim Bresheeth, "ASymphony of Absence: Borders andLiminality in Elia Suleiman's Chronicle of aDisappearance," Framework 43, no. 2 (Fall2002), pp. 71-84.22. Urri Lotan, "Between Shatti andSheinkin: An Interview with RashidMasharawi" [in Hebrew], Hadashot 6, no.11 (1993), pp. 6, 11.23. Pinchasi, "The 'Other' of the'Other."'

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