Edward Said: The Last Interview (review)

Less than a year before his death on 25 September 2003, Edward Said gave his final interview over the course of three days. This interview is recorded in Mike Dibb's film. Said speaks of his illness and how he was virtually unable to read, write or listen to music. But there is no sign in this remarkable film of any abatement of Said's immense intellectual energy or passionate engagement with life. Said speaks for almost two hours about his life, his major works, including Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, his films, his role as a member of the Palestine National Council and his subsequent profound disillusionment with Arafat and the Oslo Accords. It is hard to think of another individual who could carry an entire film of this length merely by speaking to an appropriately low-key interviewer such as Charles Glass.

Said is blazingly articulate, with a face that could have been painted by El Greco. He illustrates his points with references to Vico, Foucault, Jane Austen, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Conrad, Graham Greene, Daumier, Tagore, Faulkner, Shakespeare, Hemingway, Mailer, Eliot, Roth, Chomsky and Napoleon. He describes his obsession with counterpoint and his preference for Rossellini over Verdi (Verdi is always "in italics"). Said also discusses American self-identity, the U.S. educational system and the provincial nature of its intellectuals, such as Philip Roth and Norman Mailer, who remain focused on the interior life of the country and do not engage with its immense impact in the world. Yet Said is always accessible and engaging. Whether describing his schooling in Cairo and the U.S.A., his views of his parents, his existential experiences of exile or his intellectual and political passions, Said makes sparks fly. His words paint a vast, vivid world, one that he inhabits more intensely than most. His emotional and imaginative range is as great as his intellect. I had the pleasure of watching this film with people who are well versed in Said's work and with others who had barely heard of him. Not one of them failed to be drawn in or energized and left wanting to respond to Said's ideas.

The director of this film, Mike Dibb, was a friend of Said's who knew his subject sufficiently well to make the roles of the interviewer and the camera as unobtrusive as possible. Said wears the same clothes over the three-day period of the film's shooting, which helps create the illusion that the viewer is the third party in a small room listening to Said and, to a lesser extent, Glass conversing. The result is an intimate portrait of a great mind.

With the passing of Edward Said, the world lost a great intellectual and an articulate and credible spokesman for Palestine. This film captures the man himself.