Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma, and Memory (review)

A book about Palestinian cinema necessarily enters into a contested territory, literally and figuratively. The scorching passions that underlie academic, media, and community debates in this country regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict leave little space for bland disagreements. To judge by tenure controversies, blacklists, and other intimidations directed at scholarship sympathetic to Palestinians, a fierce battle is now underway for the control of knowledge and public opinion.

Into this miasma step Nurit Gertz and George Khleifi, an Israeli and a Palestinian, who are charting a path for discussion in a lower register—informed, reasoned, respectful, deeply empathetic, and eminently useful. Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma and Memory is the first book-length study of its kind in Hebrew, now in English, to provide an extensive discussion of Palestinian cinema as it has evolved over some eight decades. As such, it makes visible a national cinema whose films are rarely if ever screened in the United States; it offers an in-depth study of an emergent body of films produced under extremely adverse circumstances; it situates these films in their historical, political, and ideological contexts; and it contributes meaningfully to our broader understanding of other "emergent," "Third World," and "postcolonial" cinemas. Happily, it is also erudite, providing necessary information to the initiated and uninitiated alike, and it is written in clear, jargon-free language. These qualities make Palestinian Cinema at once authoritative and accessible.

The beleaguered state of Palestinian cinema, produced under so much duress, emerges here forcefully. Inevitably, the book shows, Palestinian cinema confronts the claims of its context—that of a nation in formation undergoing a protracted dispossession that threatens its core identity. Here, an existential need to retrieve the lost homeland in some way is intimately tied to Palestinian cinema's evolving responses to the changing claims of its history. The traumatic loss of homeland—marked visually through icons of home, village, olive tree, prickly pear, pastoral vistas, and so on—is the painfully unresolved theme running through the films under discussion. As one reviewer put it, this is a cinema of "the return" to the traumatic site of loss, where the genre of history necessarily gives way to that of elegy.¹ It is a cinema that replays a mourning that has not yet run its course, but also a cinema determined to channel this melancholy into a productive engagement with the traumatic history of its people. Such engagement is necessarily political, invoking the Palestinians' literal "Right of Return."

It is to Gertz and Khleifi's credit that they retain this emotional impact without compromising the book's position as a serious academic text, or perhaps in reverse, that they inject into this academic text the power of empathy as an ethical (and implicitly political) statement that has far-ranging consequences. Emotional impact is not used here simply as a rhetorical ploy. Rather, it emanates from the films' very subject matter and the history out of which they grew. It also reflects the authors' commitment to bringing that history to light. Repeatedly, the dialectic of melancholy and agency, entrapment and change, emerges as a core issue that translates in Palestinian Cinema into analyses of the relation between subject matter and narration, form and content.

The book's organization is particularly useful given the cultural, historic, and political complexity of its subject matter. Progressing chronologically, it helps readers understand ways in which Palestinian films have evolved historically in response to national concerns at given points in time. The book follows Palestinian cinema since its beginnings in 1935 through its suspension during and after the Naqba (the "catastrophe" of Palestinian dispossession in and around 1948); its reemergence as a militant cinema spurred by the formation of the Fatah movement and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO); its responses to Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza since the 1967 war; and its evolution through the two Intifada uprisings.

This...