Loading ...Between 'Reality' and Memory: An Interview with Palestinian Filmmaker Michel Khleifi
Isis Nusair (IN): How did you start making movies?
Michel Khleifi (MK): It happened by chance. There was nothing in our life in Nazareth that would have prepared me to be a filmmaker. The films we saw, like all the children our age in the 1960s, were popular and commercial. This was our only chance to breath in the “Nazarene ghetto.” Closure was imposed on us by the Israeli occupation through its cruel military rule that banned us from leaving Nazareth without permits. The world used to come to us through these films and some leftist newspapers and magazines.
There was one screening hall for thirty thousand people in my small town. They used to also screen films at the French and Spanish missionary schools. I loved theater since I was a kid and used to dream in a naïve way to study it one day. In the mid 1960s, I saw Elia Kazan’s film, America, America. The film tells the story of a Greek family from Turkey before WWI, and before the massacres and ethnic and religious cleansing committed by the Ottoman and later Turkish authorities against the Armenians, Syriacs, Christian Arabs, and of course large numbers of Greeks. In the film, the family wants to smuggle its wealth via its oldest son who dreams to immigrate to the United States of America. This fictional family resembled to an extent my family that comes from a similar background: Christian Greek Orthodox. There is a scene in the film of an engagement party that was similar to my sister’s engagement party that I remembered as a child. I was surprised by how Kazan managed to capture the details of that scene. That is when my view of cinema started to change. I realized that it was not only for entertainment, and that it was able to dive into our inner world and capture personal and intimate moments. We are able through cinema to restructure and convey our personal feelings.
I left school when I was fourteen and a half years old. I worked in a garage for five years (two in Nazareth and three in Haifa). My love for theater led me to a strange hobby for my age which was reading plays. Maybe this gave me more freedom to liberate my imagination. Wherever I went, I always had a play with me. At the time, we did not know that knowledge was a capital we carried in our heads. That is when it became clear to me that we need to develop the elements of our culture and knowledge, and how important it is to build a national/cultural/political project that could reach an international level.
IN: Tell us about your studies in Belgium.
MK: When I got to Belgium in the early 1970s, the youth revolution in Europe was at its peak. It was a cultural revolution that swept away with the old and the conservative. Marxist thought from a variety of political and philosophical views dominated the artistic, cultural, and literary European scene at the time. Parallel to that, there was a cultural/political movement in South America that worked on illiteracy and taught people to think critically through teaching them how to read and write. That is when I got the vision to create a Palestinian “culture of the poor” that could stand in the face of “cultural poverty.”
Let us not forget that during that time, the Vietnam War was taking place. This war was important for my generation because the Vietnamese people were able to triumph over an empire and prove to the world that “poor” people are able to win and be creative culturally, politically, and in their struggle. This was a victory over the strongest country in the world. I realized then how important it was to convey the Palestinian experience as a human and just one. I needed to start expressing myself artistically and culturally in order to reach that human level. I had to look for the keys to my personal expression that were a product of the accumulation and richness of the Palestinian human experience itself.
I love Arab culture and I belong to the Middle East, the cradle of human civilizations. Palestine is what got me to love knowledge, art, and cinema. Palestine through cinema got me to reach out to women and women got me to freedom. These are the basic elements of my films. I belong “there” like an orange that bloomed in Jaffa and no more. You can take one branch from Palestine’s oranges and plant it anywhere in the world or vice versa. We take from the world to enrich ourselves. Life is an exchange and enrichment for me and for the other.
I am always looking for people who will liberate language, form, art, politics, and philosophy, as well as techniques and not allow them to freeze. It is important to liberate things and give them an open space to operate. Critical thinking is the base for building a free society and for building culture and mature beings aware of the world around them.
In Brussels I studied how to direct theater, radio, and television. I did not know that cinema was an art that could be studied as well. Since my first year of studies, I was always attracted to cinema students and started to volunteer to work with them. In Belgium, I built myself and my knowledge and discovered hundreds of things. It was a wonderful experience that pushed me into adventures that I did not dream of, and at the same time it brought me back to the world of my childhood in Nazareth.
I remember in one of the visual art history classes, the teacher talked about Picasso’s “blue period.” He showed us some pictures from that period. When I was a child, curfew was imposed on us at night in Nazareth, and the police and border patrol units would ask people to turn the lights off. A man would go around and scream in Arabic, “Turn the lights off.” People, including my father, would paint the lamps with blue watercolors and the color blue will dominate the scene exactly as in Picasso’s paintings. I wondered whether Picasso actually lived through that cruel experience with us; that is the “blue period” of the Palestinian people.
During my childhood years, Palestinian communists paid close attention to culture, poetry, and literature. This resulted in the emergence of Palestinian poets like Tawfiq Zayyad, Samih al-Qasim, Salim Joubran, and especially Mahmoud Darwish. The communists’ newspapers and magazines were an open window to progressive and international literature. That made us feel less alone when facing the Zionist abuse and occupation, and realize that we are part of that same progressive culture and people struggling for their freedom and liberation.
This was the “warm stream” in Marxism that was defended by the Frankfurt School. It said that culture touches the humanity of people and liberates them regardless of ethnic, national or religious identities. This is where the contradiction between cultural work and ideological thought starts. Questions of freedom are the essence: Does freedom have borders or is it without borders? What is the difference between what is moral and what is legal? These questions became the center of my daily thought and where I looked for intellectual answers and later for themes to convey the practical, theatrical, and cinematic experiences.
IN: Why did you start making documentaries and not fictional films?
MK: Cinema is an art that is built on the relation between thought and the eye/camera and what is in front of the camera and vice versa. Is what I see real or is it a staged reality enacted in front of the camera? What is reality? Is it my surroundings or my inner world looking outside? What is the dynamic and dialectical relation between these two worlds? That is how I started posing questions about cinematic form and how to reflect the Palestinian reality without prior ideological pressures. There was another essential element that interested me in regard to how to represent the existential Palestinian experience cinematically. How can I convey the “story” of a people without pictorial memory? What is the intellectual, mental, and temporal path for writing memory in general? Then came other questions that I needed to find answers for in my films about how many accumulated temporality do we live through simultaneously? How do we deal with a present that becomes instantaneously a past?
Source: www.jadaliyya.com