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ОглавлениеFilm Curator
The Jerusalem Fund and Palestine Center
I first met Mohammad Malas in 2003 when I was teaching film at the American University in Cairo (AUC) and invited him to be a Distinguished Visiting Professor in my department and he accepted. We planned a series of events, including sessions with students, a retrospective of his films, and a roundtable discussion with Egyptian film critics and filmmakers, such as Samir Farid and Raafat al-Mihi among others. This was in the weeks leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and all of Cairo was on alert, including the universities. In anticipation of massive demonstrations and state reprisals, Malas decided to postpone the visit. When he came a year later, in March 2004, we screened nearly all of his films on three successive days at the Falaki campus of what was then the AUC’s location in the heart of Cairo. The auditorium was packed full—of faculty, filmmakers, film critics, media professionals, academics, artists, and some students. It was particularly moving to watch his films in the city of Cairo, with its history and leadership of anti-imperialist struggles and pan-Arab movements of the twentieth century. I know that, for Malas, this was acutely meaningful, especially as this was an audience that truly appreciated his work. They understood where he was coming from, and to them his work was representative of Syria’s great intellectual heritage. Of all the films, it was the screening of al-Manam (The Dream) that affected me the most—I recall the emotionally charged atmosphere in the room after the screening. I felt as if the film had touched a deep nerve among the people in the audience, across generations, who like me, were still reeling from the turmoil recently unleashed in Iraq. It must be remembered that the invasion of Iraq incited the largest mass gathering of protestors in Cairo since the days of Abdel Nasser—and Malas’s presence in Cairo reminded us of this.1 Before he left, being the generous person that he is, Malas gave me copies of some of his books, one of which was al-Manam: mufakkirat film, published in 1991 by Dar al-Adab in Beirut. Sonia Farid translated the book into English in 2005, and after editing and annotating the translation, I’m pleased to present The Dream: A Diary of the Film.
But first, a few words to introduce Mohammad Malas. In truth I have only met him on two occasions over the course of ten years, yet I feel a strong kinship with him, as if I have known him a long time. He is a master of cinema, and it is a pleasure to write about someone whose work I feel I understand, cinematically and personally. Objectively speaking, he is one of the leading film auteurs of the Arab world, whose ‘art’ films have gained global distinction since the 1980s. In both documentary and fiction film, his signature is the poetic and personal treatment of what might be regarded as ‘ordinary’ or marginal characters (particularly women and children) as they struggle with social and institutionalized forms of oppression. Like other Syrian directors, Malas’s output has deepened despite the severe and inconsistent muzzling of artists and intellectuals in his country.2 His semi-autobiographical feature films, Ahlam al-madina (Dreams of the City, 1984), and al-Layl (The Night, 1992), placed him squarely on the map of world film directors. The first two installations of a life-long trilogy, “Dreams of the City” and “The Night” are filmic odes to childhood loss (of the father and of the homeland—Malas’s childhood village of Quneitra was seized by Israeli forces in the 1967 war and the Golan was subsequently annexed by Israel). This theme of loss is prevalent in all his films, and provides a structural element in both this book and the documentary al-Manam (The Dream, 1987). Malas’s more recent feature films, Bab al-maqam (Passion, 2005) and Sullam ila Dimashq (Ladder to Damascus, 2013), as well as all of his documentary films, are equally distinctive.
Malas was born in 1945, and in his lifetime Syria assumed a central role in Arab nationalism and Cold War politics in the Middle East, bound by a sentiment of pan-Arab unity even though the roots of such sentiment stretched far beyond the twentieth century. Like many of his generation, he studied filmmaking at the Moscow Film Institute (VGIK) during 1968–74, where he learned a language of cinema that he developed into a vernacular entirely his own. His work, along with that of other important filmmakers, such as Omar Amiralay (who collaborated on the production of “The Dream”), indirectly critiques the abuse of Syria’s national narrative—its legacy of successfully expelling French colonialism, fighting Zionism, and embracing a secular nationalism. For readers unfamiliar with modern Syria, it is the abuse of Syria’s national achievements by a deadly security state apparatus to justify its hegemony that filmmakers and artists like Malas contest, as has been discussed by Cook and Wedeen, among others.3 This nationalist narrative began to unravel in the wake of the Arab Spring in 2011, which inspired and brought hope to the youth of Syria, however brutal the Syrian’s regime’s retaliation, and despite the evolution of the Syrian uprising into a civil war. True to form, Malas would address this unraveling in his 2013 film, “Ladder to Damascus.” Not enough can be said about the devastation of a people and a country that has spiraled into a drama of overlapping proxy wars and new enemies unimaginable fifteen years ago.
It is not truly comparable to the Lebanese civil war although the analogy is always close. It makes more sense to regard the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq as the root of the manufactured sectarian conflict that has overtaken Syria. However, there is still something instructive in reflecting on the Lebanese civil war, that other very complicated and bloody conflict that began in 1975 and ended in 1990 and resulted in hundreds of thousands dead and tens of thousands missing. It was a very confusing war, with many factions, parties, and shifting allegiances. It was not just a war between Muslims and Christians, between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Lebanese, or between leftists and right-wing parties. Aptly described by late Lebanese filmmaker Randa Chahal Sabbagh as a series of “heedless wars” in the title and subject of her 1995 documentary Nos Guerres Imprudentes (Our Heedless Wars), other major players included Syria, Israel, and to a less visible degree the United States and the Soviet Union, who all pursued their own political, national, and regional interests. The Palestinian refugee stood at the center of this conflict.
This particular text, The Dream: A Diary of the Film, reveals Malas’s private thoughts and observations as his film takes shape. In other words, through this text, we see the interior of a film project. This is both a film and a book, working in concert with each other—each in a sense incomplete without the other. It is written in poetic prose, often in note form, in a style which by its nature resists building a totalizing portrait or narrative. It is the chronicle of Malas’s experience of meeting and filming people living in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon from 1980 to 1981—Shatila, Burj al-Burajneh, Qasmiyeh, Nahr al-Bared, and Ein al-Helweh, among others. This book and the subsequent film (although the film was actually released before the book was published) provide a snapshot of a collective body of refugees at a critical juncture during the Lebanese civil war, at the height of the PLO’s presence in Lebanon (on all registers: symbolic, social, cultural, economic, personal, historical), and before the devastating Israeli invasion of 1982. Malas’s initial idea of making a documentary about a Palestinian family quickly turned into an observational documentary composed of nocturnal dreams as narrated by Palestinians in the camps. As an observational documentary, every shot was carefully studied and composed before filming—this we learn from the book. This is the technical and artistic aspect that enhances the content; it is the dreams themselves that the film seeks to ‘observe.’ These dreams are woven together into an informative text on the statelessness of Palestinian refugees and their right to self-determination. Throughout the process of making this film, Malas sought to discover, without suggesting a monolithic vision, the ‘quintessence’ of the Palestinian. The dreams of the Palestinians in this work reveal the extent to which their plight recurs and resonates in the fabric of the Arab world.
Perhaps Malas’s own experiences of loss, as has frequently been mentioned by scholars and critics,4 compelled his interest in the subject of this diary and subsequent film. But there is also a commitment to memory as a necessary response to loss. Remembering the dead is necessary in order to grieve, and when we look at his different films and texts, we find that this is a common thread. Loss is part of the picture; it is the motive behind the act of filmmaking, and the act of remembrance. If his own father had fought and died for Palestine (as is suggested in his film “The Night”), was Malas perhaps investigating his own relationship to Palestine and the Palestinian struggle as another way of understanding his father? Perhaps he was trying to find the contours of this feeling in the diary and film, with the desire to heal both self and other. Who are people at their core if they are not their dreams, hopes, fears, memories, and affinities? Perhaps allowing his subjects to share their preoccupations through their dreams would illuminate the collective imagination of stateless Palestinians—who are so often used as pawns in the political games of the region, then and now. The result of this telling is to not only remind us of loss, but of the lives lived, the presences embodied, the experiences that occurred, the spaces that were inhabited, and the dreams that were dreamed. The most important message of this book is to be found in the margins: what came before and after it, what is alluded to in the shadows of someone’s eyes or in the narrowness of an alley. The places mentioned—Khalsa, Safad, Acre, and so forth—are real places that these people were expelled from and to which they and their descendants are not allowed to return. As for the other events referred to in the work, the women raped, the houses looted, the buildings demolished, the villages ruined—all of which have been partially documented in oral testimonies now available on certain websites such as www.palestineremembered.com—reality mixes with dream.
The book is framed by two major massacres of Palestinians during the war in Lebanon: Tel al-Zaatar in 1976 (following on the heels of the Karantina massacre) and Sabra and Shatila in 1982. Tel al-Zaatar was a densely populated refugee camp located on the Christian side of the Green Line in Beirut. In 1976, a unified group of Christian militias called the Lebanese Front, comprised of the ‘Tigers’ militia, the Phalange Party, the Guardians of the Cedars, and al-Tanzim, entered the camp and slaughtered between two and three thousand Palestinians in the span of fifty-two days. The PLO factions fighting back were Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). In two days in 1982, September 16–17, an estimated two thousand or more people were slaughtered by Christian Phalangist militias, with the knowledge and implicit consent of Israeli forces, in the massacre of Shatila and the neighboring slum, Sabra. The massacre was in retaliation for the killing of Bashir Gemayel, the then president-elect of Lebanon and senior leader of the Phalange Party, and was conducted under the supervision of Ariel Sharon, the then Israeli defense minister, who was also the architect of the Israeli invasion.
Some of the survivors of Tel al-Zaatar appear in “The Dream,” some of whom, as we are informed at the end of the film, would perish in the Sabra and Shatila massacres. What are we to make of this work that chronicles the dreams of survivors of one massacre who then face death in another? Is “the dream,” the parenthetical aside Malas refers to on the first page of his preface, inserted into a reality where nothing changes? Aside from the framing massacres of this text, references are made to many other events, places, and figures central to the post-1948 Palestinian narrative—Land Day, historic Palestine, Shimon Peres, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Yasser Arafat—which project, through the dreams narrated by the film’s subjects, an overarching narrative of the Palestinians in the post-1948 Arab world: their aspirations and hopes, but also their humanity and their right to exist, despite the indifference of Arab and other rulers.
For readers familiar with history, the Camp Wars of 1985–1987 also appear on the margins of this text. When the PLO leaders departed in 1982 it was largely a symbolic departure—many of the PLO fighters remained and were absorbed by different Palestinian factions. The Camp Wars were essentially a struggle between Palestinian factions and Syrian-backed forces in Lebanon, the aim of which was to put an end to the influence of the PLO and Yasser Arafat. It is considered the bloodiest period of the civil war, ending with massive casualties on all sides. The different Palestinian factions were united against Amal, the Shia militia headed by Nabih Berri, which was allied with Syria. Hezbollah, which at that time was just emerging and still a very minor player, received military training from leftist Palestinian factions. Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader and head of the Progressive Socialist Party, refused to participate with the Syrians and Amal in besieging the Palestinian camps, and allowed the different leftist Palestinian factions to maneuver in his territory. The Lebanese Communist Party leader George Hawi viewed the Camp Wars as an attempt to finish the Israelis’ effort to eradicate the Palestinian resistance on all levels.
In the original Arabic text, Malas frequently switches tense between past and present, as if one constantly erupts into the other, or as if the present moment is enveloped in the past. This conveys a temporal register outside the hierarchies of historical time. The style of writing also moves from meditation to observation, from shorthand notes to poetry and synesthetic description. The notation of banal details freely gives rise to poetic reflection. There is also reference to the camera as an organic extension of the filmmaker—just as much his eye and his conscience, the camera is a tool of analytical and humanizing portraiture. Yet at times (as is apparent in the book) this cannot be reconciled with the limitations of what Malas searches for within himself, asking himself questions to which he finds no certain answers.
In a sense Malas began this project at exactly the right time. When he embarked on it in 1980, as a Syrian he had to work hard to convince the different parties of the authenticity of his intentions. Between 1980 and 1981, he interviewed and filmed approximately four hundred people. Following the traumatic events of Sabra and Shatila in 1982, he completely halted the project. It was only after the success of “Dreams of the City” that he was able to return to it. The closing chapter of the book describes his return to Shatila in 1987, after a two-year siege had been lifted, and after a copy of the finished film was smuggled into the camp and viewed by its inhabitants. Completed six years after Malas began the project, the film was edited down to twenty-three dreams with a total of forty-five minutes of screen time. Both diary and film present their subjects somewhere between the past and present, preserved in word, magnetic tape, and now digital code. Umm Hatem, Abu Turki, Umm Yousef, Abu Adnan, Umm Alaa, Intisar, Elham, Ibrahim, and many others who may have perished come to life each time we read these words or see and hear them in the film.
In the end we are left with the sense that the cinema, as magical as its powers may be, is a limited art form, far surpassed by the power of our imagination and feelings. It is this place of imagination, feeling, and authenticity, this transcendent realm, that Malas is always trying to reach. In reaching for the transcendent, this book is ultimately a work of poetry that functions as a requiem for the cinema. Malas closes his text with a special emphasis on the word ‘cinema,’ turning the second syllable of the word into ma’, the Arabic word for ‘water,’ connoting the capacity of both water and cinema to reflect the images and dreams of the human protagonist, so easily disrupted by the waves of other bodies in motion. The diary and the film both present the question unanswered, the problem unsolved, of when will there be justice for the Palestinians.
We have strived to preserve the essential qualities and character of the original Arabic text in this translation, in order to provide English-speaking readers with access to this valuable encounter with the voices and faces of the people it portrays. While neither book nor film endows their subjects with agency, they offer readers and viewers a form of mediated contact with the affective experience of Palestinian refugees who lived in the camps in Lebanon in 1980–81. More than thirty years later their existential crisis is far from over.
