The Arabfuturist Drive-By

Elia Suleiman’s individualist approach to Palestinian cinema is underlined by his personal detachment from both “the specificity of place” and a physical Palestinian homeland--identity, developing a fragmentation of images to be pieced together by the viewer (Suleiman 95). This metacinematic motif of dynamic observation is also recurrent within the narrative of Divine itself, reflecting his dedication to offering the potential for a multiplicity of narrative perspectives and analytical viewpoints through something he calls the ‘sushi aesthetic.’ Suleiman’s interviews are very illuminative and illustrative of every aspect of his film and filmmaking process- particularly because he includes the process in the product, shown best with the repeating sequence of the house in Jerusalem being analyzed here- but especially because he explained his spell of dissociation following his father’s death in terms of a perception of space as “purely illusory… living a kind of interiority where the notion of space is not accessible,” two years before Divine (96). With his own character taking care of and eventually grieving the death of a sick father, it is very clear that Suleiman attempts to portray his internal struggles at this time (with his character still writing scripts as well) while still decentering himself to a point of “transluency” to situate his and his father’s suffering within a larger web of quotidian despair and violence. Camerawork, lighting, performance, sequencing, and sound thus collaborate in this repeating sequence, and the film in general, to turn this web on its head and take the audience along for the ride.

The other sequences existing within and immediately around this one provide just as much information as the sequence itself, with the most repeated and related sequences being the hand-holding and lost-woman scenes before and after the nighttime car-bombing and drive-by scenes. The scenes preceding the car-bombing and drive-by share Arabfuturist sounds accompanying the couple at the Al-Ram checkpoint; the hand-holding is visible for the former scene but only implicit for the latter where their cars simply sit at the bottom of the screen as a red coupe passes through the centered checkpoint without the harassment that has become so emblematic of Al-Ram. While there are many cars who are simply waved through during the film, besides the couple and this red car, anyone who is asked to stop is harassed or intimidated in some way. The couple’s resistance is of course the hand-holding in itself, with these two Palestinians on either side of the border meeting to engage in the simplest physical contact from which they are barred. Their accompanying Arabfuturist track is a lot more sensual and mellow (almost clandestine, mischievous) compared to the red car’s. The driver’s ease of passage, despite being much less trangessive than most depictions of decolonial resistance, still audiovisually associates a freely moving Arab body between the checkpoints of settler colonialism: the candy red sports car subtly imposing itself in the center frame of an otherwise relatively dull color palette and the upbeat Arabfuturist music dominating the silent soundscape exemplify the quiet dignity of what Palestinian freedom, movement, looks like.

With these nighttime sequences, as with most of his work, the sounds (especially their relationships across scenes) are just as if not more important than the visuals. The occupation of the entire screen by an extended shot of their hand-holding, paralleled with the intrusion of the sports car, both combined with the aural occupation of Arabfuturist music, thus relates these scenes to each other and/through their paralleled successive scenes; their respective sequential scenes of the car-bombing and drive-by (along with Arabfuturist music) then link these two otherwise audiovisually irrelative scenes not only with their sequencing, but also by invading otherwise static and relatively indistinct audiovisual spaces. Both the bomb and machine gun- as well as the car itself speeding and slamming on brakes- occupy a lot of aural space, while the fire itself invades the pitch dark property and the camera closes in on the house being sprayed by the machine gun. The Arabfuturist music- denoting a mode of resistance- is linked with these unknown attacks on this heretofore unknown house and its occupants. So far we only have a few pieces of this image of violence he’s constructing, but they paint a picture of movement and resistance rather than stasis and passivity.

The lost-woman scenes succeeding the nighttime Jerusalem house scenes satirize both the comedic inutility of the police and their collaboration with “innocent” settler citizens and tourists in colonial violence and Palestinian erasure. The idea of a police officer with a van who cannot give this woman simple directions within his jurisdiction is absurdly accurate and comedic considering the entire class laughed at this scene; however, the fact that he must use the blindfolded Palestinian man he recently arrested to give her directions and she thanks the cop instead of the man is even more accurate and hilarious. “It’s the humor of the ghetto. It’s laughing at yourself to give yourself a little hope.” Some people would hesitate to laugh at the second part of the joke (when he uses the Palestinian give the directions), likely for one of two reasons: either they are Palestinian or another colonzied subject who dislikes this comedic representation of a terrific reality, or they are a self-aware Israeli or another colonial subject who cannot grapple with this representation of the violence they participate in. This continual dualistic negative response to Suleiman’s work (again, Bourlond’s interview was before Divine) exemplifies the multiple narrative perspectives that he embeds and encourages throughout his art, but it also lends to a multiplicity of analyzations of the joke’s final punchline: he speeds away when the woman asks for directions but he doesn’t have an Arab to answer. Is he simply running off because he doesn’t have an answer for her, or does this reference colonial police rounding up colonized subjects for sport, or does this simply mean the criminal escaped? Whether and why someone did/n’t like the joke lends to various constructions of the final image. 

This scene is then followed by the infamous Arafat balloon scene, also lending to different receptions and reactions based on various “sensitivities.” Above all, Palestinian movement- geographically, spatially, culturally, and religiously- is symbolized here more than anywhere else in the film. Again Suleiman uses red against a cool and neutral background to command our attention, this time as the balloon floats throughout all of Jerusalem for the most expansive and dynamic shot of the film (besides the Ninja scene), 

…chart[ing] the breadth, the depth, and the height of the place (via tracking and crane shots). The love between the two protagonists not only allows the merging of the split Palestinian identity into a single whole, including the man and the woman, it also leads the Palestinian to action. The woman gives material form to the fantasies and desires of the passive man…
(Gertz & Khleifi 179).

Very strange for them to discuss the balloon scene’s relation to the role of love within the narrative- and thus connect this love to the woman’s resistance- but then completely dismiss the following Jerusalem scene in favor of going back to the watchtower and jumping forward to the ninja fight. The successive scene takes us right into the mind of Suleiman.

Not only are we invited directly into his home- as this is the first and only instance that we get into the car with him as he drives home- but we are also thus invited into the scene and his filmmaking process. This is the meal. As we discussed via email, the form and contested setting of this scene leave it open to a multitude of interpretations, but I interpret the overall instability of a setting (Are they in Jerusalem or Nazareth? Is this his house or not?) as serving his deconstruction of the space: allowing accessibility through inaccessibility, a didactic cinematic rendering of his belief that “What is important is to be able to position oneself in relation to the world… Exile is a privilege in the sense that it makes this possible.” (Suleiman 96) It is about the freedom of not being conceptually tied to concrete, fixed place: many Palestinians allowed to enter Nazareth (towards Ramallah from Al-Ram) are not allowed to enter Jerusalem and vice versa, so the contested location of this scene reflects not just Suleiman’s interior struggle with and dissociation from space, but also the shared realities among fragmented regions and ethnicities within Palestine. 

If the Arafat balloon landing on a church, mosque, and synagogue reflects the shared Palestinian identity and struggle among various religious identities, then the prominent Stars of David and reference to milk and honey- as well as a probably Ashkenazi israeli settler- do not serve to connect Judaism to Zionism but rather Zionism to (settler-)colonialism, the agent of aforementioned fragmentation. With the same police van as that of the lost-woman sequence (among other scenes, including those with Suleiman’s father), we know that these officers would never actually assist “[their] man in the East” if he was Palestinian. He must be israeli, and so his inappropriate offering of Arabic coffee does not present a self-mockery of Arabic/Palestinian tradition, but rather reflects an israeli/colonial butchering of Arabic culture. Not only is there an entire production--performance that goes along with Arabic coffee making--drinking, but it is also offered for the purposes of hospitality. He not only sequesters the coffee-making from both us and his guests, but then also serves them on the sidewalk instead of inviting them inside; there is no mention of the Arabs whose land they’re on, whose culture they’re butchering, whose people they’re arresting, or who even attacked this man’s house. Whose home is this man “welcoming” these Zionist officers into? The Palestinians whose house he’s occupying, or the Palestinians whose land they’re all standing on? 

This silent erasure of Palestine is upended by the woman, who watches this interaction with disdain and then interrupts it with an equally heavy silence. Her presence offers two things: a representation of Suleiman’s bourgeois dining table (footnote 1) and the ability for the audience to invade this space of colonial violence with her, both to finally construct the image/scene. Even though his analogy used sushi as a reference for anti-bourgeois dining, Arabic coffee similarly includes the “consumer” in the production process; so in a colonizing process, there becomes not just a checkpoint between the sushi or coffee maker and the diner, but also a power differential being exploited, which is antithetical to the ideals and norms of hospitality. Whereas sushi has its own plethora of cultural significances, it does not express hospitality as Arabic coffee does. There are no power differentials being displayed between the cops and this man in their performances, especially regarding the coffee in particular because he returns from the metaphorical kitchen to drink with them on the sidewalk. The maid is thus the erased Palestinians and Arabs whose coffee culture and land the israelis are appropriating; the checkpoint- the watchtower- is thus destroyed when the Palestinian woman walks across their fictional living room and forces them to acknowledge her existence. Furthermore, the camera (and lighting) allow us to invade this space by not only following into this scene and across the border with them after the balloon scene, but also attaching us to her within the scene. First, we observe from the window as the scene on the street unfolds, and the self-reflexive camera shows it is actually the woman watching them; then as she walks on the street we get our first close up of the man who lives across the street. All of the information regarding this sequence is thus revealed by her gaze, which we are allowed to assume both in the house and on the street.

The instability of certain “facts” (locations, identities, etc.) that we typically take for granted allows us to join in the process of crafting the sequence’s final image, whereas the other scenes featuring the woman’s decolonial resistance were individual and final, without the eroticism that Suleiman professes. By sharing his private space with her- with Gertz and Khleifi emphasizing differences between the private and outside space- he also shares even more of his private space and mind with us through the sushi/arabic coffee aesthetic. Perhaps this lends itself to the alternative interpretation of a misdirected eyeline match, and he simply awoke from this dream in Nazareth, but regardless the simultaneous openendedness and finality of this fourth and final shot- punctuated by the woman’s disappearance- reflects the externalized interiority that he instills in his films in order to allow for contested grounds of space and identity.

Works Cited

Dickinson, Kay. Arab Film and Video Manifestos: Forty-Five Years of the Moving Image Amid Revolution. Cham, Springer International Publishing, 2018.

Suleiman, Elia. “A Cinema of Nowhere.” Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 29, no. 2, 2000, pp. 95–101. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2676539.