The Kanafani Effect in Palestinian Cinema
Resistance and Counter-Narration in the Films of Michel Khleifi and Elia Suleiman
Refqa Abu-Remaileh
Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow, in affiliation with the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin & Marburg University, Germany
Abstract
Guided by Ghassan Kanafani’s seminal studies on ‘resistance literature’, this paper extends the concept to contemporary Palestinian fiction film to explore its permuta- tions in the visual medium. The resistance label has had its repercussions on Pales- tinian cultural production; however, it continues to inspire an aesthetically-driven innovative defiance in the face of an ongoing Israeli occupation. Tracing the divorce of cultural production from political organizations, I focus on a Palestine configuring ‘inside’, attending to the films of Michel Khleifi and Elia Suleiman, to explore therein a particular synthesis of counter-narratives of resistance. Embedded in the moving image medium itself, in its structures, techniques and narrative forms, the aesthetic resistance Kanafani had anticipated shines through these artists’ films to disclose new spaces of everyday resistance, in expressions of freedom, satire, self-criticism and humor. The spectator is called on to partake in creating these spaces, by reading silences and inter- preting multilayered images so as to construct meanings that cannot be hijacked by language or confined by oppression.
One has to keep telling the story in as many ways as possible, as insistently as possible, and in as compelling a way as possible, to keep attention to it, because there is always a fear it might just disappear.
Edward W Said
