The Stone at the Top of the Mountain: The Films of Rashid Masharawi

Author(s): Nurith Gertz

Source: Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Autumn, 2004), pp. 23-36
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Institute for Palestine Studies
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 THE STONEATTHETOP OF THE
MOUNAIN:THEFILMSOF RASHID
MASHARAWI

NURITH GERTZ

Thefilms of Rashid Masharawi, one of the leading Palestinian "exilic"

directors of the younger generation, are set almost entirely in the occu-
pied territories, especially in refugee camps, and unfold in a seemingly
timeless present shaped by a past catastrophe (1948) never explicitly
evoked. The author examines Masharawi's some dozenfilms, both doc-
umentary andfeature, thematically and technically, showing how the
films' structure and camera work emphasize the sense of confinement,
narrowing horizons, andpsychological siege depicted. The author con-
cludes that though almost relentlessly bleak and stripped of any hint
of romanticism, the films also convey a stubborn will to survive and
endure, and togetherpresent a powerful allegory of life in the occupied
territories.

"With many a weary step, and many a groan,

Up the high hill he heaves a huge round stone;
The huge round stone, resulting with a bound,
Thunders impetuous down, and smokes along the ground.
Again the restless orb his toil renews,
Dust mounts in clouds, and sweat descends in dews."

-Homerfrom the classical myths*

RASHIDMASHARAWI, though less well-known than Michel Khleifi or Elia Suleiman,

is widely considered to be one of the best Palestinian filmmakers working today.
Born in 1962 in the Shatti refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, Masharawi has made

NURITH GERTZ is professor of cinema and literatureat the Open University and professor
of cinema and television at Tel Aviv University. She is the author, most recently, of
Myths in Israeli Culture: Captives of a Dream (Vallentine Mitchell; 2000). This article
is taken from a chapter that will appear in a forthcoming book on Palestinian cinema,
coauthored with George Khleifi,whom the author would like to thank for his comments
and insights on Masharawiand his work.
*H.A. Guerber, Greece and Rome, trans. Ruth Ruzgas (1986; London: Bracken Books,
1992), p. 144.

Journal of Palestine Studies Vol. XXXIV,No. 1 (Autumn 2004), pp. 23-36 ISSN:0377-919X; electronic ISSN:1533-8614.
o 2004 by the Institute for Palestine Studies. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission
to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of CaliforniaPress's
Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.
24 JOURNALOF PALESIINESTUDIES

close to a dozen films, a number of which have met with considerable success in
various international film festivals. His first feature film, Curfew (Hatta Ish'aarin
Aakhar, 1993), won the Golden Prize in the 1993 Cairo Film Festival and was
shown at the Cannes Festival as part of Critics' Week. His second full-length
film, Haifa (1996), was screened at Cannes in the framework of "A Special
Look," which presents films selected by the festival's directors but not shown
in the official competition. His most recent feature film, Ticket to Jerusalem
(Tathkara Ila-l- Quds, 2002), was screened at the New Directors/New Films
Festival in New York in 2003. He was the first Palestinian filmmaker to work
almost exclusively in the occupied territories, and his first feature film, because
it was made with a Palestinian-based production house, has been called the "first
truly Palestinian film."1
Palestinian film critics often compare Masharawi's work with that of Khleifi,
the best known Palestinian director who is credited with opening a new era
of Palestinian cinematic creativity. But while Khleifi's films mainly document
Palestinian life inside Israel proper, Masharawi's films take place primarily in
refugee camps. And while Khleifi, like other Palestinian directors who grew
up in the landscapes of old Palestine in Israel, presents idyllic reconstructions
of traditional village life,2 Masharawi's films depict a bleak struggle for survival
in a dead-end present. Though he rarely evokes the world left behind by the
older generation in what is present-day Israel, this lost world, and specifically
his parents' town of Jaffa, is clearly an important part of his identity. Thus, in
an interview: "I am from Jaffa, from Manshiyya. Half of the Dolphinarium [the
marine-life observation area] was ours. I grew up in Gaza, in a refugee camp,
but it was always clear to me that I am from Jaffa, and that we are poor because
we are not in Jaffa."3
Masharawi moved to Tel Aviv when he was twelve, leaving school and home
to support his parents and six siblings after his father became incapacitated. He
worked as a construction worker, dishwasher, and waiter before getting a job
building sets in the Israeli film industry. But although he left the camp early (and
despite long periods living and working not only in Tel Aviv but also in Holland
and Ramallah), it was his years in the camp that established his cinematic path
and shaped his vision. The structure of his films, where hope invariably turns
to hopelessness, where disaster is followed by even greater disaster, where
the protagonists' situation goes from bad to worse, and from worse to even
more terrible, is reminiscent of existentialist literature of the 1940s and 1950s
depicting the human condition as a kind of prison. In Albert Camus's The
Outsider (L'etranger), for example, the protagonist passes from freedom to
prison and finally to a solitary cell on death row, with the diminishing space
paralleled by evaporating hopes. In Camus's novel, however, the narrowing of
space and loss of hope are accompanied by a transition to enlightenment, a
kind of higher freedom and acceptance of human destiny, while in Masharawi's
films human destiny is intertwined with political destiny and leads to neither
freedom nor enlightenment. This unsparing depiction of an ever narrowing
world and implacable dead ends metaphorically reflects Palestinian life in the
THE STONEAT THE TOP OF THEMOUNTAIN:THE FILMS OF RASHID MASHARAWI 25

camps of today, and this is what makes his films simultaneously compelling and
difficult to watch.

SHRINKINGSPACES,DECLININGHOPES

Rashid Masharawi's bleak vision was already hinted at in his very first produc-
tion, a four-minute short film entitled Partners made when he was nineteen.
It shows an Arab from Jaffa who drives a garbage truck and a Jew who tells
him where to stop-an interaction that constitutes the totality of their "part-
nership." But the harshness of his vision is perhaps most clearly exemplified in
his first feature film, Curfew. The film opens with a high-angled long-shot view
of the city of Gaza, after which the camera descends to a refugee camp. This
is a very static camera, its immobility emphasizing the absence of motion in
the camp, which is shown as an unpeopled, lifeless world, bare and strange,
a place of exile. The camera then zeros in on a small playground where some
children are playing, proceeds from there to a narrow apartment into which
a family is crowded, and remains "stuck" there for the rest of the film. Group
shots capture the family members confined in these tiny lodgings, but without
any close-ups that could create a sense of personal space; the family seems
imprisoned behind frames and bars, blocked by closed compositions, always
crowded together within the enclosing walls.
Space, then, plays a crucial role in the film (as it does in third world cinema
in general4). Having progressively narrowed the scope from the broad space of
Gaza City, seen only at the beginning and the end of the film so as to indicate
the location of the events, the camera, too, is imprisoned within these walls,
highlighting the confinement of the people, who never reach the wider space
beyond the camp. Masharawi's camera, to borrow Einaim's formulation, tells
the painful stories of those who live in spaces that "have vanished and instead,
only a void."5
The difficulties Masharawai encountered while making Curfew could be said
to reflect the film's subject matter. It was shot in 1993, toward the end of the
first intifada. As it was not possible to film in Gaza at the time, the director had
to shoot the panoramic views of the city from hidden lookouts or rooftops. The
streets of the refugee camp were filmed in Jenin camp in the West Bank, while
the interior scenes were filmed in a house in Nazareth, in Israel proper. In this
way, the film's on-site locations themselves suggest a state of siege, distances,
and exile.
The film's plot is simple. The family sits in its small, cramped home while
a young son, Radar, reads aloud a letter sent by his older brother in Germany.
The brother's letters, like those of so many refugee sons working abroad, arrive
periodically from distant exiles and are shared by the entire family; the son's
distant exile seems an extension of the family's exile depicted in the film, which
has been shrunk to this one camp and to this one small apartment. While Radar
is reading the letter, a curfew is declared. If up to now the camp's alleyways
were more or less empty, now they are utterly deserted. And if before it was
26 JOURNAL OF PALESTINE SUDIES

possible to leave the cramped house, now it is out of the question. The result
is a heightened sense of claustrophobia and suffocation, an inside with no
outside. What is happening outside can only be guessed at from the sounds
(shots, pursuits, house demolitions) or from what Radar reports as he peeps
from an aperture high in the wall. The family leaves the house only once during
the entire film, for a military search, and then the narrow apartment seems a
protected nest compared to the darkness outside, the wall against which people
are lined up, the fear of the Israeli soldiers.
The family's situation, then, worsens as the space diminishes, from being
crammed into the house, to being placed under curfew, to being immersed in
total darkness when the electricity is cut. Later, the apartment fills with tear
gas, and the family is not only in darkness but their eyes are shut tight against
the stinging gas. Later still, soldiers break into the neighbors' house, expel the
residents, and blow it up. When Akram, a younger son, complains, "Eat. Sleep.
Prison. Gas. We can't do a thing," his father replies, "Do you want to die? Do
you want to go to prison? Do you want the house you live in to be destroyed?"
Indeed, at the end of the film one of the family's older sons, Raji, is hauled off to
prison. Apparently every situation can be worse, the only "consolation" being
that the previous situation was also terrible ("What difference does it make?"
says one of the brothers about the curfew, "We're not doing anything anyway")
or that the future may be even more terrible ("There are people who have lost
their sons, and they're not crying," says the father to the mother, who weeps
when her son is taken away).
Under such conditions, the yearnings and dreams of the protagonists do
not concern the distant past in Palestine or a future return to it. The focus
is on what has just happened, the moment before the curfew, the moment
before the darkness. Palestine has no explicit existence in the film. The places
the characters of the film want to reach are in more distant exiles, such as
Germany, where the oldest brother is living, or in Israel, where there is work.
The unending series of calamities in itself underscores a basic sameness in the
camp residents' lives: the house was ill lit even before the electricity was cut; the
option of leaving Gaza for work in Israel is terrible, but that of staying at home
is worse; everyone was imprisoned in the camp even before the curfew-Raji
could not leave because he had to look after the family; the daughter, Amal, was
not allowed to go out because she is a girl; the father cannot move because of
his back pains; the younger men cannot work outside because of the intifada,
and so on.
A similar downward progression is found in Masharawi's 1991 documentary
House or Houses (Dar-aw-Dour).6 The film's subject is a man who was once
a metal-smith but who lost his livelihood when the Israelis destroyed his shop
while widening the street. He now works as a housecleaner in Tel Aviv, far from
his home. The sharp cinematic transitions between his house in the camp in
Gaza and his workplace in Tel Aviv emphasize the endlessness of his exile:
Tel Aviv, which had absorbed the neighborhood (Manshiyya) where he had
lived until 1948, is now a place of exile where he has to stay during the week,
THE STONEAT THETOP OF THEMOUNTAI: THE FILMS OF RASHID MASHARAWI 27

cleaning other people's apartments while he longs for his home in Gaza. But
Gaza, too, is a place of exile, a foreign space. From this impasse he sinks even
deeper during the Gulf War, when he loses his job and is penned up in the camp,
with no possibility of leaving. This new situation of curfew and imprisonment
underscores the distress of his previous state of exile and separation ("We
were conquered even before the Gulf War,"he says) and the hopelessness of
improving the situation in the future ("God willing, tomorrow will be a better
day," he says, before adding, "When will it be any better?"). He is troubled
everywhere: in Tel Aviv where he works, far from his family; in Gaza where he
cannot support them; in his house in the refugee camp, where Israeli soldiers
threaten to seize him; and outside his house, where he has to hide from them.
The continual narrowing of space-from the open sea, through the yard, into
the house, and finally to the plate of food on which the entire life of the family
is focused-underscores the dead end.
An impression of diminishing space occurs even in Masharawi's films shot
out of doors. His 2002 feature film A Ticket to Jerusalem, made during the sec-
ond intifada, opens and closes with traveling shots of the open spaces through
which the protagonist, a man named Jabber, is driving. But there, too, the cam-
era soon becomes "stuck," when Jabber arrives at a roadblock. The now static
camera closes and cuts the open spaces while Jabber remains trapped between
barriers in much the same way that the characters of Masharawi's other films
are confined to their apartments or camps. Like in the other films, the man's
immobilization underscores the hopelessness of his situation: he tries to earn
his living traveling from place to place projecting films to children, but is re-
peatedly told that people need bread and work, not movies. And even if they
wanted his films, he is unable to reach them, spending most of his time trying
to get through roadblocks. Meanwhile, his wife is alone in an empty apartment,
his parents are angry at him for leaving her alone, and everyone around him
scorns his work. Following Masharawi's usual pattern, things become even
worse: the closure is tightened, the roads are cut off entirely, everyone is con-
fined to their homes (so even those who might see his films cannot), Jabber's
camera breaks down, he stops going to work, and his relations with his wife
reach the breaking point. And the background is filled with nonstop explosions
and shootings, signaling endless house demolitions, injuries, killings.
In all Masharawi's films, the structure of unending disasters-the vicious
circle of dead-end situations-is further emphasized by the monotonous rep-
etition of the same actions (coming together for meals, wandering in empty
streets) and the same disruptive disturbances. The monotonous music, the tap-
ping of a bouncing ball, the ongoing clicking of dice in a game of backgammon,
the echoes of distant gunfire heard on the soundtrack-all serve to magnify the
changeless tedium of everyday life in the camp. This repetitiveness also applies
to the longer time span: a newborn son is named after one who had died, a child
born during the curfew reminds people of a previous birth during a previous
curfew. The feeling of inescapable imprisonment within the camp is reinforced
by the film's circular structure: it both starts and ends with a long shot of Gaza;
28 JOURNAL OF PALESTINE STUDIES

it begins with the postman delivering the letter from the son in Germany and
ends when the reading of the letter is completed; a curfew is announced early
in the film and another is announced at the end. Time in the camp has stopped;
the lives of the protagonists have gone nowhere.

Loss AND REPOSSESSION OF TIME AND SPACE

Masharawi's films focus on the present lives of the camp dwellers; there
seems to be no past or future. And yet, beyond the harsh-and by no means
exaggerated-depictions of the present7 are echoes of the past; the traumas
of war and expulsion that are not expressly portrayed are evoked indirectly
as an echo of something imagined.8 Old traumas inscribe themselves as the
film's "historical unconscious" and reappear "as filmic images"9 in the present.
This is the blurred memory of the "second generation," memories of the lost
country passed on by parents or grandparents. The connection of the new
Palestinian directors with Palestine, then, is not constructed from their own
experiences but from inherited memory and imagination. Marianne Hirsch calls
this "postmemory":

Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow

up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose
own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previ-
ous generation, shaped by traumatic events that can be nei-
ther fully understood nor re-created.... This memory creates
where it cannot recover. It imagines where it cannot recall. It
mourns a loss that cannot be repaired.10

Imagining what it "cannot recall," postmemory in the case of these films reveals
itself as an acting out in the present of the traumatic past; Kaes refers to the
same phenomenon as "a mask that hides the traumatic experience . . . that
could not yet be visually articulated.""l The extent to which postmemory is
exemplified in Masharawi is made clear in a 1993 interview, where he says:

Jaffa is always present in my subconscious. It is true that I

love Jaffa, but I do not have to mourn over it in a blatant and
acrimonious way. It won't help if I shout all the time "Iam from
Jaffa and this is my house!" The boring repetition of my story
as a refugee will only diminish the power and importance of
my story. It will also diminish its reliability and will cast doubts
on my beliefs and on the justice of my claims.12

Thus, instead of dealing directly with the loss of Jaffa, Masharawi's films evoke
the past catastrophe through their very structure of deterioration and ever
narrowing space. The original trauma reverberates behind the succession of
calamities and can be reconstructed by sporadic hints about the past. It can
THE STONE AT THETOP OF THEMOUNTAIN:THE FILMS OF RASHID MASHARAWI 29

also be understood by an allegorical interpretation of the ongoing events as rep-

resentative reenactments of repressed traumatic experiences, an interpretation
that brings to the surface the "political sub-conscience"13 that the text has sup-
pressed. The relentless deterioration of situations, combined with the cramped
spaces in which the protagonists live, convey a general sense of devastation and
endless exile that transcends each film's specific time
and space. This transition beyond the specific makes it The relentless
possible to find in the unfolding events depicted in the deterioration of situations
films allegories for the first disaster, which is imitated and the ever shrinking
and repeated in a process of "acting out." spaces convey a sense of
Hints of the past are most explicit in Masharawi's devastation and endless
second feature film, Haifa (1995). This film is more exile that transcends each
complex in structure than either Curfew or House or film's specific time and
Houses, and, unlike them, includes both memories of space.
the past and hopes for the future. The memories are
those of Nabil, the camp's "village idiot" who is nicknamed Haifa because
he wanders half mad through the camp's narrow alleys shouting "Haifa! Acre!
Jaffa!"The hopes for a better future, shared by many in the camp and expressed
by Abu Said, another of the film's principal characters, hinge on the coming of
peace. These memories and hopes coalesce in a certain national continuity that
gained strength during the Oslo process, when the film was made. However,
the succession of disasters that occur in Haifa, as in the two films described
above, shatters this narrative or casts it, together with its memories and hopes,
in an ironic mold. Although the misfortunes depicted in the film are personal,
relating to individual life stories, they are also allegories for the collapse of
Palestinian national aspirations.
Even after everything has been lost, and even in a refugee camp, the madman
Haifa still clings to the hopes and memories that sustain him: he remembers
the past in Haifa, Jaffa, and Acre; he remembers his aunt whom he loves; and he
dreams of marrying his cousin in a ceremony he imagines in his remembered
city of Haifa. His aunt, too, is sustained by hopes: throughout the film she never
stops waiting for the return of her sons who, like so many Palestinian sons, are
scattered throughout the world. Each time Haifa enters her house the aunt is
sure that one of her sons has returned, and when he leaves she is overcome by
loss: "Everyone is leaving. No one is staying." Her disappointments end with
her death, the last and final loss. And with her death, Haifa's mainstays also
crumble, for at the same time his cousin is married off to someone else; his
private loss mirrors the national loss.
Abu Said, the film's other main character, is similarly caught in a downward
spiral. Formerly a policeman, he has lost his job and now sells sugar candy
to camp children. Still, he is hopeful: he has faith in the peace process and
believes that he will be able to return to his job, that his son will be released
from prison, that the shooting will cease, that "there will be no more dead."
However, all these hopes dissipate. One day, he becomes paralyzed after suf-
fering a stroke while selling his sugar candy. Now that he is unable to leave
30 JOURNAL OF PALESTINE STUDIES

his bed, he is notified that he has been accepted for a position as a policeman
in the Palestinian Authority. Although Abu Said's personal catastrophe is not a
result of the national story, it seems a mordant commentary on the Palestinian
aspirations that he shares, mirroring the loss of collective hopes. In a later in-
terview, the director, referring to the Oslo process, summed up the connection
between memory of the past and hope of the future-and their relationship to
the political scene-as follows:

When they made the agreement they knew that it would leave
us in the camps. In the camp, my land was Jaffa. It justified
my life. I would have preferred to finish my life in the dream.
The peace took Jaffa away from the refugee camp.14

Thus, the camp residents in Haifa expect that the peace process will lead
to a restoration of Palestinian rights. The deterioration in the lives of the
protagonists-Haifa, the aunt, Abu Said-occurs against the background of
these hopes. The collision between the private and public spheres is exem-
plified in the film's climax, when a demonstration crossing the camp inter-
sects with the funeral procession of Haifa's aunt coming from the opposite
direction-in the middle, between the two crowds, stands Haifa. The cam-
era moves in for a close-up, and the expression in his eyes reveals the total-
ity of the collapse in both the personal and the collective spheres. Although
these would appear to contradict each other, they are, on the allegorical level,
inseparable.
Just as Masharawi's heroes do not succeed in escaping from present time into
memory and dream, so they are unable to go beyond present space. In Haifa,
two spaces are linked to the refugees' hopes: Washington, where the peace
talks are taking place, and Palestine, the land left behind. Both are presented as
equally unreachable. In an absurdist scene, Washington is shown in a newscast
that the camp dwellers try to watch on a broken-down television cooled by
a fan. Palestine, meanwhile, seems to exist only in the mad Nabil's cries of
"Jaffa!Haifa! Acre!"-and when he tries to recollect specific details about these
places, he can recall only conquest and expulsion. The impossibility of either
escape is prefigured in the film's opening footage, where Haifa is seen sitting
in an old wreck of a car, turning the steering wheel and making the motions
of driving without, of course, going anywhere. The editing carries the camera
from the car to the landscape just beyond, to the broad open spaces of the
desert that Haifa never reaches. Like the other protagonists of this and earlier
films, Haifa remains "stuck" in the camp, a lifeless place filmed in static shots
that take in deserted alleyways and passers-by that seem to float in and out of
the frames, or to advance, very slowly, from background to foreground. And,
again as in Masharawi's other films, the camera has an ever narrowing focus,
passing from empty streets to cramped apartments to one small corner of a
cramped apartment-in this case, to where Abu Said lies paralyzed. The broad
space seen as the film opens, evoking promise and memories, diminishes step
THE STONE AT THETOP OF THE MOUNTAIN:THE FILMS OF RASHID MASHARAWI 31

by step as the film progresses, to close in, at the end, to the narrow confines
of a sick man's bed.
The disappointed hopes (or actual results) of Oslo are also visible in the so-
called "roadblock movies"--Palestinian films of the late 1990s whose plots re-
volve around Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks and which express feelings of
historical and psychological siege and of geographical enclosure. Masharawi's
short documentary of life in Gaza, Stress (Tawattor), is one of the darkest of
these films. Made in 1998, it appears to foresee the second intifada that broke
out two years later. It, too, begins and ends with long shots, opening with a
view of the Erez checkpoint at the northern exit of the Gaza Strip, and ending
with a view of a Gaza camp.The entire film takes place out of doors; unlike
Masharawi's earlier films, there is no indoor location within which the film's
characters can feel that they are in a safe haven (however suffocating). But even
the out-of-doors seems cramped as the camera segments the space into small
elements through the use of close-ups and high-angle or medium shots, as well
as by cut-off images of a stomach, a face, a hand, an ID card-details that are
crooked and broken, disconnected from any organizing framework and not pre-
ceded by an establishing shot. The space is also truncated repeatedly by images
of soldiers, settlers, and settlements that dissolve into, or are cut off by, images
of Arab towns and refugee camps. While Masharawi's earliest films deal with
the diminishing borders themselves, Stress deals with the shattered reality dic-
tated by these borders. While in the film Haifa the Oslo accords are presented
as a surrender of the broad boundaries of the dream of return, Stress presents
them as setting new boundaries that delimit Palestinian identity and shatter it
from within. The film documents what happened in the seven years after the
signing of Oslo: the expanding and proliferating settlements; the splintering of
the designated Palestinian area into small parcels; the cutting off, by roadblocks
and bypass roads, of Palestinian urban from rural areas, of villages from their
lands, of the West Bank from the Gaza Strip, and of these last from Israel.15

MAQLOUBA, OR THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

Most of the directors of Masharawi's generation who grew up in the Pales-

tinian exile or in the refugee camps of the occupied territories, and who be-
came active at a time when spaces were increasingly divided and dislocated
by borders and roadblocks, settlements, and bypass roads, found it difficult to
depict an idyllic harmony of a now lost past. Unable to emulate the harmonious
"recreations" of Khleifi or other Palestinian directors born in Israel in calmer
days, many "exilic" directors of the new generation utilized symbols of the
past: traditional foods, dress, stone houses, the al-Aqsa mosque, and other em-
blems of unity in Palestinian history and identity. The documentaries of Lianna
Badr, Fadwa (1999), Zeitunaat (2002), and The Green Bird (At tayr-al-akhdar,
2002), are the best examples of this type of film.
But in Mashawari's bleak world there is no room for a reverential treatment
of these symbols. His short film Upside Down (Maqlouba, 2002) parodies them
 32 JOURNAL OF PALESTINE STUDIES

by turning them into surrealistic fantasies. The film opens with an old woman
in traditional village dress climbing the stairs of a ruined old stone house. She
enters a room whose walls bear faded bits of indistinct color typical of rooms
in the old houses abandoned in 1948 that fill the new Palestinian cinema as
recollections of the distant past. The woman prepares the traditional Arab
dish called maqlouba,16 with the camera lingering on the ingredients-rice,
chicken, eggplant, lemon-the kitchen utensils and stone walls and occasion-
ally passing to views seen through the window. At first this seems to be an
inventory of shopworn Palestinian symbols: village woman, the stone house,
the preparation of traditional food, cleaning of rice, dreams of open spaces,
floating vision of the al-Aqsa mosque-all representative of the destroyed Pales-
tinian past and the hope for a future revival. However, all these elements are
out of place or seen from an unlikely angle, much like an unfinished puzzle
whose pieces are scattered around every which way: the maqlouba is seen
through the bottom of the pot; the views from the window are constantly
changing-mountains, fields, refugee camp, city, the sea. As the film nears its
end the maqlouba is ready, with the camera showing it from below, and is then
up-turned onto the serving platter-so that it is now right side up. But the serv-
ing platter, instead of being placed on a table, begins to soar above Jerusalem
and above the mosque, with the empty pot floating above it. The maqlouba
is a national symbol representing, and restoring, the national past. But when
it is floating in the sky, like Arafat's picture on the balloon in Divine Interven-
tion (Yad Elahiyya, 2002)-Suleiman's film which was shot a bit later-it looks
ridiculous and loses its symbolic meaning. Yet at the same time, it regains that
meaning by being revitalized through the effect of estrangement. Thus, while
the film exposes the banalization of the Palestinian national symbols, it also
renews them by giving them a visionary surrealistic dimension.
It is Masharawi as director who overturns traditional symbols in Maqlouba,
but an integral part of his films is the depiction of a society where tradi-
tional hierarchies of authority and identity have already been overturned in the
general collapse. The adult men fall the farthest. They
An integral part of have been expelled from the public sphere where they
Masharawi'sfilms is the were active. They cannot leave for work (because of the
depiction of a society curfew in Curfew, the closing of the border passes in
where traditional Dar-aw-Dour, physical paralysis in Haifa) and cannot
hierarchies of authority determine either their own or their families' fates. They
and identity have already are restricted to their homes-women's space. The men
been overturned in the are completely passive (a feminine trait), a passivity ex-
general collapse. perienced as a backache or paralysis that confines them
to their beds (in Curfew and in Haifa) and apart from
their wives' beds, a passivity that is a form of castration. Although both the
backache and the paralysis are real, they serve as allegories for the collective
situation of the adult generation. The male identity as a whole is presented
as a mere semblance of a masculine identity, with the men clinging to manly
functions they are unable to fulfill. Thus Haifa, armed with a cardboard gun,
THE STONEAT THETOP OF THE MOUNTAIN:THE FILMS OF RASHID MASHARAWI 33

at one point is a soldier and at another "drives" a car that goes nowhere; Abu
Said is a policeman who is no longer on the police force and cannot perform
the job when he is called back; Jabber projects films to an audience that does
not want to see them and drives a car that, because of repeated breakdowns
or impassable roadblocks, cannot reach his destinations.
At first glance, real control appears to be in the hands of the women, who
run the households, divide what little food they manage to obtain, and try to
dictate how their adult children will live (one son will study, another will work,
and the daughter will marry, the mother Um Said decides in Haifa). But in fact,
the women remain under male control and supervision, locked within the
preordained constraints of fertility and family from which they cannot escape;
Curfew and Haifa depict several young girls in the camp who dream of a
different fate but are forced to accept lives of marriage and family. Whatever
authority the women appear to have acquired within their families evaporates
as their sons refuse to stay at home, refuse to give up their underground political
activity, refuse to take on the burden of marriage. In short, they refuse to
surrender to their mothers' dictates. But the most important rebellion, the
oedipal rebellion of the sons, cannot be resolved, for their weak fathers do not
constitute a challenge ("No one speaks to his father in such a way," complains
Abu Raji in Curfew).
The ones who do control the young men's lives and have complete authority
over them are the Israelis, who are usually not even seen and against whom
overt rebellion is impossible. Thus, and despite their rebelliousness, the young
men are unable to express their manhood either within their families, because
they refuse to marry or because their mothers rule the family, or within the po-
litical sphere, where their activities inevitably end in searches, the destruction
of homes, and imprisonment. The impossibility of either of these two paths is
encapsulated in the fate of the mad Haifa, who in one stroke loses his dreams
both of marriage and of return to the homeland.

A KIND OF RESISTANCE

Masharawi's protagonists never rebel openly against their conditions or

Israeli rule; they express their resistance by maintaining a semblance of nor-
malcy under the very noses of the occupier.17 Their unyielding struggle for
survival is carried out through mutual assistance and support between neigh-
bors and relatives and through everyday acts of noncompliance, often small and
seemingly insignificant. In House or Houses, for example, the housecleaner in
Tel Aviv reclaims his inheritance, as it were, by fishing in the sea facing Man-
shiyya, where he had lived before 1948. In another scene, watching footage of
the intifada (on his Israeli neighbor's television set) from a distant high angle,
he fixes an unblinking, defiant gaze on Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir
addressing the nation: "We will withstand this."
Another form of resistance, seen in both Haifa and Ticket to Jerusalem, is
expressed through imagination, art, and the cinema: in the first through two
34 JOURNAL OF PALESTINE STUDIES

children who, hiding in an abandoned building, draw pictures, tell stories, and
weave dreams; in the second, through the films thatJabber projects. Thus, from
the despair and hopelessness of the refugee camp (in Haifa), and the ceaseless
anxieties of subsisting (in Ticket to Jerusalem), the protagonists draw, tell
stories, project films. This struggle is strongly reminiscent of the quest for love
in Divine Intervention and in Rana's Wedding ('Ors Rana, Hanni Abu-Assad,
2002), where the lovers have to meet at roadblocks. A number of other films-
among them Kalandia Roadblock (An Ta'bor Qualandia, Subhi el-Zubeidi,
2002)-also depict this struggle through imagination and dream.
Masharawi's films do end in a victory of sorts, but it is of the kind won by
the protagonists of Camus's The Plague (La peste) or Solzhenitsyn's A Day in
the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. These are triumphs based on stubborn nonaccep-
tance, on the ability to continue, day after day, simply to survive. Bhabha speaks
of "the everyday life" of a nation as a continuous, circular, and repetitive pro-
cess that breaks the national narrative, which progresses in a linear continuum
towards the defined goal.18 Everyday life in the camp represents the option
of a different kind of resistance, one that carries no hope of national redemp-
tion but is simply a ceaseless struggle to maintain a strong hold on life itself.
This hold on life is a passive form of opposition for the subjugated, endowing
them with an independent sphere of their own where they can both evade
and undermine the hegemonic power of the rulers.19 This hold on life itself
endows the well-known term sumud (refusal to leave the land; steadfastness)
with additional meaning.
The deep opposition depicted in these films also expresses itself in another
way: by ignoring the very presence of the occupier.20 The Israelis dominate
Palestinians' lives by controlling time and space-determining the intervals
between curfews and between searches, between pursuits and between the
destruction of homes. They reduce the refugees' space further and further,
imprisoning them in this enclosed area, and even this small space they penetrate
with their bullets and tear gas. But the Palestinian-as-cinematographer rebels
against the occupiers by driving them out of the cinematic frame and making
them nonexistent. In Haifa, the Israelis are seen only fleetingly, in the opening
scene as they pursue one of the characters; in Curfew they are not seen at all;
and in Dar-aw-Dour they are placed geographically at the margin of the space,
which centers on Gaza where the protagonist lives rather than Tel Aviv where
he works.
Palestinians for years have claimed that the Israeli narrative has erased the
existence of the Palestinian Arabs.21 Masharawi exemplifies this erasure in his
short film The Magician (1992), in which an Arab worker in aJewish restaurant
is made to disappear by a conjurer, who then is unable to bring him back.
In an interview, Masharawi explains this as follows: "One hundred thousand
[Palestinian Arabs] work [in Tel Aviv] and as if with a magic wand they are
made non-existent, they are not there ... non-existent. It's like with a television
remote control... as if someone from the government came and went 'click,'
and that's it."22Two films, Curfew and, to a lesser extent, Haifa, reverse this
 THESTONEAT THETOPOF THEMOUNTIN:THEFILMSOF RASHID MASHARAWI 35

picture by eliminating the Israeli or turning him into a blurred "other"-an

inchoate, deconstructed being. Instead of controlling the Arabs with his gaze,
the Israeli is turned into the object of the Arab gaze (e.g., the boy, Radar, who,
like actual radar, looks out of the aperture in the wall and describes what the
Israeli soldiers are doing outside). Though a palpable being, the Israeli is here
perceived only by the sound of his gunshots and the aftereffects of his actions;
the Israeli who in reality dictates the cinematic narrative exists in the cinematic
framework only in fragmentary form, as a disembodied voice.23 Certainly, an
absence from the screen cannot conceal the power wielded or the oppression
exerted, but it does make it possible to undermine these power relations and
construct a definition of Palestinian identity that is independent of the ruler's
vision.
In Michel Khleifi's films, as in those of other Palestinian directors, most of
whom grew up in Israel, the cinematic camera serves as an instrument of rebel-
lion: it is used to strike back at Israeli "closures" and to conquer lost spaces and
time. These directors use cinematic means to depict a lost, nonexistent world.
The reality in Rashid Masharawi's films, however, is much harsher, and it is
more difficult to recreate the lost harmonious reality from it. It is an existential-
ist reality, a realistic portrayal of oppression and siege, of recurrent calamities,
of hopelessness. In this reality the trauma of the conquest, and not the idyllic
past that preceded it, is revived. But even in this reality, there is resistance,
however Sisyphean, the huge stone being pushed repeatedly to the top of the
mountain, only to roll back down, over and over. In this case of these films, the
Sisyphean fate is personal and individual as well as public and collective; the
endeavor is not only existential but also national. In the real world, as depicted
in these films, the Sisyphean stone could be said to have shattered into the many
smaller stones hurled by the "children of the intifada." Masharawi's films are not
political tracts: they are cinematic descriptions of the impossible reality lived
by the individual who created them and by the collective of which he is part.

NOTES

1. Samir Farid, Palestinian Cinema in Teshome Gabriel, "Toward a Critical

the Conquered Land [in Arabic] (Cairo:
Public Administration for Culture, 1997).
2. See Khleifi's Wedding in Galilee
('Ors-il-Jaleel, 1987) and The Tale of Three
Jewels (Hikayat al-Jawhiral-Thalath, 1994);
similar treatments of the Palestinian past
can be found in Ali Nassar's Milky Way
(Darb-et-Tabanat, 1997) and The Ninth
Month (Fish-Shahr-et-Tassee, 2002), and in
Nizar Hasan films Independence (Istiqlal,
1994) and Legend (Ostura, 1998).
3. Rashid Masharawi, telephone
interview, 1 February 2001.
4. Teshome Gabriel and George Khleifi
also discuss the process of diminishing and
reducing in Masharawi's films. See
Theory of Third World Films," in Questions
of Third Cinema, eds. Jim Pines and Paul
Willeman (London: British Film Institute,
1989), pp. 1-30, and George Khleifi, "A
Chronicle of Palestinian Cinema" [in
Hebrew], Theory and Criticism 18 (Spring
2001), pp. 177-93.
5. Hamza Einaim, "Before Birth, After
Death-an Essay" [in Hebrew], Roof 3
(Winter 2000), p. 15. For a much more
conventional use of the camera, see
Masharawi's films Long Days in Gaza and
Voice of Palestine.
6. Dar-aw-Dour means "House or
Houses" in Arabic, but it is also the name
of a children's game.
36
7. See also Viola Shafik, "Cinema in
Palestine," in Middle Eastern and North
African Film, ed. Oliver Leaman
(New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 509-32.
8. A parapraxis, in Elsaesser's terms,
leaning on Freud. See Thomas Elsaesser,
"Absence as Presence, Presence as
Parapraxis, Parapraxis as Mimicry,"Assaf
Kolnoa 3 (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University,
forthcoming) and Sigmund Freud,
"Remembering, Repeating and Working
Through," in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works, vol. 12
(London: The Hogarth Press and the
Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1909 and
1974), pp. 147-56.
9. Anton Kaes, "Cinema and
Migration,"AssafD, 1 (1998), pp. 101-16.
10. Marianne Hirsch, "Past Lives,
Postmemories in Exile,"Poetics Today 17,
no. 4 (Winter 1996), pp. 659, 664.
11. See also Anton Kaes, "Holocaust
and the End of History: Postmodern
Historiography in Cinema," in Probing the
Limits of Representation, ed. Saul
Friedlander (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1992); Anton Kaes,
"Cinema and Migration"; Freud,
"Remembering, Repeating and Working
Through"; Dominick LaCapra, "Revisiting
the Historians' Debate," History and
Memory 9, no. 1-2. (Fall 1997),
pp. 80-113; Homi K. Bhabha,
"Dissemination: Time, Narrative, and the
Margins of the Modern Nation," in Nation
and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha
(London and New York: Routledge, 1990),
pp.291-323.
12. Ali Wakkad, "ARealistically
Directed Director: An Interview with
Rashid Masharawi" [in Hebrew],
Hadashoth 1, no. 6 (1993), pp. 1, 6.
13. Frederic Jameson, The Political
Unconscious (Methuen: London, 1981),
p. 49.
14. Rashid Masharawi, telephone
interview, 1 February 2001.
15. Rima Hamami and Salim Tamari,
"Anatomy of Another Intifada,"in Real
Time: El Aqsa Intifada and the Israeli
Left, ed. Adi Ofir (Jerusalem: Keter, 2001),
pp. 69-89.
16. Maqlouba means upside down in
JOURNALOF PALESETNE
SIUDIES
Arabic. It's a name of a national dish that,
when it is cooked and ready to serve, is
turned upside down from the pot into the
serving plate.
17. See Maya Pinchasi, "The 'Other' of
the 'Other'-On How the Israeli Is
Presented in the Films of Masharawi and
Khleifi" [in Hebrew] (Seminar Paper,
Department of Cinema and Television, Tel
Aviv University, 1999). Orli Lubin relates to
this phenomenon in her discussion of the
Israeli film Point of View, by Dina
Zvi-Riklis. See Orly Lubin, "The Image of
the Woman in Israeli Cinema" [in Hebrew]
in Fictitious Looks at the Israeli Cinema
(Tel Aviv: The Open University of Israel,
1998), pp. 223-46. See also Orly Lubin,
"Schurr" [in Hebrew] in Fifty to Forty-eight
(A special issue of the journal Theory and
Criticism), (2000), pp. 423-28.
18. Bhabha, "Dissemination." See also
Hamid Nacify, An Accented Cinema
(Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2001).
19. Bhabha, "Dissemination."
20. The discursive battle of "cinema in
exile," as described by Naficy is thus not
fought here by an ambivalent subversive
imitation of the ruler, but by an attempt to
shape an independent narrative.
21. See, for example, Edward Said,
"Reflections on Twenty Years of Palestinian
History,"JPS 20, no. 4 (Summer 1991),
pp. 5-22, and Elias Sanbar, "De L'identite
culturelle des Palestiniens," in Palestine.
L'enjeu culturel, eds. Elias Sanbar, Subhi
Hadidi, and Jean Claude Pons (Paris: Circe,
institute du monde arabe, 1997), p. 15. See
also Haim Bresheeth, "Telling the Stories of
Heim and Heimat, Home and Exile: The
Film Ustura as an Iconic Parable of the
Invisible Palestine," Intellect 1, no. 1,
(2002), pp 24-39; and Haim Bresheeth, "A
Symphony of Absence: Borders and
Liminality in Elia Suleiman's Chronicle of a
Disappearance," Framework 43, no. 2 (Fall
2002), pp. 71-84.
22. Urri Lotan, "Between Shatti and
Sheinkin: An Interview with Rashid
Masharawi" [in Hebrew], Hadashot 6, no.
11 (1993), pp. 6, 11.
23. Pinchasi, "The 'Other' of the
'Other."'