Salaam Cinema: On Mohsen Makhmalbaf
If things seem better in the old-new city of Jerusalem, it’s in part because they’re worse. Israel technically annexed East Jerusalem after the 1967 war, but it has taken some four and a half decades to create the infrastructural facts on the ground that make the occupation such a concrete and humdrum state of affairs. The light rail is just one example, erasing as it does the border between the Jewish and Arab sides of town. In the last ten years or so, the notorious wall or “separation barrier” has, in addition, cut East Jerusalem off from the West Bank, rendering this once-thriving urban hub of Palestinian life little more than a demoralized and demoralizing backwater. This is no doubt one of the main reasons why so many Palestinians have decided this summer to go west to eat ice cream and shop in pop-music-blasting Jewish shoe stores. It’s a chance to pass through the looking glass that this city often is and spend just a few day-tripping hours on the cleaner, more prosperous side of town.
Systematically neglected by the municipality and battered by the larger political and economic situation, East Jerusalem is home to 39 percent of the city’s total population, though its people receive only a small fraction of the city’s resources. West Jerusalem has forty-two post offices, East Jerusalem, nine; the West boasts seventy-seven municipal preschools, the East has ten; eighteen welfare offices function in West Jerusalem, while the whole of the East counts three. Since 1967, a third of Palestinian land in East Jerusalem has been expropriated. According to Israel’s National Insurance Institute, the poverty rate among the city’s Palestinians is 79.5 percent. Of East Jerusalem’s children, 85 percent live below the poverty line. (The percentage of poor Jewish Jerusalemites is 29.5 percent.) The numbers are at once shameful, slightly numbing and somehow too banal to register with most of the world at large, though this is the way a viable Palestinian Jerusalem ends: not with a bang but a bureaucratic whimper.
Not one to be swayed by such sad statistics, Israel’s public security minister must have felt it his duty to protect the people of Israel from the existential threat posed by a children’s puppet festival that was scheduled to open at the Palestinian national theater in East Jerusalem on June 22. Claiming without proof that the festival was being sponsored by the Palestinian Authority, in violation of the Oslo Accords, the minister banned it and ordered the theater shuttered for eight days and its director summoned for questioning by the Shin Bet. Protests by Palestinian and international organizations did no good, and a solidarity campaign by various Israeli puppeteers—including no less than Elmo from the local version of Sesame Street—proved useless. The theater remained closed, and the impoverished kids of East Jerusalem were left to entertain themselves in the heat.
Back in West Jerusalem, hawkish high-tech entrepreneur Mayor Nir Barkat decided that what the people of his city really needed this summer was a $4.5 million Formula One race car exhibition. Blocking off traffic on the city’s main thoroughfares for several days, the mayor, a self-declared “motor sports fan and racer,” arranged for a flashy parade of Ferraris, Audis and Grand Prix motorcycles to vroom past the old city walls in the rather mind-bogglingly named Peace Road Show. It is, declared the mayor in his American-sounding English, “great branding, great marketing,” and “great for promoting peace and co-existence.”
And about that peace and co-existence: Barkat also found time this summer to bestow honorary Jerusalem citizenship on billionaire casino tycoon and ideological sugar daddy Sheldon Adelson and his Israeli-born wife. Adelson took the occasion of the Jerusalem ceremony held in his honor to dismiss the Palestinians as “southern Syrians” and to claim that Yasir Arafat “came along with a pitcher of Kool-Aid and gave it to everybody to drink and sold them the idea of Palestinians.” At this festive gathering, complete with the reading of a fancy parchment scroll and the crooning of “That’s Amore” by singers wearing Paul Revere–style tricorne hats, Barkat declared the Adelsons “Zionist heroes of the city.” At the same time, native-born Palestinians from the neighborhood of Silwan are not considered citizens at all, honorary or otherwise. They are, instead, “permanent residents,” many of them threatened with eviction by the municipality, which is working closely with Jewish settler groups and various government agencies to demolish their homes and put in their place a pseudo-biblical park and tourist attraction called the King’s Garden. The city has also recently approved plans to construct apartments for Jewish settlers in the heart of another Palestinian neighborhood, Sheikh Jarrah, where families are literally being thrown out into the street. That’s amore.
The mayor is a busy man. In late May, he squeezed in a trip to Los Angeles, where he attended a reception hosted in his honor by the evangelical birther Pat Boone, who long ago did his bit for Israel by writing and singing the lyrics to the theme for the movie Exodus. (“This land is mine, God gave this land to me /This brave, this golden land to me.”) While in LA, Barkat met with Hollywood producers, to whom he offered special tax breaks and subsidies to shoot their movies in the Holy City, where a special department has already been established to handle film permits and logistical matters. It’s “not only good business. It’s good Zionism,” he enthused to The Hollywood Reporter. “It’s the right thing to do.”
Which brings us back to Mohsen Makhmalbaf.
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I first heard his name when I was working as a film critic for a daily newspaper in Jerusalem during the 1990s. It was in 1997, at an earlier Jerusalem Film Festival, that I encountered his movies, and I was immediately captivated. Reckoning with Makhmalbaf’s work was compelling then, and the pleasure it affords persists to this day. In fact, thinking back across all the thousands of hours of sitting in the dark and at my desk that being a film critic entailed, I can say that seeing his movies—and, to a lesser though still important degree, those of his countryman Abbas Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf’s gifted oldest daughter, Samira—did more to rearrange in a lasting way my sense of what film could do than any others I took in during nearly a decade at the job.
Here was a director—and writer, producer, editor, performer and sometimes cameraman—working with the most minimal of technical means, and often with nonactors and half-improvised dialogue, in the freshest and most surprising fashion. His movies seemed to strip the cinema back to its vital essence: no pyrotechnic special effects, no outsized crew, no corn-starchy, plot-thickening additives or amped-up soundtracks. Instead, they spilled with a remarkably sophisticated sense of dramatic freedom, social consciousness, visual depth, humor, moral resonance and human possibility. His films have something of the spare, true-to-life quality and political urgency of those by the Italian Neorealists, but the cultural wellsprings that flow into Makhmalbaf’s movies are completely different, blending as they do elements of Sufi poetry, Persian and Arabic storytelling techniques, and the symmetries and vibrancies of Persian miniature painting.
They’re defined as well by their constantly self-questioning nature. Makhmalbaf’s movies seem to anticipate their own critique, or to suggest various theses and antitheses to which viewers are welcome to bring their own syntheses. As a critic, I found this highly refreshing, as though he’d started a conversation and expected the audience to continue it: his films are essentially dialogic, even Socratic. Salaam Cinema, for instance, is a wise, wry examination of the power dynamics at work in a casting call for one of Makhmalbaf’s own films—and, by unspoken extension, in a repressive society at large. Perhaps his best movie, A Moment of Innocence, features another character named Makhmalbaf, played by Makhmalbaf, who decides to make a film about a seminal event in his youth. It takes up memory, the movies and the subject of regret better, and more poignantly, than almost any other film I know. It’s also a masterpiece of scale—a tiny picture that somehow opens up onto whole galaxies of feeling.
For someone sitting in Jerusalem and watching his movies, there was an almost electric jolt of recognition, something like déjà vu: Tehran could be Jerusalem. Israel and Iran may be each other’s sworn enemies, but their back alleys look like our back alleys. And it wasn’t just that the stony passageways were physically similar to the ones I walk through every day, but that Makhmalbaf had an uncanny ability to observe and convey his psychic surroundings—and in doing so, reveal to us our own. He has said that he used to view the camera as a weapon, while now he sees it as a mirror “to show people themselves.”
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