// literary & arts //
Fall 2005
Apocalypse Lost
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Review:
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Get this: There are people who strap themselves with explosives, board crowded buses, and blow everyone and everything sky high so that when the angels escort them to heaven, they'll already be halfway there.
Whatever its moral shortcomings, the bombing of civilians is grotesquely cinematic. Ever since the famous scene from "The Battle of Algiers" in which three Algerian women sit calmly among their unsuspecting victims, watching the prelude to a bombing has not lost its horror. But even as suicide attacks have come to define the Palestinian resistance in Israel and, more recently, in occupied Iraq, few films have treated the subject in any depth.
Enter "Paradise Now," a new film by Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad that attempts to put a human face on an inhuman activity. In an early scene, Said (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman) sit on a hill overlooking Nablus, sharing a hookah and talking about the girl next door – an ambiguous moment in which the film could lead anywhere. But when a friend announces that the two men have been selected for a suicide mission in Tel Aviv the next day, the evening's otherwise mundane events – dinner with the family, a visit to return a neighbor's keys – seem suddenly foreboding.
Duty calls, leaving little time for goodbyes. They flee at dawn to an insurgency hideout, where both men pose with AK-47s before a video camera and read a personal statement, to be packaged and distributed after their "glorious" deaths. In the film's only flirtation with comedy, Khaled agonizes over his performance in take after take, which explains the eerie showmanship behind the grainy clips that CNN airs to death after each new atrocity. Apparently the revolution will be televised after all, and no one knows this better than the bombers themselves.
The job gets botched, sending both men running around town and country wearing C4 as undershirts. The terrorist leaders accuse Said of betrayal, saddling Khaled with the burden of tracking him down. Life is messy with loyalties and as the film peppers the plot with traitors and loyalists, collaborators and martyrs, allegiances start to blend together. When Said gets his watch fixed at a local shop, he marvels at the wall of videos documenting the last words of martyrs and the executions of collaborators. The shop owner informs him that the collaborator videos cost more, since they are in greater demand. The only force stronger than a people's drive for self-determination, it would seem, is its compulsion to crown celebrities.
No doubt many moviegoers have sought out the film expecting a glimpse into the inner workings of human bombs, or at least a crash course in the political situation that spawned them. But even at its most didactic, "Paradise Now" does not offer much by way of theory. Suha, daughter of the hero-martyr Abu-Azzim, enters Said's life as the voice of reason trapped in the body of a beautiful woman. "There can be no freedom without a struggle," Said tells Suha. "If you kill, there's no difference between the resistance and the occupier," she replies. The dialogue feels forced and detracts from the story's momentum. Despite their sporadic outbursts of enthusiasm for the cause, both Said and Khaled seem confused on the details. "What happens afterwards?" Said asks in the car on the way to the drop-off point."Two angels will pick you up," the driver says, as if this were simply part of the operation.
As a small film about a weighty subject, "Paradise Now" does a better job of capturing fragile moments than the melodrama of martyrdom. Just before they slip through the security wire at the border, Said and Khaled quietly share a cigarette in a stone quarry, as if on lunch break. If it's gritty realism Abu-Assad aims for, the film still maintains a remarkably polished aesthetic, especially given the challenges of shooting on location in the West Bank. It treats the whole operation with an icy calm, mirrored in every element from Abu-Assad's patient camerawork to Said's face, illegible as a mask. We look behind the mask for some indication of the passion fueling his actions. But if Said has pathos, Assad never gives us the satisfaction of seeing it, let alone feeling it. Instead, he keeps us waiting for Said to react, to explode. But that moment, when it comes, is explosive only in its silence.
While "Paradise Now" treats its subject with unwavering sobriety, "Protocols of Zion" turns anti-Semitism–and anti-Semites–into a punch line. In this half-serious exploration into "the mother of all conspiracy theories," documentary filmmaker Marc Levin spends most of the film on the verge of laughter as he interviews booksellers, street-corner evangelists, Hasidic MCs, and white supremacists about the ideas laid out in the perennial propaganda pamphlet, Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Originally fabricated by the Russian Tsar's secret police, the Protocols outline a 24-step plan for Jewish world domination. It would be disturbing if it weren't so funny.
With the Protocols as a hook, Levin sets out to show that anti-Semitism, while perceived as more benign than ever, is alive and kicking. Shaun Walker, chairman of the white power group National Alliance, reflects in an interview that back in his skinheaded youth, "I thought Jews were just white people with a different religion." Walker gives the filmmaker a tour of his warehouse full of white power memorabilia, including storm trooper boots and shelves of "core books" (Mein Kampf is a bestseller; Protocols is sold out). But Levin finds his muse on the streets of New York, where no crazy idea gets passed over. He visits Ground Zero on September 11, 2004, to find a man shouting that no Jews died in the attack. Always a sucker for irony, Levin directs our eye to a massive sign looming over the disaster site: "Never Again."
The most frightening irony about Levin's clowning, however, is that many people aren't in on the joke. In one excerpt from the controversial Egyptian TV show, "Knight Without a Horse," Jews are shown draining the blood from the throat of a small boy. In an interview from the same station, an Arab girl still in her swaddling cloths calls Jews "apes and pigs." With his deft use of historical and contemporary footage, Levin takes the film from raucous to sober to poignant and back, wisely shifting gears whenever his directorial hand gets too heavy. And if network television hasn't yet convinced us, "Protocols" proves that the absurd finds its warmest home in reality.
Whatever its moral shortcomings, the bombing of civilians is grotesquely cinematic. Ever since the famous scene from "The Battle of Algiers" in which three Algerian women sit calmly among their unsuspecting victims, watching the prelude to a bombing has not lost its horror. But even as suicide attacks have come to define the Palestinian resistance in Israel and, more recently, in occupied Iraq, few films have treated the subject in any depth.
Enter "Paradise Now," a new film by Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad that attempts to put a human face on an inhuman activity. In an early scene, Said (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman) sit on a hill overlooking Nablus, sharing a hookah and talking about the girl next door – an ambiguous moment in which the film could lead anywhere. But when a friend announces that the two men have been selected for a suicide mission in Tel Aviv the next day, the evening's otherwise mundane events – dinner with the family, a visit to return a neighbor's keys – seem suddenly foreboding.
Duty calls, leaving little time for goodbyes. They flee at dawn to an insurgency hideout, where both men pose with AK-47s before a video camera and read a personal statement, to be packaged and distributed after their "glorious" deaths. In the film's only flirtation with comedy, Khaled agonizes over his performance in take after take, which explains the eerie showmanship behind the grainy clips that CNN airs to death after each new atrocity. Apparently the revolution will be televised after all, and no one knows this better than the bombers themselves.
The job gets botched, sending both men running around town and country wearing C4 as undershirts. The terrorist leaders accuse Said of betrayal, saddling Khaled with the burden of tracking him down. Life is messy with loyalties and as the film peppers the plot with traitors and loyalists, collaborators and martyrs, allegiances start to blend together. When Said gets his watch fixed at a local shop, he marvels at the wall of videos documenting the last words of martyrs and the executions of collaborators. The shop owner informs him that the collaborator videos cost more, since they are in greater demand. The only force stronger than a people's drive for self-determination, it would seem, is its compulsion to crown celebrities.
No doubt many moviegoers have sought out the film expecting a glimpse into the inner workings of human bombs, or at least a crash course in the political situation that spawned them. But even at its most didactic, "Paradise Now" does not offer much by way of theory. Suha, daughter of the hero-martyr Abu-Azzim, enters Said's life as the voice of reason trapped in the body of a beautiful woman. "There can be no freedom without a struggle," Said tells Suha. "If you kill, there's no difference between the resistance and the occupier," she replies. The dialogue feels forced and detracts from the story's momentum. Despite their sporadic outbursts of enthusiasm for the cause, both Said and Khaled seem confused on the details. "What happens afterwards?" Said asks in the car on the way to the drop-off point."Two angels will pick you up," the driver says, as if this were simply part of the operation.
As a small film about a weighty subject, "Paradise Now" does a better job of capturing fragile moments than the melodrama of martyrdom. Just before they slip through the security wire at the border, Said and Khaled quietly share a cigarette in a stone quarry, as if on lunch break. If it's gritty realism Abu-Assad aims for, the film still maintains a remarkably polished aesthetic, especially given the challenges of shooting on location in the West Bank. It treats the whole operation with an icy calm, mirrored in every element from Abu-Assad's patient camerawork to Said's face, illegible as a mask. We look behind the mask for some indication of the passion fueling his actions. But if Said has pathos, Assad never gives us the satisfaction of seeing it, let alone feeling it. Instead, he keeps us waiting for Said to react, to explode. But that moment, when it comes, is explosive only in its silence.
While "Paradise Now" treats its subject with unwavering sobriety, "Protocols of Zion" turns anti-Semitism–and anti-Semites–into a punch line. In this half-serious exploration into "the mother of all conspiracy theories," documentary filmmaker Marc Levin spends most of the film on the verge of laughter as he interviews booksellers, street-corner evangelists, Hasidic MCs, and white supremacists about the ideas laid out in the perennial propaganda pamphlet, Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Originally fabricated by the Russian Tsar's secret police, the Protocols outline a 24-step plan for Jewish world domination. It would be disturbing if it weren't so funny.
With the Protocols as a hook, Levin sets out to show that anti-Semitism, while perceived as more benign than ever, is alive and kicking. Shaun Walker, chairman of the white power group National Alliance, reflects in an interview that back in his skinheaded youth, "I thought Jews were just white people with a different religion." Walker gives the filmmaker a tour of his warehouse full of white power memorabilia, including storm trooper boots and shelves of "core books" (Mein Kampf is a bestseller; Protocols is sold out). But Levin finds his muse on the streets of New York, where no crazy idea gets passed over. He visits Ground Zero on September 11, 2004, to find a man shouting that no Jews died in the attack. Always a sucker for irony, Levin directs our eye to a massive sign looming over the disaster site: "Never Again."
The most frightening irony about Levin's clowning, however, is that many people aren't in on the joke. In one excerpt from the controversial Egyptian TV show, "Knight Without a Horse," Jews are shown draining the blood from the throat of a small boy. In an interview from the same station, an Arab girl still in her swaddling cloths calls Jews "apes and pigs." With his deft use of historical and contemporary footage, Levin takes the film from raucous to sober to poignant and back, wisely shifting gears whenever his directorial hand gets too heavy. And if network television hasn't yet convinced us, "Protocols" proves that the absurd finds its warmest home in reality.
//Chris Beam is a Columbia senior majoring in History. He is a senior editor of The Blue and White.