Elia Suleiman, the Palestinian filmmaker, creates a darkly humorous theatre of the absurd in Divine Intervention, portraying the political situation with static frames and silent actors. Listen to the excerpts from the latest issue of Outlook - only by Pragya Vats.
#Artists #Art #FilmMaker #EliaSuleiman #Theatre #BusterKeaton #JacquesTati #DarkHumour #Palestine #Gaza #Palestinians #WarOnGaza #GazaGenocide
#Artists #Art #FilmMaker #EliaSuleiman #Theatre #BusterKeaton #JacquesTati #DarkHumour #Palestine #Gaza #Palestinians #WarOnGaza #GazaGenocide
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00:00 I am Pragya and I bring to you excerpts from the year-ender issue titled "We Bear Witness".
00:06 The issue is dedicated to the people of Gaza and what they went through.
00:11 "Static Frames of Turbulence" by Satish Padmanabhan from Outlook.
00:16 The flair and flourish of Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman.
00:21 The link that I get of Palestinian director-actor Elia Suleiman's divine intervention from 2002
00:28 has no subtitle option. About 10 minutes into the film I realize it's not needed.
00:35 There are two monologues in Arabic in the film and they come towards the end of 90 minutes.
00:41 One, an army commandant with a megaphone giving nonsense orders to car drivers at a traffic
00:49 intersection and another, an old man ranting about the way the world is, I assume.
00:56 In an interview, Tim Burton, maker of such fantastical films as "Beetlejuice", "Charlie
01:03 and the Chocolate Factory", "Batman", "Big Fish", "Edward Scissorhands" says,
01:09 "He thinks in images, not in words, and most of the times he doesn't have a script on the sets,
01:15 but sketches and storyboard of the shots." Suleiman must also think like that.
01:21 But unlike Burton's grotesque and the twisted, his talent lies in piercing humor,
01:27 deadpan and dark, making the political situation between Palestine and Israel into a theater of
01:35 the absurd. Suleiman is more Buster Keaton and French humorous Jacques Tati, as he has been
01:41 compared to often, the world changing and collapsing all around him and he is a mute witness
01:48 to it all. But the images, almost always static frames inside which the action takes place,
01:56 are all political. Barbed wires, checkposts, queues, soldiers, security officers, boots,
02:04 police cars, guns, tanks, bullets in the sun-baked, dusty, bare landscape.
02:12 "Divine Intervention", celebrated at Cannes when it was released, couldn't get an Oscar nomination
02:18 as the best foreign film, apparently because the Academy's list didn't have Palestine as a country.
02:24 It's a series of carefully crafted montages of life and occupied territory. Sample these,
02:31 a man, played by Suleiman himself, is driving a car, eating an apricot, shot in profile from
02:38 the adjacent seat. The shot continues till he takes four or five bites of the fruit,
02:45 the scenery changing on the road beyond him. He comes to the apricot stone and casually throws it
02:52 out of the car. It hits an armored tank outside which is blown to smithereens. The shot continues
02:59 with the man continuing to drive the car, unperturbed. For this and more, read the
03:05 year-ender issue of Outlook.