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| | Abstract The multiple layers of Palestinian identity in Annemarie Kattan Jacir`s films
Das Abstract zum Referat von Rana Brentjes innerhalb des Panels Identität und Dekonstruktion in postmoderner palästinensischer Kunst Forums Literatur (Dienstag 9.00 - 10.30 Uhr, Raum Audimax XXIII). In my paper, I want to discuss narratives, styles and visual methods used by the Palestinian video-artist Annemarie Kattan Jacir. An activist, poet, writer, teacher, and filmmaker, Jacir was born in 1947 in Bethlehem, grew up in Saudi Arabia, and studied in the United States. She has created a number of short films, five of which will be the focus of my paper. Palestinian identity and its multiple forms of manifestation is a central subject to her work. She combines the volatile with the comical, the ridiculous with the dramatic, and the fantastic with the realistic in dissecting the meaning of identity for Palestinians today. All her films stem from being a cross-cultural artist. Her experience of Diaspora and multiple identities adds complexity and finesse to her use of visual symbols of dispossession, exile, and identity.
1. Personal and Collective Narration
Jacir uses different methods and approaches of narration in her films to question identity, self-representation, and identification of the other. The films are interconnected through the re-narration of themes such as borders, identity, and history, each time told from different perspectives. Her narrative voice spans from artistic declamation ("New Frontier", 1998), over commentary ("A Post-Oslo History", 1999), and short story ("like twenty impossibles", 2003; "The Satellite Shooters", 2001) to anthology ("Palestine is Waiting", 2003). The type of stories told ranges from the documentary over the fictional to the essayistic.
2. Stylistic Approaches
The major stylistic element chosen by Jacir in "A Post-Oslo History" is the direct approach and simplicity of the narrative, the clear lines traced by the camera and the focus on a minimalist number of symbols (the watchtower, the Israeli flag, the soldiers, etc.). In the tradition of The Battle of Algiers, “like twenty impossibles” makes uses of the documentary idiom in its exploration of truth in fiction and the mundane brutality of military occupation. The film begins with documentary footage of a checkpoint. It then continues with the fictional story, cleverly playing with the documentary genre. The shift between the documentary footage and the fiction is very smooth, not noticeable at all. Jacir heightens the tension of the film with unexpected turns in the story as well as subtle interplays between the protagonists adding branches and sidetracks into the main story. With simple means, dialogues, and postures, Jacir accomplishes to instill upon the viewer the very complex, tightly packed mixture of emotions and sub-narratives that never culminate, but leave the audience with anxious dissatisfaction.
The metaphor of the American Wild West is the central tool that Jacir employs in "New Frontier" and "The Satellite Shooter" in order to point out different aspects of the interconnectedness of US-American and Middle Eastern history. One major stylistic tool in "New frontier" is the cutting of a Hollywood film celebrating Manifest Destiny into its most propagandistic, flat statements lined one after the other in a cacophonic sequence. A second, similar move Jacir makes when overlaying this reconstituted commercial film with original voices from the Zionist movement and Israel (politicians and soldiers) describing what happened to Palestine. The voices break into the apparent harmony of the American mythical dream. They are capable of creating identification and repulsion, questioning and rejection.
The major stylistic device employed in "Palestine Is Waiting" is the confrontation between written statements (UN Resolutions, facts, statements made by Israeli politicians) and the visual and oral Palestinian testimony (past and present).
3. The visual deconstruction of Palestinian identity
Each of Jacir’s films addresses a different aspect of fractured Palestinian identity: the Refugee, the Immigrant, the Emigrant, the Occupied, the Exiled. Put together, these various entities merge to form the artistic expression of Annemarie Jacir’s own complex identity. In each story she tells, she also reveals a small part of herself to her audience.
In “The Satellite Shooters”, she visualizes the dreams, desires, yearnings, and prejudices held by the Palestinian emigrant and the white male of the American West in form of stereotypic idealization - oversized clothes, hats, cowboy-boots, cars and a sensual belly-dancer, a heavily veiled temptress with charcoaled eyes, and the Virgin Mary. Conflicts with the stereotypic ideals shatter the dreams of the Palestinian immigrant. Jacir expresses the clash between fantasy and heritage by a comical “normalized” visual representation of the protagonist, which mixes a re-integration into twentieth-century Pan-Arabic art and family culture with a dress of indefinite American modernity and a re-scripting of personal names.
In “New Frontier” the outcry against the theft of identity is hidden behind the ridiculously pathetic drive of the white American emigrant family to the virgin, pure, and empty west. The victim is silenced, both visually and orally. The cutting of the commercial glorification intensifies the pathos of the images. In “Palestine Is Waiting”, the visual messages flood the spectator. They are complex, dense, partly terrifying, partly familiar thanks to modern communication technologies. The tools of the medium are used to enhance the effects caused by occupation, dispossession, and destruction. The depth of the loss is visualized by an unending chain of symbols that simplify, dramatize, and juxtapose. The infinite experience of defeat is countermanded by a steady production of exclusionist identifications of what it means to be a Palestinian.
In “A Post-Oslo History” Jacir works with minimalist means – an uncommented series of images leading into the trap of the checkpoint, a long thinning path into the dark, the possible disaster of no-rights, no-alternatives but submission. The trajectory is interrupted by moves of the camera towards the growing and increasingly menacing symbols of the other, the enemy, the occupier. In “like twenty impossibles” Jacir blurs the line between truth and fiction to tell a story of art bowed but not defeated by the routine violence of the Israeli occupation. The separation of image and sound at various stages of the film, concluding in the visual departure cuts the viewer off from the sound and makes him/her experience a sensation equal to loosing one of his/her senses. Thus, she creates a duality of sensory deprivation that reflects the voiceless-ness of the Palestinian people in a world with decidedly different/opposite interests.
Conclusion
Jacir`s outraged forcefulness and poetic humor in dissecting identity are the features of her work. She addresses Palestinian identity in Palestine with brutal, relentless openness. She holds up a mirror showing Israeli politic as a modern adaptation of the romanticized American frontier history. When addressing Palestinian identity in the United States, Jacir works with satire, irony, ridicule and overdraws her characters. With those means she creates moments of suspense, shock, and incredulous laughter.
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