Israeli and Palestinian national cinemas

Question 1

Dreams of a Nation, (Dabashi)

Answer 1

questions: - How does a stateless nation generate a national cinema?
- The overriding presence of an absence is at the core of Palestinian cinema, what has made it thematically in/coherent and aesthetically im/possible

Question 2

nakba

Answer 2

• End of 19th century groups of white europeans took over Palestine
• Europeans granted descendants of European jews a state built on the broken back of another state
• Palestinians then robbed of their ancestral homeland

Question 3

Traumatic Realism (Dabashi)

Answer 3

• What defines what we may call a Palestinian cinema is the mutation of that repressed anger into an aestheticised violence - the aesthetic presence of a political absence

Question 4

“Is There a Palestinian Cinema?” (Alexander)

Answer 4

• The hybrid form that Palestinian filmmaking has taken is the result of ongoing tensions promoting the Palestinian homeland, representing the exilic experience of many of its practitioners, and producing cinema under transnational conditions
• It is difficult to speak of a specific genre of Palestinian cinema in the same way that one can speak about other national cinemas
• For some filmmakers the formation of a national cinema is affirming the existence of the nation
• calls us to question the worth of national cinema

Question 5

what are key themes in palestinian cinema

Answer 5

longing, Allegory of the love for a woman that represents a love for the nation,

Question 5

what are the production implications of Palestinian cinema

Answer 5

How does a stateless nation generate a national cinema?
1. Directors don’t have nationhood, Not only that, they may be Israeli citizens. - They may have Israeli funding- Then are Palestinian films submitted to awards as Israeli films???

2. • If you need funding from Israel, you may lose audience in the Arab world for Israeli endorsement
     - What if you need money to make the film
     - Damned from the start
3. Narrative of failure
   - Narrative should have a BME - Palestine has no end, so it is a narrative of failure
   - Constantly returns to the past, to trauma

Question 5

Lost Palestinian cinema

Answer 5

PLO - made several “propaganda” films, which many were lost by IDF bombing in Beirut