Phoebe Bronstein: Man-Made Martyrs in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction -- Disturbing Manufactured Martyrdom in Paradise Now

Man-made martyrs in the age of mechanical reproduction: disturbing manufactured martyrdom in Paradise Now
by Phoebe Bronstein
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In the span of two days, two lifelong friends, Said (Kais Nashif) and Khaled (Ali Suliman), make the transition from car mechanics to suicide bombers. Their mission requires them to move undetected across the Israeli-Palestinian border and detonate two bombs in sequence in the city of Tel Aviv. Paradise Now (2005), written and directed by Palestinian-born Dutch director Hany Abu Assad, is set and shot on location in Nablus, a portion of the West Bank under Palestinian control. In combining fictional and documentary elements Abu Assad takes a cue from Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1967 film Battle of Algiers; and in a nod to Pontecorvo, Khaled even quotes a line from the paradigmatic film of the Third Cinema: “If we had airplanes, we wouldn’t need martyrs” (Rich).[1] [open endnotes in new window]

As a young Jewish woman, with a particularly religious extended family, I must first admit that I had my reservations about seeing (and later about writing on) a movie about Palestinian suicide bombers. I saw the film for the first time in 2005 in a New York art house theater. The movie had yet to gain ground in the United States and many people, myself included, knew little about it, save that it was a political thriller dealing with a hot-button issue. However, what is remarkable about this film, in a year when Stephen Spielberg’s film Munich (2005) premiered, is that Abu Assad refuses to engage in the melodramatic discourse that too often defines Israeli-Palestinian relations from the rhetoric of political news coverage to dinner-table conversations. According to Abu Assad this discourse often figures suicide bombers as either heroes and martyrs or villains and criminals. Instead, in Paradise Now Abu Assad works against these prevailing notions by revealing the construction and production of martyrdom. In this way, he calls attention to the incorporation of individual identities — that are neither good nor evil — into the collective identity of the Palestinian Resistance.[2] Abu Assad insists on a heterogeneous collective identity, all under the auspices of Palestine, which defies and subverts the dominant hegemonic ideologies that consistently stereotype and do violence to Palestinian identity.[3]

The Palestinian Resistance in the film both relies on the individual identity of its martyrs and on the construction of what Faisal Devji refers to as the “forging of the generic or universal Muslim,” a process both compelled and constructed by the media. By showcasing the production of the two men as martyrs instead of focusing on the violent back and forth of Israeli-Palestinian relations, Paradise Now presents an image of the Palestinian Resistance that subverts both the Resistance’s self-representation and Western media’s representation of it. By representing these tensions and suggesting a larger system outside of this violent back and forth of colonial/anti-colonial aggression, Abu Assad insists on a dialectical mode of thinking about, and a new image of, the Palestinian Resistance.[4] In this way, the film does not function to condemn the men, the Palestinian Resistance, or even Israel, but instead it condemns this cyclical system of violence perpetuated by both sides, the destruction reaped on the individual by the infrastructure of colonial and anti-colonial aggression, and the mediascape that compels and compounds that violence.

(Un)Spectacular violence: contextualizing the media, martyrdom, and Paradise Now

Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, pioneers of Third Cinema, argue in “Towards A Third Cinema” that systems of mass communication are akin to napalm, or in the 21st century perhaps weapons of mass destruction. Today, more than ever, these systems are all pervasive — from the Internet to television to Hollywood films — and so whoever controls and knows how to manipulate those channels holds incredible, potentially deadly power. However, Faisal Devji suggests in Landscapes of the Jihad that suicide martyrdom, particularly in the Islamic world, is a phenomenon compelled and constructed by the mass media, and so it makes use of those very same channels of mass dissemination through which oppression functions.[5] This phenomenon is alluded to in Paradise Now in the Resistance’s shooting of martyr videos and again when Said and Suha, his female friend and potential romantic interest, come across videos about both collaborators and martyrs for sale. By making use of the same channels of dissemination, the Palestinian Resistance remains locked in a violent conversation with the Western mass media in a type of colonial/anti-colonial struggle, where both sides produce and thrive on images of violence. This mediascape, which is reiterated time and again in political thrillers like Stephen Spielberg’s Munich or Peter Berg’s The Kingdom (2007), engages us emotionally rather than intellectually and discourages us as viewers from engaging critically with the films or issues represented, and so such media representations reiterate the “prevailing ideologies of society” (Hill 115).[6]

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Michael Chanan: Roots of Third Cinema

Roots of Third Cinema from Michael Chanan on Vimeo.

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"Roots of Third Cinema" and other Michael Chanan films and videos online

Deidre O'Neill and Mike Wayne: Return to Third Cinema: The Case of Listen to Venezuela

"Return to Third Cinema: The Case of Listen to Venezuela."
by Deidre O'Neill and Mike Wayne
Originally published in Film International 8.1 (2010)

...

The dialectical image

The question that we were confronted with was how do you make a film adequate to a process
as complex, collective and contradictory as a revolution? We felt that many of the dominant
film models were problematic from the point of view of making a revolutionary film.

What mode of consumption a film encourages in the watching audience is a political
question. Audiences are not only learning about a particular topic/content when they
watch a film, there is also a pedagogy involved in how they watch and use the medium of film itself. We wanted our film to be watched in a different way from the dominant models, we wanted to challenge habitual ways of looking and seeing and encourage the audience to critically decode images and sounds. A revolutionary film is one that gives agency back to the audience because it opens a space to question taken-for-granted models and values. We do
not know whether we succeeded in this but that was the intention.

For inspiration we looked to the traditions of radical cinema. Sergei Eisenstein’s theories of revolutionary cinema came out of a context of immense social changes in the first years after the Russian revolution and the overthrow of the centuries-old Tsarist regime. In this context Eisenstein tried to develop a theory of film form that was congruent with a period of social upheaval and change. Eisenstein developed a theory of editing that stressed how editing stirs up and agitates the spectator’s mind, conceiving each cut as a ‘shock’ or stimulus at the level of rhythm, tone, composition and juxtaposition. Eisenstein’s other ambition was to bring together the sensuous/emotional impact of the image with an intellectual and conceptual dimension to expand the spectator’s consciousness of social relations. This required rejecting the linear, continuity editing then becoming dominant in Hollywood.

Eisenstein’s fellow compatriot film-maker Dziga Vertov stressed the space between shots
as the moment where the spectator’s activity sets to work, making sense of the relationships
between the cuts or in the mental ‘space’ between sound and image.

Inspired by left cultural practitioners, the philosopher Walter Benjamin coined the phrase
‘the dialectical image’ to identify a distinctive revolutionary approach to social and historical reality. The dialectical image interrupts naturalized modes of seeing and hearing, it interrupts linear conceptions of history or narrative. The dialectical image has the potential to awaken us to the disjunctures and contradictions of social life. Awareness of disjuncture at the level of film form can begin a process of questioning and decoding representations. The dialectical image tries to enable a cognitive shift in the
viewer; it begins a process that starts with the film but can be applied beyond the film to social relations generally.

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Nicola Marzano: The Art of Hunger -- Re-Defining Third Cinema

The Art of Hunger: Re-Defining Third Cinema
by NICOLA MARZANO
16:9



This article tries to address established notions of Third Cinema theory and its filmmakers from developing and post-colonial nations. The Third Cinema movement called for a politicized
film-making practice in Africa, Asia and Latin America, since its first appearance during the 60’s and 70’s, taking on board issues of race, class, religion, and national integrity.

The films investigated in this paper, from directors like Sembène, Getino, Solanas and Guzman, are amongst the most culturally significant and politically sophisticated from this movement and denote the adoption of an independent, often oppositional, stance towards
commercial genres and mainstream cinema.

Third Cinema has posed – and continues to pose – difficult and challenging questions. These questions, then, are crucial to this article, an article that focuses on Third Cinema in an inclusive fashion, studying films from Argentina, Chile, Senegal, and even England. Suggesting new methodologies and subtle refinements of existing ones, this article aims at rereading the entire phenomenon of film-making in a fast-vanishing 'Third World'.

Coming to terms with Third Cinema

There is an endless debate about Third Cinema and its strategies in offering valuable tools for documenting social reality. From the 70’s onwards, appreciation of its value and aesthetics has been unfolded through controversial approaches and different views on this radical form of cinema.

The idea of Third Cinema was conceived in the 1960s as a set of radical manifestos and low-budget experimental movies by a group of Latin American filmmakers, who defined a ’cinema of opposition’ to Hollywood and European models. Possibly, this new form of expression came from three different areas of the world: Asia, Africa, and Latin America. At the time these three zones were labelled ‘Third World’ (sometimes they, or at least some of them, still are).

Even though scholars like Willemen explained how the notion of Third Cinema was most emphatically not Third World Cinema, these two concepts have often been confused either intentionally or accidentally (Willemen 1991: 3).

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