Paradise Now Part 2: Self-Reflexivity

In my last post on Paradise Now, I argued that Abu-Assad had given a voice to a previously silent character, the terrorist. The story comments in many ways on the current political crisis in the Middle East, but the film is also a self-reflexive work that comments on cinema and media as they operates in the Middle East.

The most indicative scene is where Said and Suha discuss cinema over tea at her home. Suha asks Said if he likes movies and he responds by saying that Nablus does not have a movie theater, and the only theater he has ever been to was one he help set on fire. This dialogue helps establish two important points about the perception of cinema in the West Bank.

First, cinema is not accessible to Palestinians due to lack of infrastructure. Said does mention that movies are available on tape in Nablus, but the experience of watching a film in a theater is relatively foreign to him. Cinema is, perhaps, a foreign art form to Palestine. By setting a movie theater on fire, Said destroys not just a building but a symbol of something foreign and imperialistic. It is possible to deduce that Said's destruction of the theater reflects a larger rejection by the Palestinian people of cinema as a whole.

Nonetheless, media does exist in Nablus. Two scenes in the film take place at a video store that rents out tapes of suicide bombers' final messages and the confessions of collaborators before they are killed. In this way, media has become incorporated with the conflict. Suha is shocked and disgusted by these video rentals, though she does not know that Said himself had recorded his own video hours before.

The idea of taping these messages is to make them immortal, so that the stories of the terrorists and collaborators will live on. The videos also help to distribute the messages to a large audience. These two points are also goals for cinema as a whole: to make stories eternal and to distribute them to a mass audience. But in this case, videos are manipulated for political purposes and exploitation. This is not to say that certain cinemas, such as Hollywood, do not have political agendas or exploit for a profit. In fact, many theorists would say all Hollywood films have some form of agenda, and mainstream films have profited from exploiting people and situations for as long as cinema has existed. The only difference is that the video rental store is straightforward in its purpose and uses all real people. The videos achieve the same end as cinema but without the seductive illusion created from cinema magic.

Going back to Said and Suha's initial conversation, there comes a point where Said is also unable to name a genre of film he enjoys. He asks Suha if a "boring" genre exists, since that is what his life is like. Said feels that no current genre of film relates to his life or is fit to tell his story. Indeed, perhaps no genre or style of cinema in existence is suited to tell the Palestinian narrative and become part of the developing Palestinian cinema.

While Abu-Assad may be reflecting on cinema's failure to attract or accurately portray Palestinians, he is himself attempting to construct a Palestinian cinematic identity. Paradise Now is painfully aware of its task at hand.

In the end, Said and Suha can come to no conclusion about Said's interest in film. She, being born and raised outside of the West Bank, is too removed from the situation in Palestine to understand his apathy towards cinema. Their conversation eventually escalates to a debate about how to fight the occupation and the two realize they do not see eye to eye, and arguing is futile.

In addition to its address of the Middle East conflict, Paradise Now meditates on the role, if any, of cinema and media in Palestine as it attempts to construct a Palestinian style to make cinema an effective art form in telling the Palestinian narrative.