A Cinema of Nowhere

Abstract

At a time when Palestinian artistic production remains closely tied to land and confined within limits of a collective identity, filmmaker Elia Suleiman distinguished by an unabashedly critical and individualistic perspective. Farfrom advocating a return to Palestine or reunification of territory, he aspires in his work to the transgression of national borders and to a detachmentfrom specificity of place.'* In a similar vein, he strives to avoid static notions of identity and teritory, seeing dynamism and movement as sources of meaning and artistic creation. He also one of rare Palestinian artists to make extensive use of irony and self-mocking. Born in Nazareth in 1960, Elia Suleiman livedfor over a decade in New York and largely self-taught as a filmmaker. His principal films are Introduction to End of an Argument (1991), Homage by Assassination (1992), Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996), and Arab Dream (1998). Concerning Chronicle of a Disappearance, Suleiman's best known work, film critic Stanley Kauffmann of New Republic wrote (30 June 1997) that it is a film of Absurd. If Ionesco had been a Palestinian and a filmmaker, he might have made it.... Like all good Absurdists, [Suleiman] looks at things bifocally. from point of view of a fly on wall and under eye of eternity. Elia Suleiman was interviewed in Jerusalem by Anne Bourlond in February andJuly 1999. The interview was published in fall 1999 issue of IPS's French quarterly, Revue d'etudes Palestiniennes.