Writing the History of the Palestinian Nakba in Return to Haifa. From Novella to Militant Film

Abstract

Directed in 1982 and primarily screened to Western audiences, the film Return to Haifa is one of the first visual productions to show to the West a major episode of the Palestinian modern history, namely the expulsion of most of the Palestinian population from their homes by Zionist forces in 1948. This article examines the film of Kassem Hawal, an Iraqi filmmaker engaged in the Popular Front of the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), as a medium that writes the history of the Palestinian Nakba. Reproducing on the screen Ghassan Kanafani’s eponymous novella (published in 1969), the film borrows major features of the Palestinian author’s visual style, specifically in the use of the narrators’ points of view and in its depiction of the individual experiences lived by the novella’s characters. Yet, far from being a mere adaptation, the film stands out in its representation of the collective experience of the Nakba by Palestinians. The predilection of Hawal for archival images is central to understand the film as a tentative to use the novella in a visual writing of the Palestinian history of 1948. The analysis of interactions between archival and fictional shots demonstrates that Hawal’s film reflects on the types of images that are necessary to write this history. The analysis finally shows the cinematic suggestion of the need of impossible images to visualize the collective experience of Palestinians in 1948.