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Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma, and Memory by Nurith Gertz and George Khleîfî. Indiana University Press 2008. $75.00 hardcover; $24.95 paper. 256 pages Originally published in Hebrew, 2005
A book about Palestinian cinema necessarily enters into a contested territory, literally and figuratively. The scorching passions that underlie academic, media, and community debates in tins country regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict leave little space for bland disagreements, To judge by tenure controversies, blacklists, and other intimidations directed at scholarship sympathetic to Palestinians, a fierce battle is now underway for the control of knowledge and public opinion.
Into this miasma step Nurit Gem and George Khleifi. an Israeli and a Palestinian, who are charting a path for discussion in a lower register - informed, reasoned, respectful, deeply empathetic, and eminently useful. Palestinian. Cinema: ÎAndscape, Trauma and Memory is the first book-length study of its kind in Hebrew, now in English, to provide an extensive discussion of Palestinian cinema as it has evolved over some eight decades. As such, it makes visible a national cinema whose films are rarely if ever screened in the United States; it offers an in-depth study of an emergent body of films produced under extremely adverse circumstances; it situates diese films in their historical, political, and ideological contexts; and it contributes meaningfully to our broader understanding of other "emergent," "Third World," and "postcoloniaï" cinemas. Happily, it is also erudite, providing necessary information to the initiated and uninitiated alike, and it is written in clear, jargon-free language. These qualities make Palestinian Cinema at once authoritative and accessible.
The beleaguered state of Palestinian cinema, produced under so much duress, emerges here forcefully. Inevitably, die book shows, Palestinian cinema confronts tile clairns of ils context - that of a nation in formation undergoing a protracted dispossession that threatens its core identity. Here, an existential need to retrieve die lost homeland in some way is intimately tied to Palestinian cinema's evolving responses...