Static Frames of Turbulence

The flair and flourish of Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman

- Satish Padmanabhan

THE link that I get of Palestine director-actor Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention (2002) has no subtitle option. About 10 minutes into the film, I realise it’s not needed. There are two monologues in Arabic in the film, and they come towards the end of 90 minutes— one an army commandant with a megaphone giving nonsense orders to car drivers at a traffic intersection and another an old man ranting about the way the world is I presume. In an interview, Tim Burton—maker of such fantastical films as Beetlejuice, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Batman, Big Fish, Edward Scissorhands—says he thinks in images not in words, and most of the times he doesn’t have a script on the sets but sketches and storyboard of the shots.

Suleiman must also think like that. But unlike Burton’s grotesque and the twisted, his talent lies in piercing humour, deadpan and dark, making the political situation between Palestine and Israel into a theatre of the absurd. Suleiman is more Buster Keaton and French humorist Jacques Tati, as he has been compared to often, the world changing and collapsing all around him and he is a mute witness to it all. But the images, almost always static frames inside which the action takes place, are all political—barbed wires, check-posts, queues, soldiers, security officers, boots, police cars, guns, tanks, bullets in the sun-baked, dusty bare landscape.