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.
Denne historien er fra January 11, 2024-utgaven av Outlook.
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Denne historien er fra January 11, 2024-utgaven av Outlook.
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Trump, Up And Charging
'Many countries are nervous about Donald Trump returning to power, but India is not one of them'
Post and Past the Oil in Azerbaijan
As the UN climate conference takes place in Baku, Azerbaijan traces the history of the hydrocarbon industry through the lens of postage stamps
Bhutto's Nehru Story
Nehru's principle of \"compromise and argument\" remains the only workable formula for South Asian leaders
Breathless on Bachchan
Cédric Dupire's documentary The Real Superstar is an irreverent, experimental archive of Amitabh Bachchan's life and his stardom
The Anaphora to Zeugma of the Queen's English
Shashi Tharoor's book is a logophile's candy shop, full of fun, surprises and insights
The Wind Knocked
THE wind knocked on the door. Hesitantly. Wanting to be let in. It had heard the murmuring of the flames. And knew that there was a fire. The wind sought shelter.
The Way Home
“We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.”—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
The War Artist
Cartoonist and journalist Joe Sacco is in search of the truths distorted by conventional narratives
Mining Adivasi Votes
If the BJP manages to win Jharkhand, it will be the third mineral-rich state after Odisha and Chhattisgarh that will fall into the party's kitty
Unequal Republic
Political parties make promises of equal represention to women, but patriarchy continues to dominate electoral democracy