Walled in/walled out in the West Bank: performing separation walls in Hany Abu-Assad’s Omar

Transnational Cinemas, 2015 Vol. 6, No. 2, 123–135, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/20403526.2015.1084798 Walled in/walled out in the West Bank: performing separation walls in Hany Abu-Assad’s Omar Ana Cristina Mendes* Centre for English Studies, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal Techniques of colonial governmentality, such as the conjointly reinforcing institutions and practices of the military court system and the network of military checkpoints and other devices, continuously act to undermine (and concurrently reinforce) the disputed sovereignty of Palestine. Bearing a striking resemblance to practices of governance developed in colonial settings, a ‘new military urbanism’, comprised of political devices (in the Agambian sense) such as roadblocks, checkpoints and concrete barriers, works to control the everyday lives of civilian populations. At the core of this military urbanism lies the mechanism of walling. In particular, the wall that makes up the West Bank security barrier, erected in 2002 by the Israeli Government ostensibly to protect Israeli civilians from Palestinian militant attacks, constitutes the strongest spatial manifestation of an unyielding state of exception – the place where life has lost its political existence. Focusing on the Palestinian film Omar (2013), written, produced and directed by Hany Abu-Assad – mainly on the ways it engages with territorial conflict and transgression – the central purpose of this article is to analyze its representation of the West Bank wall as both a physical reality of the state of exception and a site of radical potentiality. To frame the analysis of how Omar reflects upon the scope and possibility of nation-state sovereignty today, and also upon the value of human, bare life, the article will begin by addressing other visual narratives of street art that effectively reterritorialize the space of exception that is the West Bank. The article will also examine Omar’s positioning at the nexus of the national and the transnational as a product of the Palestinian film industry. Keywords: Hany Abu-Assad; separation wall; Palestine; Palestinian cinema; transnational film production; state of exception [F]reedom is to be found in the abyss of potentiality. To be free is not simply to have the power to do this or that thing, nor is it simply to have the power to refuse to do this or that thing. To be free is (…) to be capable of one’s own impotentiality, to be in relation to one’s own privation. (Agamben 1999, 182–183) If you like dancing you go on holiday to Ibiza, if you like walls you go to Palestine. (Banksy, in Jury 2005) Techniques of colonial governmentality, such as the conjointly reinforcing institutions and practices of the military court system and the network of military checkpoints and other devices, continuously act to undermine (and concurrently reinforce) the disputed sovereignty of Palestine. Bearing a striking resemblance to practices of governance developed in colonial settings, a ‘new military urbanism’ (Graham 2011), comprised of *Emails: anafmendes@gmail.com, nanafmendes@campus.ul.pt © 2015 Taylor & Francis 124 A.C. Mendes political devices (in the Agambian sense) such as roadblocks, checkpoints and concrete barriers, works to control the everyday lives of civilian populations. Physical obstacles to movement are compounded by a grueling system of permits, an extra impediment to the free circulation that Palestinians face in their own territory – an occupied territory since 1967 in the aftermath of the Six Day War, when Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza strip, according to the State of Palestine; a disputed territory, as defined by the executive branch of the Israeli government. At the core of this military urbanism lies the mechanism of walling. In particular, the wall that makes up the West Bank security barrier, erected in 2002 by the Israeli Government ostensibly to protect Israeli civilians from Palestinian militant attacks, constitutes the strongest spatial manifestation of an unyielding state of exception – the place where life has lost its political existence (Agamben 1998, 2005).1 States of exception have been enforced to tackle ‘new threats’ identified in the bodies of others who are projected as terrorists, or aliens in general. In Giorgio Agamben’s theorization, states of exception are those based on a suspension of the juridical order and where individuals are deprived of citizenship and treated as bare, biological lifeforms. Sovereign power – representing the political life – defines apolitical identity as that which is devoid of agency within the juridical system. Still, as Agamben argues, apolitical (bare or ‘abandoned’) life is necessarily implicated in political life, as the latter depends on the former for its existence. Focusing on the Palestinian film Omar (2013), written, produced and directed by Hany Abu-Assad – mainly on the ways it engages with territorial conflict and transgression – the central purpose of this article is to analyze its representation of the West Bank wall as both a physical reality of the state of exception and a site of radical potentiality (Agamben 1999). To frame this analysis, the article will begin by addressing other visual narratives of street art that effectively reterritorialize the space of exception that is the West Bank; the article will also examine Omar’s positioning at the nexus of the national and the transnational as a product of the Palestinian film industry. Lisa Hajjar, in her treatment of the ‘carceralism’ that characterizes Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank and Gaza, observes that the military court system is central to the situation Palestinians find themselves in: ‘enmeshed and tracked in grids of surveillance, subjected to restrictive codes of conduct and interaction, physically immobilized through the use of permits, closures, curfews, checkpoints, and walls, and incarcerated in large numbers’ (2005, 186). Edward Soja first defined ‘carceral cities’ as post-metropolises where fear-driven and security-obsessed urbanism is dominant (1996, 2001). Carceral urbanism manifests itself through existence in the post-metropolis of satellite cities, gated communities and fenced condos. Using the transformation of Los Angeles from 1965 to 1992 as a case study, Soja presents the ‘Carceral City’ as a ‘geography of warlike fortification and enclosure, of ever-watchful surveillance and creative means of social and spatial control, a place where police has become an insistent substitute for polis’ (1996, 448). While this is verifiable in many present-day cities besides Los Angeles, such as in the fortress-like enclaves of São Paulo, the spatial effects of carceral urbanism in the West Bank have assumed extraordinary proportions. Israeli occupation has had the effect of fragmenting the territory into a series of disconnected carceral archipelagos, reminiscent of the extraterritorial zones (i.e. positioned outside of the sovereignty that surrounds them) of colonialism. The West Bank wall, a concrete barrier that seals off the West Bank – formerly part of Jordan – from the state of Israel, hence succeeds as an instrument of dispossession in the ‘colonial present’, a concept Transnational Cinemas 125 introduced by Derek Gregory to address the ‘constellations of power, knowledge, and geography’ that ‘continue to colonize lives all over the world’ (2004, xv). Claims about the continuities or overlaps between Palestinian and colonial experiences have been numerous. In a recent example, Stephen Morton notes how ‘the rhetoric of the state of exception has masked colonial histories such as the occupation of Palestine’ (2013, 186). In Rashid Khalidi’s searing account, ‘[t]he quintessential Palestinian experience […] takes place at a border, an airport, a checkpoint: in short, at any one of those many modern barriers where identities are checked and verified’ (1997, 1). Borrowing from Khalidi’s words, the quintessential experience in the West Bank is one of the colonial present. The instruments of colonial dispossession that secure the West Bank wall (most of which is considered illegal under international law) also naturalize a permanent state of exception. Though this present colonial dispossession is multilayered, having originated in the trauma of Palestinian displacement in 1948 in the aftermath of the Arab–Israeli war, the first level of dispossession is centered on the land, chiefly on its loss and deferred recuperation, and consequently on the lived landscape. As Eyal Weizman put it in his examination of the West Bank as architectural construction, ‘[t]he landscape and the built environment became the arena of conflict’ (2003, 65). In fact, since 1948, but with greater incidence after 1967 following the Six Day War, the checkpoints and observation towers that control the separation wall (also known as the isolation wall) have come to inhabit a space of taken-for-grantedness in the landscape. The naturalization of this fortress-like environment resulted in these intrusive elements becoming part of the landscape. Watchtowers, walls, roadblocks and checkpoints recurrently inhabit media narratives on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and their visual impact on the landscape has provided inspiration for politically charged art over the years. The visual, with its own conventions of representation and documentation in photography, film, media images, or museum and gallery exhibits, has indeed played a key role in coming to terms with the remembrance of the conflicted past of Israeli–Palestinian relations and its challenging present and future. The West Bank wall has been visually shaped, contested, recovered, and (re)circulated in paintings, drawings, photographs, films, museum exhibits, memorials and other forms of public visual culture by differently configured national and transnational communities. In this respect, the project of Palestinian wall art has been to constantly disrupt a ‘natural’ reading of walls, especially by those who find themselves imprisoned – literally – within them. An example of this counter-politics of visuality is the exhibition Santa’s Ghetto in Bethlehem (2007), co-organized by street artists including Banksy during his second time in Bethlehem. One of the works included in the exhibition was an installation by Palestinian artist Trash, which had the lower part of a leg glued to the wall, creating the illusion that it was kicking through it. An additional example of a counter visual occupation of the separation wall is the stencil graffito Donkey Documents, authored by Banksy. This much publicized mural was painted on the Palestinian side of the wall. It was removed from its original location and received a $600,000 (£380,000) valuation before being auctioned in Los Angeles. Donkey Documents portrays an unlikely pair – a donkey having its ID card checked by an Israeli soldier. When we consider that the donkey might be a probable stand-in for the Christmas donkey, and that its identity is being verified in Jesus’s birthplace, dominant modes of representation are further subverted. Banksy’s celebrity status as the world’s most collectible street artist has given the obtrusive structure renewed attention in the media after his visits to Palestine in 2005, 2007 and 2015. At the time of his first visit, he wrote tongue-in-cheek: ‘Palestine is 126 A.C. Mendes now the world’s largest open-air prison and the ultimate activity holiday destination for graffiti artists’ (2005, 110). William Parry notes that ‘[a]lthough Banksy and the Santa’s Ghetto collective [made up of mostly international street artists in 2007] account for a modicum of the artwork on the Wall’, they managed to ‘generate the most attention, interest and influence’, in a way that ‘engaged millions who wouldn’t ordinarily take an interest in Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine’ (2011, 9). Referring to the structure as ‘The Segregation Wall’ a decade ago, the celebrity street artist succeeded in making viewers not familiar with the local specifics more aware of the ways the material structure was enclosing a space of exception. Critics of street art have increasing voiced concerns regarding the commodification of branded street artists and the convergence of creative ‘authenticity’ with the commercial. As Sarah Banet-Weiser observes, even though Banksy ‘critiques the world of advertising and branding – calling such practices “brandalism” – he is clearly a brand in and of himself’ (2012, 94). Banksy was obviously not the first artist to visually impact the separation wall. Nonetheless, his work in Palestine is clearly a form of art activism in the sense that it is an embodied cultural practice of contestation that takes place on-site as well as through knowledge-production and dissemination. Returning to the territory six months after the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict (a military operation also known as Operation Protective Edge launched by Israel against Hamas rocket-firing militants), Banksy authored a series of works on concrete rubble in the Gaza strip, including a stencil of Palestinian children riding an Israeli watchtower as if it were a fairground ride. The incongruity of the playful image deliberately contrasts with the immediate surroundings and actualizes the domineering presence of structures of control. Hochberg (2015) maintains that concealment is a key aspect of the occupation of Palestine, in the sense that it is part of an Israeli strategy to camouflage its own militarization. The hypervisibility of Banksy’s stencils renews the visibility of the structures of control. As a sort of companion to the works authored during the artist’s more recent urban intervention in the war-ravaged region, a short documentary, less than two minutes in length, posted on Banksy’s official website exhorts viewers, using a travel advert format, to: ‘Make this the year YOU discover a new destination.’ ‘Welcome to Gaza’, the hard-hitting film continues to the sound of the East Flatbush Project track ‘Tried by 12’, ‘well away from the tourist track’. This is openly off the beaten track, given that ‘[a]ccess is via a network of illegal tunnels’. In this tour of Gaza, attention is drawn to the plight of Palestinian civilians living in squalid conditions, roaming rubblestrewn, vacant streets and trying to make repairs in bombed-out buildings. The subtitles note that 18,000 homes were destroyed during the conflict of the previous year. As the film painfully ironizes, ‘Development opportunities are everywhere. (No cement has been allowed into Gaza since the bombing.) Plenty of scope for refurbishment.’ Banksy’s whimsical documentary-cum-spoof tourism video presents this territory under siege as ‘nestled in an exclusive setting’. This ‘exclusive’ location can only be entered through tunnels, like the one shown in the film, and that are central as much as walls to understanding the conflict. This ‘exclusive’ location is unremittingly ‘watched over by friendly neighbours’, the agents of the colonial enterprise. Optimistically, the hypervisibility of these representations will intervene in the ways the occupation is articulated, rendering visible Palestine’s colonial statelessness, influencing if not public policy, at least individual perceptions. Banksy’s work on Palestine finds added worldwide resonance because it is clearly framed from an outsider’s perspective, allowing for identification by diverse audiences beyond the Middle East. In this sense, his last film (to date) might arguably be a mockery of ‘la caminata’, a form of border-crossing adventure Transnational Cinemas 127 tourism favored by middle-class consumers who want to experience an illegal crossing of the US-Mexico border, or even a satirical allusion to the virtual tourism TV-watchers engage in via reality shows such as the special California Border Patrol editions of FOX’s Cops. It might even be a play on the North American fascination for conspiracy theories revolving around secret military underground tunnels and bases. A focus on the biopolitics of security and coloniality is also recurrent in cinema whose background is the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. For example, checkpoints are the reason why the main character of Amreeka (USA, United Arab Emirates, Canada, Kuwait and Jordan, dir. Cherien Dabis, 2009) decides to move with her teenage son to post-9/11 suburban Chicago, shortly after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Even if they have to face discrimination (translating into inadequate job opportunities in the US), it is preferable to the militarized gaze that Muna, the Christian protagonist, is subjected to daily at the roadside checkpoints between Bethlehem and Ramallah, where she used to work. The strong territorial basis of the conflict is ever-present in feature films such as Rana’s Wedding (Palestine, Netherlands and United Arab Emirates, dir. Abu-Assad, 2002), The Syrian Bride (France, Germany and Israel, dir. Eran Riklis, 2004), Lemon Tree (Israel, Germany and France, dir. Eran Riklis, 2008) and Bethlehem (Israel, Germany and Belgium, dir. Yuval Adler, 2013), all featuring on their promotional posters items of the extensive taxonomy of barriers constructed by Israel in and around the West Bank. Palestine’s Oscar-tipped film Omar centers on a young Palestinian baker, the eponymous and mercurial protagonist, who frequently climbs the West Bank wall to visit Nadia, whom he is in love with and plans to marry, and who is also his childhood friend Tarek’s sister. Captured and imprisoned by the Israeli authorities one day after clambering over the wall, in one of his frequent journeys between Jerusalem and Ramallah, Omar is tortured and humiliated on suspicion of terrorism. Instigated to seek revenge, he joins Tarek (who runs a resistance cell) and Amjad, another friend, to plan an attack on an Israeli checkpoint. Omar and his friends are pursued after Amjad shoots an Israeli soldier dead. Tarek and Amjad escape, but Omar is again arrested, hung naked by his arms while beaten and placed in solitary confinement. He is interrogated by an Israeli agent, Rami, who, upon learning of his secret love for Nadia, forcibly coerces him into betraying his friends. In fact, Rami offers Omar a way out of a lengthy prison term in exchange for the latter working as a double agent and surrendering the friend who killed the Israeli soldier during the attack on the checkpoint, whose identity is unknown to the military police. Omar follows the protagonist’s predicament, exploring dilemmas and vulnerabilities, to an unexpected denouement – Omar kills Rami with his own weapon for turning him against his childhood friends. Statelessness, anxiety over divided or ambiguous loyalties, tropes of connectivity and longing for the return to Palestine, the trauma of division, as well as the specter of the terrorist (which is further heightened in Amreeka by the US rhetoric of the war on terror) are common thematic preoccupations in films set against the backdrop of the Israeli–Palestinian geopolitical conflict (Abdel-Malek 2005; Gertz and Khleifi 2008). An additional commonality, probably the most persistent, is a reflection on (and resistance to) the impact that the assertion of colonial sovereignty, particularly the infrastructures that undergird the Israeli surveillance of Palestinians, has had over the landscape. Perhaps unwittingly, feature films therefore acquire a documentary-like aspect to their portrayal of the occupied territory. Abu-Assad notes this in an interview with reference to his film Rana’s Wedding: ‘The occupation, the checkpoints – you don’t want them to interfere with your story but the ugliness of occupation influenced the look of the film’ 128 A.C. Mendes (in Haider 2010). The wall and the checkpoint materially and symbolically separate Omar from his lover Nadia, who lives on the other side of the wall, as well as Muna from her home in Bethlehem and the bank in Ramallah where she works. These control devices become a debilitating border drawn on the landscape, which the characters navigate and transgress. Conceivably, Amreeka offers viewers a lighter reading of post-9/11 colonial governmentality; nevertheless, it shares with Omar a representation of the wall and the checkpoint as instruments of an unremitting colonial regime. In both works, the wall and the checkpoint are construed as colonial spaces included in the lived landscape of Palestine. Whereas in Amreeka we watch the protagonist being constantly subject to control in a horizontal movement of back and forth through the checkpoint, which only ceases when she ‘escapes’ to the US, in Omar the geopolitical conflict is enacted vertically, through the relentless climbing and descending of walls by the protagonist, acts fraught with risk. Omar’s vertical performance of the wall relates to the concept of ‘the politics of verticality’ developed by Weizman (2002, 2003, 2007; Segal and Weizman 2003) to grasp the three-dimensionality of the architecture of occupation in the West Bank: Two-dimensional maps, fundamental to the understanding of political borders, have been drawn again and again for the West Bank. Each time they have failed to capture its vertical divisions […] The ‘Politics of Verticality’ entails the re-visioning of existing cartographic techniques. It requires an Escher-like representation of space, a territorial hologram in which political acts of manipulation and multiplication of the territory transform a two-dimensional surface into a three-dimensional volume. (2002, 2)2 The verticality we associate with the Palestinian urban experience is imaginatively rendered in Larissa Sansour’s explicitly science fiction video Nation Estate (Palestine and Denmark 2013). This short film (of approximately nine minutes) envisions a future in which Palestinians have at long last been given a sovereign state. The dystopic solution to sovereignty is vertical, in the form of a gigantic skyscraper encircled by the separation wall, where each floor represents a city or area in Palestine (for instance, Jerusalem is on the fourth floor and Bethlehem on the twelfth). Omar’s first scene is a close up on the protagonist; the camera then pans away from his face to a wide-angle shot of a graffitied wall. Following the standard film technique of beginning a film with a close up, the wall serves as a narrative shortcut for the audience, a synecdochic device giving viewers straightforward clues to the location of the narrative. Viewers see Omar as he looks longingly up at the wall, before expertly and swiftly scaling it, with the help of a dangling rope, to meet his friend Tarek. The visual composition of this scene evokes Banksy’s stencil in Abu Dis of a kneeling boy holding a paintbrush next to a painted rope ladder, naively suggesting an (impossible) escape route up the wall (2005, 118). The main representational difference between these two mise-en-scènes is that in Abu-Assad’s film the protagonist, subsequent to his vertical performance of the wall, makes the impassable surface passable, with only his hands visibly scathed from the act, whereas in Banksy’s stencil the act of climbing is presented as an impossibility, almost as if it were a childhood fantasy. Agamben’s theorization has been highly influential on recent urban and spatial debates, in particular his concepts of the state of exception and ‘the camp’. The latter ‘is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule’ (1998, 168–169); this space that has become ‘the fundamental bio-political paradigm of the West’ (1998, 181), the most extreme manifestation of which is the death camp. Transnational Cinemas 129 However, the idea of potentiality seems to offer a more optimistic take on bare life in comparison to Agamben’s later critique on the state of exception, in the sense that it is focused on state-oriented action that seems to totally suspend citizenship in a way that evinces (at first sight, at least) no satisfactory room for resistance or emancipatory answers. ‘To be potential’, Agamben argues, drawing upon Aristotle, is ‘to be one’s lack, to be in relation to one’s own capacity’ (1999, 92). Omar maps potentiality on to the visual. For the main character, wall crossing is a life-risking and life-losing endeavor. In the state of exception, the political is originally biopolitical, as control over bare life is the aim of the sovereign power, and yet the radical potentiality of Omar’s apolitical, or bare life, manifested in his performance of the wall, subverts the material actuality of this structure, an instrument of the state of exception par excellence. After the initial wall-crossing sequence, another close up on the protagonist’s face follows as he manages to escape through labyrinthine alleyways, fleeing across buildings, with the Israeli security forces behind him. The opening close-up and wide-angle shots of the film add to a ‘peekaboo’ game dynamics, borrowing from W.J.T. Mitchell’s image in his article on Gilo’s wall in Jerusalem and Christo’s Gates in New York City’s Central Park (2006). These peekaboo dynamics are inherent, Mitchell argues, to the visual experience of walls and gates; accordingly, the wall and the alleyway (or the gate and the tunnel) manifest the ‘scopic drive’ that structures the dialectics of landscape: The paradoxical character of seeing landscape, looking at the view, is materialized for us most vividly in the phenomena of walls and gates, the things we build around ourselves to obstruct the view, and the holes we punch in those obstructions to allow ourselves to pass through, visually and bodily. (2006, 587) The landscape of ‘walling and gating’ (Alsayyad and Roy 2006, 6) contains the paradoxical condition of showing and hiding, of including and excluding. Omar’s cinematic representation of the succession of alleyways in the gated ghettos that make up the ‘seam zone’ between the landlocked territory of the West Bank and Israel proper eloquently dramatizes the paradox of visual experience that Mitchell refers to. The wall is presented in Omar as the ultimate visual expression of dominion, a dynamic that plays itself out continually in a context of asymmetrical power dynamics, of an unequal access to visual rights (Hochberg 2015). Most relevantly, Abu-Assad’s camera work reclaims the right to control what can be seen. The wall as the site of a continuing coloniality of power is equally one of a playful vacillation between revealing and concealing, and hence also the site of adaptive ambivalence and radical potentiality. The power of these architectural structures as sites where transformative freedom can be grounded is expressed through the interplay between exposing and hiding, securing and crossing. Wendy Brown, in her study of the ‘new walls striating the globe’ (2010, 8) as a reflection of the weakening of state sovereignty, forcefully argues: walls project an image of sovereign jurisdictional power and an aura of the bounded and secure nation that are at the same time undercut by their existence and also by their functional inefficacy. Notwithstanding their strikingly physicalist and obdurate dimensions, the new walls often function theatrically, projecting power and efficaciousness that they do not and cannot actually exercise and that they also performatively contradict. (2010, 25) Engaging the performative characteristic of border walls, Omar’s constant climbing during the film manifests itself as an almost playful gesture, rendering the wall as if it were an arbitrary spot in the landscape. The separation wall must continuously be performed 130 A.C. Mendes by (tres)passers, through acts that may or may not be transgressive, and by those who secure this structure of exclusion/inclusion, through a constant mobilization of threat. In this sense, the wall is in a constant state of flux between literal interdiction and possibility, at once filtering and allowing for trespassing. Security, Weizman contends, ‘erects barriers and channels and rechannels the flow of people and resources through space’ (2007, 107). As the West Bank wall fragments the landscape, communal threads weaken; family and friends are cut off from each other. In some areas, the separation barrier is made up of concrete slabs over six meters high. In this respect, Weizman has demonstrated how height plays an important role in the power relations of this occupied/disputed space (2007, 179–181). The landscape is hence rendered as a labyrinth with high concrete walls that Omar has learned to perform. Individuals like this character must continuously climb – perform – the wall. After escaping through the alleyways, Omar and Tarek discuss the best alternatives for crossing the wall between Jerusalem and Ramallah – Omar chose to cross over Qalandia wall instead of the Al-Ram wall. Crossing the wall to maintain communal ties compares to flying over it to reunite with friends and family. Omar ironizes that he took the noon flight there, because the morning one was full. In fact, he nearly died traveling economy, i.e. when running though alleyways, he was met by the sound of sirens and whistling bullets, shot by those Banksy referred to as ‘friendly neighbours’. Omar’s initial scenes mobilize a complex viewing experience, which is not only visual per se, but also synesthetic. Oppressive, claustrophobic space is one of the dominant iconographies of ‘accented cinema’, a conceptual framework developed by Hamid Naficy, after Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s theories of ‘minor literature’ (1986), to theorize filmmaking informed by the experience of displacement through exile, migration or diaspora (Naficy 1996, 2001). Also borrowing from Mikhail Bakhtin, Naficy’s idea of ‘mutually inclusive’ chronotopes, understood as ‘not just visual, but more important, synesthetic, involving the entire human sensorium and memory’ (2001, 153), are particularly apt to read Omar. Despite a few shots in open spaces,3 the settings of most scenes are consistent with the time–space constructs of the ‘closed chronotopes of imprisonment and panic’ that may coexist with and even reinforce ‘border’ or ‘thirdspace chronotopes’. The film is structured around a peculiar articulation of these chronotopes, which at times seem to contradict one another, and at others coexist in continuity. Furthermore, Omar’s opening shots seamlessly illustrate Naficy’s contention that representation of life in exile and diaspora in accented films ‘tends to stress claustrophobia and temporality, and it is cathected to sites of confinement and control and to narratives of panic and pursuit’ (2001, 5). Reinforcing a sense of visual constriction, we find in Abu-Assad’s film a recurrence of ‘interior locations and closed settings’ and a ‘dark lighting scheme that creates a mood of constriction and claustrophobia’ (Naficy 2001, 153). Naficy’s discussion of territoriality and temporality of accented cinema observes how a crucial aspect of the accent (a concept he borrows from linguistics) is the ‘inscription of the biographical, social, and cinematic (dis)location of the filmmakers’ (2001, 4). Naficy elaborates: ‘If in linguistics accent pertains only to pronunciation, leaving grammar and vocabulary intact, exilic and diasporic accent permeates the film’s deep structure: its narrative, visual style, characters, subject matter, theme, and plot’ (2001, 23). Following this conceptual framework, a key characteristic of transnational filmmakers such as Abu-Assad, a central figure in Palestinian cinema, is that they are interstitial authors whose works reflect their own exilic personal experiences, i.e. located at the intersection of the local and the global, straddling social formations and cinematic Transnational Cinemas 131 practices (2001, 34). Accented films hence reflect the ‘double consciousness’ of their authors (2001, 22). With Israeli citizenship malgré lui, having had an externally assigned identity though he has always identified as Palestinian, Abu-Assad shot to international recognition and acclaim in 2005 with the transnational production (involving Palestine, France, Germany, Netherlands and Israel) Paradise Now. With a plot based on two Palestinian men who live in Nablus in the northern West Bank, and who are preparing for a suicide attack in Tel Aviv, this film depicts the tensions of living under military occupation. Omar was filmed in Nazareth (where the population is made up predominantly of Arab citizens of Israel, such as the filmmaker, who was born and lives there), Nablus, Far’a (a Palestinian refugee camp in the northwestern West Bank) and, for the jail scenes, Bisan (in the northern part of Gaza). Unlike the ordeal of filming Paradise Now in Nablus (which, at some point, caused the intervention of Yasser Arafat’s office), Abu-Assad noted in an interview that there was no opposition to making Omar on location: We managed to get permission [to shoot] for all of the places, even the wall. For the wall, we had permission to climb up to a certain height and then, for the moments at the top, we used a fake wall on a set in Nazareth. (in AFP 2013) Paradise Now was the first Palestinian film to be nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars in 2006 (awarded for ‘excellence in world cinema’ to films produced outside the US and containing primarily non-English dialog), an achievement repeated with Omar in 2014. Both were submitted to the competition as films representing Palestine, despite earlier qualms surrounding Palestine’s status as a sovereign state. This relates to what Agamben termed ‘politics of ban’, responsible for defining normative forms of politically qualified existence, hence distinguishing political life from bare life. These relations of ban undergirding a sovereign politics of inclusion and exclusion were at least partially responsible for making Divine Intervention (France, Morocco, Germany and Palestine, dir. Elia Suleiman, 2002), which was ineligible for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2002, at a time when the Palestinian Territories were not yet formally recognized by the United Nations. In the following year, however, Suleiman’s film was accepted as a submission of the Palestinian Ministry of Culture. Whereas Paradise Now was officially accepted by the US Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as a submission from the Palestinian Territories, eight years later the Academy recognized Palestine, instead of the territories, as the place of origin for Omar. This acknowledgment of Palestine as place of origin further positioned Palestinian cinema as vital for nation-building purposes, a cultural expression that has been strengthening a sense of communal history grounded on exile and displacement. The role of festivals in the promotion of Palestinian transnational cinema has been increasingly relevant. In fact, further visibility was granted to Omar by the media buzz surrounding it after its official selection for screening in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Prize (Prix spécial du jury). After the premier of Omar at Cannes, Adopt Films acquired US rights. These distribution patterns verify Naficy’s assertion that accented films ‘are simultaneously local and global, and they resonate against the prevailing cinematic production practices, at the same time that they benefit from them’ (2001, 4). Clearly, the negotiations of power relations in a field of representation dominated by a US-centered logic, that reads films from outside the US (i.e. outside the mainstream Hollywood system) as world cinema, are relevant for understanding the positionality of the filmmaker. Transnational cinema 132 A.C. Mendes cultures both foster an expanded space for minority-based authorship and self-fashioning, and uncover the unfeasibility of unmediated and unframed self-representation. Asked during an interview who his target audience was, Abu-Assad noted: ‘My first audience, honestly, are the Palestinians and Arabs’ (in AFP 2013). This assertion seems to place his cinematography within the category of (trans)national cinema, away from a Hollywood-centered logic that favors its classification under the rubric of world cinema. Nonetheless, by reaching out across national boundaries to global audiences, Paradise Now and Omar, both nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, link Palestinian national cinema to transnational and global production and distribution networks, including screenings in international film festivals and the acquisition of rights by multinationals (as was the case with Warner Independent Pictures, which acquired Paradise Now). Omar’s intertextually even nods at Hollywood when Tarek does an impersonation of Marlon Brando in exchange for a cup of coffee. Before Omar, the mode of production of the Palestinian film industry was transnational in the sense that films were co-funded by different countries. While Paradise Now was produced with European funds, Omar was the first film to be funded almost entirely (ninety-five percent) by Palestinian private investors (Enjaaz, the postproduction fund of the Dubai International Film Festival, accounts for the remaining five percent). It took producers only a year to secure finance. Even after this historical landmark, the Palestinian film industry still has very limited financial and technical capacities and thus continues to be very reliant on external (especially European) assistance. Waleed F. Zuaiter, the actor who plays Rami, the Israeli agent assigned to Omar’s case, was also a producer on the film. As he puts it, to do a Palestinian film is not easy […]. Hany and I had a shared dream that we could get Palestinians to invest in the talent and the community and the filmmaking, because most Palestinian films are funded from European government funds or from abroad, and here we are. (in Rothe 2013) According to Naficy, the interstitiality (and frequently multilingual nature4) of accented films relies on the fact that ‘they are created astride and in the interstices of social formations and cinematic practices’ (2001, 4). Naficy provided an original overview of the cultural and industrial contexts of ‘accented cinema’ in 2001, one that necessarily needs updating more than a decade after publication. The different material, technical, financial and political conditions that characterize the production of Omar extend Naficy’s idea of accented modes of production as interstitial and collective, critically realizing it by inviting an analysis at the interface of exilic and diasporic filmmaking, world cinema and (trans)national cinema to reflect the new realities of the Palestinian film industry. The critique in both Paradise Now and Omar of the categories of nation and state, of issues of Palestinian political identity involved in the politics of ban, seeks to dislodge their stability from within – as seen, for instance, in the duplicity of the characterization of both Omar and the Israeli officer in charge of breaking him. In a bold move, Abu-Assad’s film undermines a vision of Israeli soldiers as a collective, mechanical mass, through the humanization of the character of the Israeli agent Rami, making him sympathetic, with his own grievances and motives which justify his actions throughout the film. Neither of the two main characters, Omar and Rami, are without flaws, neither dissent from violence, and both are united by displacement and (mis)communication. Omar offers a critique of how violence seems to be becoming the only act of Transnational Cinemas 133 communication; in this perspective, the blame does not rest solely on ‘the other’ or ‘the Jewish enemy’, as Palestinian strategic options that resort to violence are also critiqued. Emphasizing irresolution, the film prompts questions about the unsustainability of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in general. By doing so, Omar underscores the demise of state sovereignty, particularly of a sovereignty that is grounded in the performance of violence. The Israeli wall hence acts in the film, in Brown’s words, ‘as an eerie monument to the impossibility of nation-state sovereignty today’ (2010, 34). Ultimately, as Brown demonstrates, the wall has been ineffectual against Palestinian hostility toward Israel, resulting only in a change of strategies and tactics deriving from new-fangled ‘political subjectivities’: Clearly, the Wall has produced new political subjectivities on both sides and is part of a larger architecture of occupation separating Palestinians from Israelis and discursively inverting the sources and circuitries of violence, projecting the cause of the wall onto imagined originary Palestinian aggression toward Israel. (2010, 110) Brought into stark relief by the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, Abu-Assad’s Omar reflects upon the scope and possibility of nation-state sovereignty today, and also upon the value of human, bare life. Audiences are confronted with the terrible choices acted out of resentment and revenge, including the one Omar will make in the end. ‘The paramount feature of Palestinian cinema’, Hamid Dabashi writes, ‘is a subdued anger, a perturbed pride, a sublated violence’ (2006, 11). Omar’s deceptively simple narrative offers no solutions to the conflict. Bitterly depicting the resilience of separation, it suggests a way out – only a space outside violence, of endemic suspicion and betrayal, will bridge ruptures. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. The vast majority of the population in the West Bank is comprised of Palestinian Arabs, though a minority of Jewish Israelis also lives in the occupied territory. In a later text, Weizman speaks of the ‘vertical geopolitics’ of Palestine, seen as a ‘hollow land’ after Israel’s colonial occupation (2007, 7). Also influential in the theorization of global vertical geopolitics are, to name three other studies, Graham (2011), Gregory (2011) and Elden (2013). Naficy’s third chronotope is the ‘open chronotope’ characterized by ‘external locations and open settings and landscapes, bright natural lighting, and mobile and wandering diegetic characters’ (2001, 153). Mirroring their transnational production processes, accented films are often bi- or multi-lingual. For instance, Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention contains dialog in Arabic, Hebrew and English, and Eran Riklis’s The Syrian Bride in Arabic, English, Hebrew, Russian and French. Notes on contributor Ana Cristina Mendes has been a researcher at the University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies (CEAUL/ULICES) since 2005. Her areas of specialization are postcolonial and migration studies, with an emphasis on the cultural industries and exchanges in the global cultural marketplace. She has recently been pursuing research in the subfields of poverty studies (slumming), visual arts, 134 A.C. Mendes cinemas and literatures of the Asian emerging economies). Her publications include the co-edited book Re-Orientalism and South Asian Identity Politics (2011), the edited collection Salman Rushdie and Visual Culture (2012), the monograph Salman Rushdie in the Cultural Marketplace (2013) and articles in Third Text, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Interventions and Textual Practice. ORCID Ana Cristina Mendes http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3596-0701 References Abdel-Malek, Kamal. 2005. The Rhetoric of Violence: Arab-Jewish Encounters in Contemporary Palestinian Literature and Film. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. AFP. 2013. “Cheers for Palestinian Film of Love and Betrayal.” Al Arabiya, May 20. http://eng lish.alarabiya.net/en/life-style/2013/05/20/Cheers-for-Palestinian-film-of-love-and-betrayal-.html Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. 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Parry, William. 2011. Against the Wall: The Art of Resistance in Palestine. Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill. Rothe, E. Nina. 2013. “Believing: Hany Abu-Assad’s Omar Gets Standing Ovation in Cannes.” The Huffington Post, May 21. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/e-nina-rothe/believing-hany-abuassads_b_3313403.html Segal, Rafi, and Eyal Weizman, eds. 2003. A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture. Tel Aviv, London: Babel, Verso. Soja, Edward W. 1996. “Los Angeles, 1965–1992: From Crisis-Generated Restructuring to Restructuring-Generated Crisis.” In The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century, edited by Allen J. Scott and Edward W. Soja, 426–462. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Soja, Edward W. 2001. Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Weizman, Eyal. 2002. “The Politics of Verticality.” https://www.opendemocracy.net/ecology-poli ticsverticality/article_801.jsp. Weizman, Eyal. 2003. “The Politics of Verticality: The West Bank as an Architectural Construction.” In Territories: Islands, Camps and Other States of Utopia, edited by Klaus Biesenbach, 65–118. Berlin: Walther König. Weizman, Eyal. 2007. Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London: Verso. Filmography Amreeka. USA, United Arab Emirates, Canada, Kuwait and Jordan. Dir. Cherien Dabis. 2009. Prod. National Geographic Entertainment, Imagenation Abu Dhabi FZ, Levantine Entertainment, Maximum Film International, Cinergy Productions, First Generation Films, Alcina Pictures, Buffalo Gal Pictures, Eagle Vision Media Group, Rotana Film Productions, Showtime Arabia, the Violet Jabara Foundation, R.A. Abdoo & Co., Manitoba Film & Music and The Royal Film Commission – Jordan. Bethlehem. Israel, Germany and Belgium. Dir. Yuval Adler. 2013. Prod. Entre Chien et Loup, Gringo Films and Pie Films. Divine Intervention: A Chronicle of Love and Pain (Yadun ‘Ilahiyya). France, Morocco, Germany and Palestine. Dir. Elia Suleiman. 2002. Prod. Arte France Cinéma, Filmstiftung NordrheinWestfalen, Gimages, Lichtblick Film- und Fernsehproduktion, Ness Communication & Productions Ltd., Ognon Pictures and Soread-2 M. Lemon Tree. Israel, Germany and France. Dir. Eran Riklis. 2008. Prod. Heimatfilm, MACT Productions, Eran Riklis Productions, Riva Filmproduktion, Arte France Cinéma, ZDF/Arte, Metro Communications, United King Films, Citrus Film Investors and Canal+. Omar. Palestine. Dir. Hany Abu-Assad. 2013. Prod. ZBROS. Paradise Now (Al-Jinna Alaan). Palestine, France, Germany, Netherlands and Israel. Dir. Hany Abu-Assad. 2005. Prod. Augustus Film, Lama Productions, Razor Film Produktion GmbH, Lumen Films, Arte France Cinéma, Hazazah Film, Eurimages, Filmstiftung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Hazazah Pictures, Lama Films, Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg and Nederlands Fonds voor de Film. Nation Estate. Palestine and Denmark. Dir. Larissa Sansour. 2013. Prod. Morten Revsgaard Frederiksen and Beofilm Productions ApS. Rana’s Wedding. Another Day (Al-Quds fi Youm akhar). Palestine, Netherlands and United Arab Emirates. Dir. Hany Abu-Assad. 2002. Prod. Augustus Film and Palestinian Film Foundation. The Syrian Bride. France, Germany and Israel. Dir. Eran Riklis. 2004. Prod. Eran Riklis Productions, Neue Impuls Film, MACT Productions and France Cinéma Productions.