Chronicle of a Disappearance [Segell Ikhtifa] by Dhat Productions, written and directed by Elia Suleiman, starring Elia & Nazira Suleiman (1996)
There are few things art’s better for than letting you participate in someone else’s love of life – this is a phenomenal work of art. Very little happens here. The first section, “Nazareth Personal Diary,” is composed of statically shot vignettes in the title city: women sit around, chat; men sit around, chat; a guy plays backgammon on his computer, smokes hookah; other guys fish, but mostly, sit around, chat; people are sort of working, and sometimes, when they’re at work, they’ll just sit around, smoke, maybe even chat. This is most of what everyday life is, as anyone who lives it knows, and only under exceptional circumstances does it become this:
or this
or this
or this
As with anything else, thinking about whether this is a “political” work of art or not seems tedious, as taxonomical questions are mostly interesting to taxonomists. It would be strange to think a work of art says the same thing to everyone, and stranger still to think that was something you could articulate better than the work of art does; from the other side, artists and their art and their audience are all, like everything else, part of the real world, so even if there really were nothing more to engaging with art than appreciating its aesthetic beauty, what’s more beautiful, a dead butterfly, pinned to a board, or a live one, flying around a garden? At any rate, ambivalence about the degree to which an artist could and should participate in the society around them seems to me to be the main thing being dramatized in the second part of this movie, the “Jerusalem Political Diary,” a part prefaced by a series of static shots that show the filmmaker character’s back as he reviews the footage that would become the first part of the film, which enacts for us the looking-at-yourself-as-if-you-were-someone-else function of autobiographical art, hopefully the occasion for some generative self-reflection that may or may not lead to you reentering life, something that could perhaps look or even feel like the subsequent long shot that begins the second part of the movie, where the camera finally starts moving, and we follow it down a long road as sirens siren and dramatic music plays, as if to say, okay! We’re in this shit now!
Well, in it a little more, anyways: we do get some surreal absurdist plot stuff, and the filmmaker character is at least moving around a bit, but mostly he’s ignored by the people around him, or otherwise literally unable to speak because of gratuitous microphone feedback. Watching this movie, you’d be right to think the globalization of American society means more than the ubiquity of those awesome light-wash 90s jeans: take, as another example, the group of Israeli soldiers who bust out of their siren-blaring van, guns loudly a-clanging, to all pee on the same wall with military synergy. I found it endearing how Suleiman chose to present the Israeli soldiers in this movie – primarily as comically hypermilitarized buffoons – because, as a Jew, it reminded me of what it feels like to make fun of Nazis.
The reputedly anti-fun Jewish writer Theodor Adorno once said,
To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.
and then, feeling the need to clarify, later said,
Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living — especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt put on him who was spared.
Things like mutual aid fundraiser screenings of Palestinian movies meant to combat, in whatever small way, the Israeli government’s attempted extermination of the Palestinian people, have now become part of the texture of everyday American life. I have generally admired the lucidity and immediacy of the solidarity that many people have shown with the Palestinian people, particularly given that, for decades, the place the “Israeli–Palestinian conflict” seems to have held in the popular American imagination is that of the-thing-that-is-too-complicated-for-a-regular-person-to-have-an-opinion-about; if I have felt strange admiring people for taking the side of the people being exterminated, it’s only because I’ve seen so many others failing to. What is complicated about the pictures above? Here’s more, with humans this time:
I am forcing you to careen between levity and seeing the most horrifying shit that can happen to a people, because that is the texture of everyday American life, and it has been since well before Adorno, escaping the Holocaust, came here. The only way to live while a holocaust is happening is to ignore it, which is why holocausts keep happening. That’s what I understand Adorno to be saying in his revision of the Auschwitz poetry line: it’s not that you can’t write poems after Auschwitz happened; it’s that you can’t write poems like Auschwitz didn’t happen.
When I saw Chronicle of a Disappearance on a Tuesday night in January, I felt an immediate identification with Suleiman the artist and the version of himself he depicted in this movie, as I aspire to his tremendous love for everyday existence. But then I started thinking about writing my review, and I, with everything but my body, groaned: I started thinking about how annoying it would be to try and articulate this identification for those still mired in internet politics, dreading all that tedious and anticipatorily defensive intellectual footwork I would feel that I, as a Jewish-American writer writing about a Palestinian filmmaker, would be expected to include, as if I’m the one that should have to explain why my default relationship to another human being is solidarity, and why I find it easier to relate to someone else on the basis of the lives we’ve chosen to live, rather than the histories we were thrown into: what we do with our time says as much about the things we do as it does about us, which is why I spend a lot of my time making art, sitting around, smoking, and chatting, and none of my time volunteering for the IDF.
If we are not for each other, who will be? And as for the question of whether life goes on, go watch the movie.~
