Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- TRADITIONS IN WORLD CINEMA
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 A Chronicle of Palestinian Cinema
- 2 From Bleeding Memories to Fertile Memories
- 3 About Place and Time: The Films of Michel Khleifi
- 4 Without Place, Without Time: The Films of Rashid Masharawi
- 5 The House and its Destruction: The Films of Ali Nassar
- 6 A Dead-End: Roadblock Movies
- 7 Between Exile and Homeland: The Films of Elia Suleiman
- Conclusion
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Filmography
- Index
5 - The House and its Destruction: The Films of Ali Nassar
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- TRADITIONS IN WORLD CINEMA
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 A Chronicle of Palestinian Cinema
- 2 From Bleeding Memories to Fertile Memories
- 3 About Place and Time: The Films of Michel Khleifi
- 4 Without Place, Without Time: The Films of Rashid Masharawi
- 5 The House and its Destruction: The Films of Ali Nassar
- 6 A Dead-End: Roadblock Movies
- 7 Between Exile and Homeland: The Films of Elia Suleiman
- Conclusion
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Filmography
- Index
Summary
Ali Nassar's two films, The Milky Way (1997) and In the Ninth Month (2002), are constructed, to a great extent, along familiar lines. They may be defined as epigonic films, deriving their plots and styles from contemporary cinema and literature as well as from those of earlier periods, while simplifying and reversing them. Thus, the complex, deep, and multidimensional has become simple and flat, the implicit has become explicit, and what, in earlier films, had reflected the place and Zeitgeist has remained here unchanged, even when transferred to a different time and place.
It is precisely because of this characteristic that Nassar's films can serve to illustrate the different periods in Palestinian cinema, both those discussed previously and those to be considered in the following chapters. His films function as a useful reference point both for the examination of what has become commonplace and familiar in Palestinian films, and for the illumination of attempts to renew it.
The Milky Way was Ali Nassar's first feature film to be screened to a large audience. It combines the two types of past that feature in Khleifi and Masharawi's cinema – the memory of the relinquished land and the memory of its traumatic loss. In persistent and diverse ways it returns to the moments of trauma. Similarly, it also looks back to the golden era preceding it.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Palestinian CinemaLandscape, Trauma and Memory, pp. 119 - 133Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2008