ABSTRACT
Palestinian cinema is only partly a cinema made by Palestinians, but is to a large extent a cinema which was first and foremost preoccupied by the question of the invaded Palestine, the subsequent resistance and the issue of Palestinian self-representation. It is hardly surprising that Arab Palestinians, due to the political circumstances, did not make any use of the audio-visual media before late 1960s. Until then, the representation (and / or misrepresentation) of Palestine and its people was left to others. At the end of the nineteenth century Palestine was one of the first places in the so-called ‘Orient’ to arouse the interest of Lumière’s and Edison’s cameramen, who were eager to bring home exotic footage from the ‘Holy Land’. As a whole, the early silent period in Palestine was dominated (just as in other Arab countries) by newsreels, travelogues and documentaries exclusively shot by foreigners (Shohat 1989: 15). The first ‘native’ film was not produced by Arabs, however, but by Jewish-Ashkenazi immigrants. It was entitled Haseret Harishon Shel Palestina / The First Film of Palestine (1911) and was (most likely) directed by Moshe Rosenberg. Other Jewish newsreels and documentaries followed, but until the early 1960s these films remained a synonym for Zionist propaganda (Shohat 1989: 18), aiming to represent the Holy Land as a desert made to bloom by its Jewish settlers and confirm the thesis of ‘a land without people for a people without land’. Arab Palestinians, if they were to appear in that scenery, represented nothing more than uncivilized nomadic troublemakers. In the Arab world and particularly in Egypt (which developed the first Arab film industry) the Palestinian question became part of two competing anti-colonial discourses during the 1930s: secular nationalist and Muslim fundamentalist. However, it is only after the proclamation of the Jewish state in 1948 and the subsequent flight of more than 900,000 Palestinians that commercial Egyptian cinema produced its first full-length fiction touching the issue, Fatat Min Filastin / A Girl from Palestine (1948) by Mahmud zu-lFiqar. During the 1960s, before and after the Arab débâcle in 1967, other Arab countries (such as Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Algeria and Tunisia) followed the Egyptian example and produced about a hundred documentaries and fiction films tackling the occupation or dealing in general with Palestine (al-‘Audat 1987: 104). It was the atmosphere of pan-Arab solidarity prevailing in the 1960s and 1970s that supported this productivity. Some of these solidarity films were highly acclaimed within and even outside the Arab world, including the three Syrian public productions: Kafr Kassem (1974) by the Lebanese Borhane Alaouié, al-Sikkin / The Knife (1971) by the Syrian Khaled Hamada and al-Makhdu‘un / The Duped (1973) by the Egyptian Taufiq Salih.
