Toward a creative space;

Comparing Elia Suleiman’s Liberation Cinema with Brechtian Epic

theatre

Submitted by

Muhammed Sagid kk

19hcma21
Space is an essential part of drama and cinema.To excerscise the creativity within a given space
is the biggest challenge for any dramatist or directors.Brethold Brecht was one of the
prominent figures who excercised new method in developing the creativity of drama
questioning Aristrotilian Tragic style and Stanislavski’s natural performance technique and by
giving much importance for audiences.Later his ideas were transformed to other visual media
including film.

The liberation cinema, a concept which was mainly relate to the cinema which breaks all
the limitations which regulate cinema and make it under the commodity and consumption, had
been discussed among the world intellectuals especially the post Marxian like Adorno, Walter
Benjamin.

This work tries to compare the films of Elia Sulaiman, the famous Palestine director,
who directed three movies and many short films, with the theatrical plays of Brethold Brecht in
the sense that how these criticize the paradigm of movies and dramas and develop it into a new
creative, anti narrative level likel.

EPIC THEATER TO LIBERATION CINEMA

French directors such as Jean Luc Godard and Jean-Marie Straub have transposed more specific
Brechtian ideas into filmic terms: rethinking the question of pleasure and spectacle, developing
filmic modes of spectatorial distanciation, and exploring the politics of representation in the
cinema.

Most theorists concieve that films are formulaic and do not encourage active,
intelligent, or imaginative participation. Contrary to that Gilles Deleuze’s cinema books
suggested the idea of liberation cinema. Deleuze rely upon the famous intellect Walter
Benjamin for his views on liberation cinema. This idea that film can provide a social
commentary and thus be meaningful, as opposed to mindless imitation,emerges from Benjamin
who celebrates the potential of films to screen ideas.
 The thearetical experiments of French directors and theoretical concepts of Delueze
lead to the development of liberation cinema especially within third world like Ousmane
Sembène (Senegal), Med Hondo (Mauritania), Kidlat Tahimik (Philippines), Fernando Solanas
(Argentina), Mustafa Abu Ali,Elia Suleiman (Palestine), Sara Gómez (Cuba) and Glauber Rocha
(Brazil).

FEATURTES OF EPIC THEATER AND LIBERATION CINEMA

Brecht's earliest work was heavily influenced by German Expressionism, but it was his
preoccupation with Marxism and the idea that man and society could be intellectually analyzed
that led him to develop his theory of "epic theatre." Brecht believed that theatre should appeal
not to the spectator's feelings but to his reason. While still providing entertainment, it should
be strongly didactic and capable of provoking social change. In the Realistic theatre of illusion,
he argued, the spectator tended to identify with the characters on stage and become
emotionally involved with them rather than being stirred to think about his own life. To
encourage the audience to adopt a more critical attitude to what was happening on stage,
Brecht developed his Verfremdungs-effekt (alienation effect)i.e., the use of anti-illusive
techniques to remind the spectators that they are in a theatre watching an enactment of reality
instead of reality itself.The concept of alienation influenced liberation cinema for its theoretical
framework.

For Brecht the theater was a medium of political struggle Brecht believed that theatre
would be at the forefront of social and political life, the privileged scene of the social life of the
period. It would represent the political consciousness of the age and its social conditions.in this
sense the theater should be dialectical which should negate all the prominent stagmatic
mechine.1

Gillez Deleuze in his views on liberation cinema shares the same concept as he suggest
that the cinema should promote becoming, because a stagnant cinema was used as a way to
apply the capitalism or as a “capital machine” thus he suggested that cinema should always be

1
(Emin 2015)
in process or in becoming. in modern cinema, there is a work outside the idea, an infinite and
indistinct circuit between image and the brain that will consider indistinctness, ambiguity, and
the object in its pure optical and sonorous logic, confronting us with a gap in our thinking, the
“impower” of our thought, producing then a new “image of thought”.

For Deleuze, art is ‘always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes
beyond the matter of any livable or lived experience. It is a process’. Analytical readings are far
from exhausting the film’s affective catalytic potential for becoming. So, our encounter with
film and our theoretical exploration of it offer much more than a copy of a copy of a copy (of a
copy).2

We can sum up that the main features of Epic drama and liberation cinema are

 It gives a special space for the specters as an analyzer

 It challenges the stereotypes or stagnant images
 It is a continuous becoming, or it is a process not a result.

ELIA SULAIMAN ON LIBERATION FILMS

Suleiman is a globally renowned Palestinian film director. He has directed 3 films and several
short features. Elia Suleiman is particularly famous for his distinct film style that uses dark
humor, tableaux sketches, slapstick-comedy, and deadpan anti-narratives. These techniques
are very different from Palestinian Cinema traditions of realism and documentary aesthetics
and much more related to the practices of avant-garde and art-cinema of Buster Keaton,
Jacques Tati, Robert Bresson, Jim Jarmusch and Jean Luc-Godard. Elia sulaiman had a different
concept on Israeli invasion on Palestine as he states in an interview

“The occupation of 1948, is no longer militaristic, there’s no longer a military government with
tanks and soldiers in the streets and all that. It’s become psychological, economic, denial of

2
(Powell 2007)
rights, humiliation in all its forms, and it’s manifested in the film [Divine Intervention] by the
ghetto atmosphere. [...] In the 1967 territories, obviously, the occupation is overt” 3

According to Elia sulaiman the intellectual occupation is the main problem in nowadays;
the Palestinian cinema which exposes the sufferings of the refugee remains constant and aims
at the Western spectators. Thus the Palestinian cinema makes the way for inferiority conscious
among the Palestinian and becomes a way for intellectual occupation.For Elia sulieman
liberation cinema was a way to overcome this intellectual subordination.

We could trace some of the Brechtian ideas within Elia Suleiman’s comment as for
Brecht one of the major intention of epic theater was to save people from intellectual
passivism.

COMPARING ELIA SULIEMAN’S CINEMAS AND BRECHTIAN DRAMAS

Here we discusse about the key features of Elia Suleiman’s cinema that resembles Brechtian
epic theater.For that we stresses on how they view the role of spectors and role of films in
society.We try to compare these features of Suleiman’s cinema with that of Brechtian dramas
inorder to find the similiarities and differences.

Position of spectators

Brecht attributes a negative, destructive function to traditional drama saying it is alienating the
audience from beiing creatively engaging with the space. Traditional drama thwarts the
illusionism of the stage, of inhibiting the audience's traditional propensity to emotional
identification with the dramatic characters and situation leaving them to an emotional
passivity, to an attitude of unquestioning acceptance of the world portrayed and of man's
station in it. Brecht’s aim is to promote an attitude of rational activism, an ability to see that
things could be other than they are.

3
(Abu-Remaileh n.d.)
 Quite seemingly In Elia Suleiman’s film the spectators achieve a position of analyzers.
About which Refqa Abu-Remaileh says

Suleiman’s films to demonstrate the blurring of documentary and fiction genres and a
marked resistance to storytelling, which challenge our expectations as Suleiman’s films to
demonstrate the blurring of documentary and fiction genres and a marked resistance to
storytelling, which challenge our expectations as viewers. We are not presented with a silver
platter of images and told “this is Palestine, and these are the Palestinians.” In fact, we as
viewers need to fill the gap between the image, the content of what is recounted, and shuffle
through possible meanings.4

In Elia Suleiman’s work the spectators work as an analyzer thus they achieve a
subjective role rather than the objective viewer. For that his films denies any kind of intimacy
with the characters by showing them only through long and very obscure shots. In Divine
Intervention (2002), checkpoints are in very long-shots (time and length) denying the urgency,
and climatic nature of checkpoints that are aesthetically narrated throughout Palestinian
Cinema - the audience distance from the action exclude it from having any unconscious
intimacy with the spectacle and force it to have conscious solidarity despite of the visuals.

Breaking the stereotypes

The contemporary Palestinian cinemas are following a stereotype in making films .in another
word their films are stagnant and refuses the becoming of art films The Cinematic foundations
ultimately regulate and paralyze the becoming-of Palestinian Cinema/Life, more or less like the
occupation. It remains immobilized itself by the weight of being a self-ethnography, the
explaining of themselves to others about their suffering. In trying to narrative their existence
and provide narratives that counter their associations with violence/terrorism, they have risked
speaking from a place that delimit them to the boxes of colonial social-relation, essentially the
victimhood.5

4
(Abu-Remaileh n.d.)
5
(Dabash 2001)
 Elia sulaiman break this stereotype by using the humor while expressing the
suffering of Palestinians. In one of the scenes in Suleiman’s Chronicles of Disappearance (1996),
two Israeli police officers raid the main character E.S’ (Played by Elia Suleiman as himself)
house. This is a common occurrence in Jerusalem parts of Palestine where Palestinian activists
are institutionally harassed .In this particular scene the police just walk around the house
looking for E.S, even though he is always right in front of their eyes. But they ignore his very
existence by not noticing him. Later in the scene when they list names of objects found - E.S’
character is placed third as ‘Walking Pajamas’ These humors break the stereotype of
Palestinian cinema because most of the Palestinian cinemas shoot the suffering of Palestinian
and tries to convey it to the western spectators. These types of film were called as information
cinemas. The capitalism is using such emotional information cinema for their capital needs.
Thus Elia sulaiman breaks this in order to poiticalize the Palestinian cinema and to maintain its
becoming.

The use of dark humour inorder to break the stagnent steriotype could be traced back
to Brechtian dramas.Unlike many communist writers, who tend toward the tragic dimension of
revolutionary violence, sacrifice, and social injustice, Brecht saw the transgressive power of
humor as a weapon in his arsenal of theatrical forms; he had a good sense of humor and used it
to convey a serious message about the need to intervene and change the world. In his case,
then, not everything comical leads to laughter, and even the comical can be taken seriously.6

Galy Gay in Man Equals Man is the most extreme example of this Brechtian dark humour. He
has no individual personality but conforms to the changing circumstances around him because
he simply cannot say no. he alters his identity without worries and pain. That Brecht wrote
several versions of the play with signifi cantly different views on the import of this chameleon's
transformation from a lazy fisherman to a soldier, demonstrates how such a comic figure is
dependent on context and the audience's contextual knowledge.Galy Gay resembles Forest
Gumb whose lack of identity is not self problem but rather a social critique.

6
(Silberman 2012)
CONCLUSION

In short Elia suleiman and Brecht gave an analytical position for viewers. Consumptional nature
of visual media and its (anti-)politics only creates a stagnant reproduction without any relevant
action. This consumptional nature of visual media and its (anti-)politics only creates a stagnant
reproduction without any relevant action. Liberation cinema and epic theater conventions
trouble the relationship between visuality and spectors. Suleiman and Brecht use dark humor
to create a new radical sensibility outside regulative convictions of visuality.

REFERENCES

Abu-Remaileh, Refqa. "Palestinian anti-narratives in the films of Elia Suleiman." arab media and society.

Dabash, hamid. Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema. london: verso, 2001.

Emin, Emini Z. "Brecht’s epic theatre." Academic Journal of Business, Administration, Law and Social
Sciences, 2015: 297-302.

Powell, Anna. Deleuze altered state and film. EDINBURG: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.

Silberman, Marc. "Bertolt Brecht, Politics, and Comedy." Social Research, 2012: 169-188.