Chronicle of a Disappearance

“A neutralised angel, in my case, wingless,” Elia Suleiman says of the fictionalised self who appears throughout his oeuvre, likening his double to the dispirited angels observing post-war Berlin in Wim Wenders’ Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire, 1987).¹ In his first feature, Segell ikhtifa (Chronicle of a Disappearance, 1996), the then 37-year-old expat returns from New York to Nazareth, where he witnesses the clumsy mechanics of Israel’s occupational regime close-up: hungry crowds of tourists circling sacred sites; pairs of Israeli soldiers cocking guns towards civilians. Whereas Wenders’ overseers for the most part absorb the rhythms of the city from safe viewing points, Suleiman, as a Palestinian on occupied Palestinian land, looks on with the wariness of someone who knows they are always liable to surveillance and scrutiny, to fetishistic camera flashes and arbitrary home raids. While Suleiman’s later performances in The Time That Remains (2009) and It Must Be Heaven (2019) are suffused with a greater haplessness and melancholy, here his stoic visage is still tinged with the sullenness of youth – an aura of punk defiance accentuated by his costume of dark sunglasses and black leather. 

Chronicle is the story of a homecoming, yet such a passage is no simple matter for Suleiman. The child of parents brutally displaced during the 1948 Nakba, and an artist who has long voiced resistance to the very concept of borders, Suleiman’s refusal to accept the authority of colonial geopolitics is reified by a style of filmmaking which rebuffs narrative conventions of chronology and catharsis. Chronicle is Suleiman’s most unruly feature: a loose composition of vignettes involving Suleiman, members of his family, and fictional characters including Adan (Ula Tabari), a revolutionary trying to rent a flat in East Jerusalem who Suleiman never quite meets. While the film initially presents itself in the mode of an autobiographical documentary, as a ‘Personal Diary,’ this claim is itself a booby trap. “Nothing was documentary at all,” Suleiman has said, “Everything was completely scripted.”² A torpor of ambivalence courses throughout the film as Suleiman’s homecoming proves both necessary and impossible, insofar as his overpoliced, commodified surroundings manifest Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of the unhomely throb of colonised land.³ At one point, the fictional Suleiman settles near Jerusalem’s airport, apparently anticipating exile or escape. Meanwhile, with his oblique charisma, Suleiman at once offers his audience intimacy and questions their entitlement to it. “There is always an Orientalist expectation from audiences in places like Europe and the States,” says Suleiman. “They come expecting to learn a little history of the place. When these people see the film, they are quite shocked that they have to exert mental energy and become emotionally involved.”⁴ 

The film’s segments, in which people cook, fish, gossip, bicker, or snore, often feel more like tense tableaux vivants than scenes per se. Boredom is a generative site for Suleiman, who describes his own creative process as a matter of “wandering around and staring, going through certain accidents that produce a tickle or potential static.”⁵ His characters likewise reside in states of lingering, as they seemingly wait for something inarticulable to happen. At several points, Suleiman sits with the proprietor of a souvenir shop selling vials of holy water and camel statuettes, smoking and watching passersby without speaking. Elsewhere, he paces his house softly, as if sleepwalking. As the late critic Gary Indiana writes of Chronicle in an excellent piece for Artforum, “Cigarettes function throughout as expressive time-wasters, lit by various characters during long static stretches when a person walking in and out of frame figures as a major event.”⁶ Suleiman’s systematic aimlessness holds both poetry and potency in the context of Israel’s occupational regime, which demands constant explanations from Palestinians about their movements on their own land. Under this repressive scrutiny, lingering becomes ‘loitering’: the crime of simply being somewhere the state does not want one to be. 

Suleiman’s use of cyclical gags further dishevels any semblance of narrative progress. Many critics have read Suleiman’s humour within the tradition of silent slapstick, particularly the work of Buster Keaton, whose films Suleiman notably had not seen when he made Chronicle. For Suleiman, slapstick functions as commentary on the repetitious banality of state power. As soldiers chase their tails or piss in unison, Suleiman reveals the degree to which borders are continually upheld through pathetic, performative displays of force. “Silence has a very political territory,” Suleiman has said of his role as a mute witness to the crimes of occupation. “If you’re silent so many times, it’s so destabilising to power structures. They would beat you in order to talk.”⁷ Suleiman further values the participatory quality of silence. As, unlike speech, “silence has no centre”; it is engaged by the audience as much as by the film’s bemused, bored, and grieving figures.⁸ Suleiman’s inclusive quietude meanwhile embosses the paranoid speech of Jerusalem’s oafish soldiers, placing it in gaudy relief. After two of them burst into a pyjama-draped Suleiman’s home, they report the contents of his loungeroom via walkie talkie: “two front doors, four doors, four windows, a balcony, a fan, a phone, a picture with a hen, four seats… Four old wooden chairs, a computer, a stereo, a desk, two wicker armchairs, a Japanese textbook.” The frenzied language of occupation is irrelevant to Suleiman, whose unperturbed silence forms a kind of metaphysical armour. As the French Resistance member and silent art maestro Marcel Marceau once said, “Mime can’t translate lies. For lies, words are adequate.”⁹

As has been represented in the work of filmmakers Heiny Srour, Jocelyne Saab, and Azza El-Hassan, women have always played vital roles in the armed resistance for Palestinian liberation. As in his second feature, Yadon ilaheyya (Divine Intervention, 2002), which features actress Manal Khader as a masterful flying warrior, Suleiman’s own politics of tight-lipped refusal in Chronicle is complemented by a more vociferous project of resistance pursued by his feminine foil, Adan. In the film’s second section, ‘Jerusalem: Political Diary’, she hijacks an IOF communication device, which she uses to transmit fruitless instructions to authorities, leading them into a wild ouroboric chase. One of the most explosive scenes in Suleiman’s body of work, the climax of this covert uprising is rousingly set to Leonard Cohen’s ‘First We Take Manhattan’. “They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom / For trying to change the system from within,” sings Cohen. “I’m coming now, I’m coming to reward them / First we take Manhattan, then / We take Berlin.” Here, Cohen’s song serves as a rousing anthem for a new generation of Palestinian liberationists. 23 years earlier, Cohen had performed nearby in the Sinai Desert, entertaining Israeli troops during the Yom Kippur War. This element of political frisson is no accident, but rather a sign of Suleiman’s willingness to submerge his audience in experiences of ambiguity and unease. 

“Yes, it’s a landscape of despair,” Suleiman has said of invaded Palestine, “but if it’s truly despair, why do I make a film in it?”¹⁰ There is a running joke throughout Suleiman’s work: that he is making a movie about peace. Perhaps it’s not quite a joke. The refrain first arose in Chronicle, when the host of a conference introduces Suleiman’s upcoming project – and it would later mobilise Suleiman’s world-roving journey in It Must Be Heaven, in which Suleiman seeks international funding for a new film purportedly about ‘peace in the Middle East.’ The cliché is another mask: a way for the director to become strategically legible while protecting himself from interrogation. The simplicity of the phrase is absurd, yet for Suleiman the absurd is always sculpted from truth. Suleiman’s films are about peace insofar as they uphold the unimpeachable fact of Palestinian sovereignty, crystallised in Chronicle’s final image: Suleiman’s elderly parents, Nazira Suleiman and Fuad Suleiman, recline on their couches in front of the television. Before disintegrating to static, the evening programming gives way to a nationalist display: a row of Israeli flags shivering on-screen, their blue oversaturated to sickly effect. When the camera shifts position, however, it reveals the Suleimans fast asleep. Their slumber remains unruffled by the impotent spectacle. 

Segell ikhtifa/Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996 Palestine 88 mins)

Prod: Assaf Amir, Elia Suleiman Dir, Scr: Elia Suleiman Phot: Marc-André Batigne Ed: Anna Ruiz Prod Des: Samir Srouji, Hans Ter Elst Mus: Abed Azrie Cos Des: Mira Awad

Cast: Elia Suleiman, Ula Tabari, Nazira Suleiman, Fuad Suleiman, Jamel Daher, Juliet Mazzawi, Fawaz Eilemi, Leonid Alexeenko, Iaha Mouhamad

Endnotes