Refusing to Witness, Insisting on Remembering: The Past and Present Of The Nakba in The Time That Remains (Copy)
Famed Palestinian director Elia Suleiman opens his third feature-length film with an ominous invitation to the unfamiliar. An unnamed, silent man in the backseat accompanies a rather talkative Israeli driver, Menashe, on a road trip away from an airport. As they glide along the highway, an unusually colossal storm gradually engulfs the surrounding landscape. In a combination of astonishment and frustration, Menashe frantically exclaims, “Do you know where we are anymore?! I don’t!” His anger cools into a sobering fear, as he comes to terms with the utter unfamiliarity of the misty land surrounding him, and the opening scene fades to black. The title of the film solemnly reveals itself: The Time That Remains: Chronicle of a Present Absentee.
As Suleiman promises his audience, The Time That Remains certainly does venture into territory invisible to many. Following a semi-biographical account of Suleiman’s family from the Nakba to the present-day, the film explores Suleiman’s family and upbringing while portraying the changing landscape of Palestine. It actively calls attention to what Gil Hochberg refers to as “visible invisibility,” “the failure of the Nakba to become fully visible and accountable within Israeli texts.” However, unlike many other examples of historical filmmaking, Suleiman’s project goes beyond making the Nakba “fully visible.” By subverting the global humanitarian gaze and the Israeli gaze through absurdist humor, The Time That Remains refuses to “witness” the Nakba as one of many past events neatly encompassed within a historical archive. Abandoning the project of representing history as factual past, Suleiman instead tells a story of an indigenous Palestinian past and present in a process of collective mourning.
Because the discipline of history hinges on archives shaped through power, the Nakba joins a lengthy list of manufactured invisibilities, or as Michel-Rolph Trouillot calls them, silences. In Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Trouillot critiques the “storage model” of the historical discipline, where archives represent fixed repositories of the past. To Trouillot, archives cannot be separated from a knowledge-production process that creates silences “at four crucial moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources), the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives), the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives), and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance).” In the context of the Israeli occupation, the foundational myth of bringing together “a land without a people” and “a people without a land” erases the Palestinian existence. Therefore, reconstructing the Nakba as “history” relies on invisible evidence, silenced through the making, assembling, retrieving, and retrospective examination of Israeli archives.
By the rules of history, in order to gain access to archival “fact” and “prove” the Nakba as an event of the past, Palestinians must undertake the impossible task of bearing witness to their own erasure of reality. Marc Nichanian powerfully illustrates the shameful violence of this process when he reflects on the “impossibility of testifying and of proving” in the context of the Armenian Catastrophe. In the cases of creating both the modern Turkish and Israeli nation-states, ethnic cleansing and genocide actively silence Palestinians and Armenians through the destruction of fact. In this case, the only “fact” of both the Palestinian Nakba and the Armenian Catastrophe is the very impossibility of fact, “the silence of he who will never speak, never again, of his own destruction.” Testimonies attempting to join the realm of archival “fact” only reiterate the violence of genocide by calling attention to the archival silences themselves.
In response to the silences of archival history and the inevitable violence of witnessing, Elia Suleiman turns away from the realm of “history” and simply engages instead with “story.” The value of a silenced history that reaffirms violence can easily be brought to question by turning to indigenous storytelling that engages with the past, present, and future. Linda Tuhiwai Smith reminds readers of her book, Decolonizing Methodologies, that “History is about power... In this sense, it is not important for indigenous peoples because a thousand accounts of the ‘truth’ will not alter the ‘fact’ that indigenous peoples are still marginal…” Therefore, Elia Suleiman and other indigenous storytellers engaging with the past have the option of rejecting entirely the historical methodology of reconstructing the past as fact. Suleiman himself claims that, “When I make a film, I do not have any impulse, when I'm composing an image, of raising the consciousness of the world about Palestine.” Though historians may attempt to read against the grain of archives to recover silenced facts, and collectors of oral testimony may attest to the facts of their witnesses, Elia Suleiman engages in an entirely different project. Knowing his own marginality as a Palestinian, Suleiman opts instead to simply tell a story.
Suleiman’s story, The Time That Remains, challenges dominant official Israeli history by comically pointing to its inability to see the Nakba. In her work on Palestinian visual challenges to Israeli occupiers, Gil Hochberg highlights an Israeli “dominant visual field,” which “not unlike that of other settler colonial societies, is created guarded, and sustained through various state-governed blinding mechanisms that conceal and erase the history of past inhabitants’ relationship to the land.” Not unlike Suleiman’s other films, there is a mocking undercurrent to be found throughout The Time That Remains. A recurring scene in the film, for example, depicts Israeli soldiers passing by Elia’s father and his friend as they pretend to fish, secretly plotting out an insurrection. The soldiers sheepishly ask them what they are up to, and the men answer that they are simply fishing. The humor amplifies itself through the deadpan repetition of the scene, showcasing the soldier’s incompetence. Similarly, there is a drawn-out scene of the film where a Palestinian man casually takes the trash out as a disproportionately large tank follows his every move. Making the actions of individual Palestinians humorously incomprehensible to incompetent state apparatuses, Suleiman wittily points to the invisibility of Palestinians in Israeli dominant visual fields.
Similarly, Suleiman also subverts the expectations of the global humanitarian audience who are constantly subjected to images of Palestinian victimhood. For a film about the Nakba, there are no explicit depictions of violence or torture in the Israeli invasion. As Hochberg notes in her analysis of Suleiman’s prior two films, Chronicle of a Disappearance and Divine Intervention, Suleiman “deliberately refuses” to “represent the unrepresentable.” Similarly, he refuses to acquiesce to the overdetermined image of the Palestinian victim. Rather than reproduce the all-too-familiar spectacle of war for an audience’s consumption, Suleiman deliberately does away with the blacks and greys of war. In its place, Suleiman allows for the flourishing of warm and vibrant pinks, light blues, and yellows. Rather than beautify violence, the off-puttingly pretty mise-en-scene of the film becomes especially jarring when juxtaposed against the familiar images of war cultivated for humanitarian consumption.
However, The Time That Remains not only engages with the expectations of Israeli and global audiences—it is also cognizant of its indigenous audience through its reconstruction of memory and engagement with nostalgia. By reaching into his father’s diaries for inspiration, Suleiman paints the picture of old Nazareth with an endearing touch. Classic Arabic tunes of Fairuz and Abdel Halim Hafez are interlaced within the film’s soundtrack, engaging with nostalgic sounds of the past to accompany the film’s imagery. Suleiman also taps into his own childhood memories, evoking scenes from an Israeli elementary school, family dinner tables, and even the mournful death of former Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. Evidently, Suleiman does not direct The Time That Remains exclusively for the eyes of strangers—he is also inviting fellow Palestinians to peer into the windows of memory with him.
Crucially though, Elia Suleiman recognizes his engagement with the past as coming out of a present moment; by concluding The Time That Remains with a final act taking place in present-day Nazareth and Ramallah, he bridges the discontinuity between the past and the present. The film’s last act takes a jarring turn away from the pretty nostalgia of the first two acts, holding a familiar yet markedly changed mise-en-scene. Suleiman and his mother have both grown significantly—his mother now lives with strangers, housekeepers tending to a household now emptied of most of its former inhabitants. Yet while Nazareth and Ramallah might have changed, the Nakba lives on in the present: as Israeli soldiers command a young woman to go home, she brazenly responds, “Me go home? You should all go home!” Here, the moment of Israeli occupation ceases to simply remain an “event” of the past, “to be treated as a foreign country steeped in its particular institutions, culture and forms of thought.” In the face of damning discontinuities between past and present in Western historicism, Suleiman’s film asserts an inseparable continuity between the Palestine of his father and the Palestine he has grown to know.
By connecting the past to the present in The Time That Remains through memory, Suleiman chooses to make his film a conduit for mourning rather than a means of “representing” the past. When Suleiman claims that he is disinterested in “raising the global consciousness about Palestine,” he affirms Marc Nichanian’s differentiation between mourning and “calling for justice.” In his analysis of Zabel Yessayan’s In the Ruins, Nichanian argues that Yessayan’s engagement with the Catastrophe did not arise from a need to appeal to global justice. According to Nichanian, “These calls for justice could not be of any use in the end since they were also appealing to humane sentiment. They had but one effect: to delay mourning once again, to put it off indefinitely.” Instead, Yessayan refuses to delay mourning, creating a work of “art as mourning.” Similarly, Suleiman’s engagement with the changing landscape of Nazareth strikes a mournful tone, if accompanied by his trademark sharp humor. There are two particularly mournful sequences towards the film’s final act: the solemn death of Suleiman’s father, and Suleiman’s elderly mother staring at Nazareth from a balcony as fireworks explode behind her; the film even concludes with the melancholic words “To the memory of my mother and father.” Evidently, it is no coincidence that Suleiman refuses to testify while also insisting on mourning.
Nevertheless, the distinction between witnessing the past through representing it as fact, and creating a semi-fictional story of mourning, cannot be reduced to a question of film as the medium of storytelling. Recalling Trouillot and Nichanian’s analyses of archive and testimony, the silences in the “production of history” are not simply limited to the discipline of history. In fact, many period piece films attempt to reconstruct the past “as it was” in order for its audience to bear witness to it as a fact. For example, the success of the 1919 American silent film Ravished Armenia hinged as much on its sensationalistic depiction of the Armenian Catastrophe as it did on its claim of authentic testimony. As Sevané Garibian highlights, the film’s publicity campaign especially emphasized the oral testimony of Aurora Mardiganian as a foundation for its text. Ravished Armenia itself embodies the workings of historicism: it re-enacts the violence of demanding testimony in order to allow its audience to “witness,” and even consume, the Armenian Catastrophe as an event of the past. Therefore, contrasting “film” with “archive” may not be the most productive method of recognizing how The Time That Remains uniquely approaches the past.
Rather, The Time That Remains “mourns” as opposed to “witnesses,” not because of its nature as a film, but because it makes no claim to a universal factuality of “the past.” Since it rejects the limited domain of proof, the film liberates itself from the need to testify from within Trouillot’s silences. The silences of the Nakba are simply inevitable, and the indigenous Palestinian remains “marginal” in the settler-colonial framework of the Israeli occupation. Rather than validating the need for proof through testimony and delaying the need to mourn, Suleiman simply mourns. It no longer makes a difference whether or not Israeli or global audiences suddenly recognize or witness the Nakba—what matters more to Suleiman is his ability to mourn with his silenced indigenous audiences, even if they exist beyond the locality of Palestine. Instead of “raising the global consciousness about Palestine” as a matter of fact, Suleiman hopes that “the spectator feels an identification to the story of Palestine,” even if that spectator is “Uruguayan.” Seeking fellow silenced mourners across borders, Suleiman remains unbound by the burden of “proving” the Nakba.
In the words of Walter Benjamin, “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” In creating The Time That Remains, Elia Suleiman recognized a moment of danger: that of an Israeli driver and a silenced Palestinian passenger engulfed by a storm, as they forget where they are and how they got there. Suleiman’s refusal to testify to the Nakba “as fact” by subverting overdetermined narratives coming out of Israeli audiences and humanitarian concerns coincides with his insistence on mourning. Seizing hold of his memories and his father’s memories, Suleiman not only mourns the Nakba, but the relegation of the Nakba to a distant moment of the past entirely severed from the present.
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