30r364 boek.qxd:awards book 11 - Prince Claus Fund

Like Nazareth or Rafahby John BergerOne day I must try to draw a portrait of Elia. Drawn lines are often more precise than writtenones. And maybe I should draw him in Nazareth, Palestine, where he was born, for if ever a manbelonged to a place and its destiny, he does.This perhaps makes him sound solemn; on the contrary, he’s a joker. Not an after-dinner one.A clown.Like many clowns he finds life funny, not because of its comedy, but because of theindecent way in which disappointment follows disappointment, until the reel finishes and theword END appears.Clowns appear innocent and this is their disguise; in fact they are acute observers ofexperience, who slyly, surreptitiously, share with us, their public, a common sense of loss in faceof the injustices of life. Such sharing accompanied by laughter encourages endurance and aspecial form of solidarity. This is why tyrants, and committees that love power, never tolerateclowns for very long. They are on the wrong side of the law, as made by the powerful.Listening to Elia talk, watching him perform, or following scenes he has scripted, I’m repeatedlyreminded of Buster Keaton.The two of them use, as story-tellers and performers, the same detachment, bordering onself-denigration, yet maintaining an Olympian calm, as though they had the patience not ofa life-time but of a millennium. (In their films both have a similar sense of the sky and space.)Meanwhile their detachment is implicitly, for all its calm, an accusation. It makes every formof greed look trivial.***As well as being a clown, Elia, as a filmmaker, is a contemporary poet. His poetic language ispart of his own emigrant body. It’s not a temple. He carries it with him. Opens it at night whenhe’s alone. Speaks to it shyly with its own secret words. Poetry is a way of travelling very lightwith a mother-tongue and of talking about what matters with minimal grandiloquence. Poetryno longer belongs to any centre, it belongs to the peripheries. Like Nazareth or Rafah.Lyric poetry is addressed to the sky. In a sense it is a last resort. The compulsion to composeit comes when all other actions have proved inadequate. It’s an appeal to recognise, to give avoice to something that is being ignored, that is being treated as a nothing and yet is there as abond between those within feeling distance of it. In Elia’s cinematographic poetry such feelingsnever include self-pity – the clown in him precludes this.As a poet he collects fragments and the silence that surrounds them, in the belief that theirsilence repairs and reassembles them in a whole, which is unbreakable because, as seen fromthe sky, it represents a truth. Divine Intervention (the title of one of his best films) refers not toa miracle but to this role of the sky receiving a testimony.*If we want to recognise what is happening in the world today – whether it be the current, andforeseeable, economic crisis, the so-called and fraudulent “war against terrorism”, the globalphenomenon of desperate immigration as a result of new forms of man-made poverty, or the94 2008 Prince Claus Awards