The Kanafani Effect: Resistance and Counter-Narration in the Films of Michel Khleifi and Elia Suleiman

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out of the occupied lands, and stressed that artistic merit cannot be deemed a
virtue of ‘geography as a non-negotiable gift’ (Darwish 1977: 21): ‘Writing can’t
achieve its resistance function unless it is good writing. Bad writing which
incites, under any slogan, is no worse than the worst weapon’ (Darwish 1977:
13).
The positionality of inside/out which was more clear-cut during Kanafani’s
time, became more complex as time passed, with the ‘ongoing Nakba’, the
extended occupations of Palestinian lands, and with processes of self-imposed
exile from the inside to the manfa, and with returns from the manfa to the
inside or even to Jerusalem and the West Bank (as in the case of Suleiman).
But although Kanafani’s original categories may no longer be easily applicable,
a link continues to exist between the enacting of a presence on the land and
resistance. After the revolutionary period in the 1960s and 1970s, the manfa
retreated into a period of relative silence (except in the realm of academia
and among those who straddled both the inside and the outside, such as
Darwish) and the locus of Palestinian cultural production gradually shifted to
the inside—whether this be inside Israel or the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Each period of filmmaking has had its fate intertwined with the shifting
notion of resistance. From an idea that sprang out of the deep social and political
commitments of a Palestinian exile, Kanafani looked to the inside in search
of a true understanding of what resistance might mean. Becoming a crucial
part of the armed struggle, cultural resistance manifested as a form of militant
revolutionary practice. Beyond revolutionary politics and practice, Kanafani
also discerned a larger aesthetic potential for resistance, anticipating many of
its later post-revolutionary elements and tactics. Fiction films inside later led
the way, transforming Palestinian cinema by giving rise to the possibility of
the independent auteur, operating beyond the aesthetic and political confines
of formal institutions, while also blurring previously dominant inside/outside
dichotomies. Overtly politically affiliated artists and filmmakers were no longer
the sole standard; Khleifi and Suleiman did not align their works with any
political parties or ideologies. And in their work they would gradually transfer
responsibility for decoding and creating meanings to a spectator, inviting
them to participate in the construction of cinematic meaning, and hence, in
composing a cultural counter-narrative.
Just as resistance poets recognized the value of words, Palestinian filmmakers
inside Israel after the 1980s began to realize the potential of the moving
image, not simply to raise awareness, to inform or educate, but also to subvert,
challenge and even laugh. In Suleiman’s films, resistance is embedded
in counter-narrative strategies that mobilize the satirical, self-critical, humorous
and tragi-comic. Both Khleifi and Suleiman eschew the heroic male figure
Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 7 (2014) 190–206