The Gate of the Sun has of Yousry Nasrallah
Godard was saying to a character in his latest film, "Notre Musique" in 1948 the Palestinians have moved out of fiction and entered in the documentary. By this formula, it meant the loss of the place for them also equivalent to the loss of the sense of narrative. Their story exploded could no longer be seized by the news images of the television endlessly reproduced the same chaos, the same repetitive images of death and destruction. With "The Gate of the Sun," Nasrallah Yousri just return them somehow lost the power of fiction, by embodying the place of loss by making flesh and life in the collective memory. It's sort of the origins of the film, the film that restores the original image. A film by designating the place of loss allows the story started, and the characters live a multiplicity of parallel stories, which intertwine, intersect and overlap, thus forming an epic and tragic one rare density and visual narrative.
Transmuting filmic narrative fiction
The film is an adaptation of the eponymous novel by Elias Khoury, who is the epic of the Palestinian exodus. The narrative device the novel and the film is to stage in Palestinian history through the story that in fact Dr. Khalil, the character narrator, Younis representing the figure of the Palestinian resistance in the first hour, however, fell into a coma following a cerebral embolism. Dr. Khalil tries to keep it alive by telling his whole story and that of Palestine. In the book and the film is the story told in a recumbent figure who must thus reviving the memory. The therapeutic aim is common to the novel and film: the setting of the story can breathe life into a story that is dying more than pale and gaunt icon of dense and tragic history of the Palestinians.
However, the structure of the novel and film is different. In the novel, it's bursts of thoughts running through the consciousness of Khalil, the narrator character, and in which collide and intertwine both his personal history and that of Younis and a multiplicity other tragic stories and other paths of exodus and exile of Palestinians. In the novel, the bursting of the story is also fragmented and erupted in Palestinian history. The beauty of Elias Khoury's novel is that it replaces the History of Palestine stories multiple, fragmented and sprawling Palestinians. The unique voice of the main narrator, often leaves room for a kind of polyphony, the characters speaking directly through the voice of Khalil, become transparent. Each story recounts a moment in the Palestinian tragedy, the expulsion of Galilee, through the defeat of Arab troops, the war in Lebanon, etc.. But there, in the novel, no concern for historical reconstruction of the facts, there is only the part of Elias Khoury, a willingness to tell his characters the unthinkable event that none of those who lived it could not understand, and recurring form of mental images and rehashing of the same thought.
The narrative construction of the film is much more structured. Yousry Nasrallah has focused the story around the two main characters of the novel, namely Younis and Dr. Khalil. The construction of the film into two parts corresponds to a cinematographic technique. There was tight story that focuses around two main stories, which speak of two different periods of Palestinian history, the first articulated around Exodus, the second round of the Palestinian diaspora in Lebanon. If the main concern of Elias Khoury is to give a voice to those who have no voice, to gather as much Palestinian stories and put them into a narrative, the filmmaker's desire is to embody, through images, two trajectories representative of Palestinian history.
Transmuting filmic narrative fiction
The film is an adaptation of the eponymous novel by Elias Khoury, who is the epic of the Palestinian exodus. The narrative device the novel and the film is to stage in Palestinian history through the story that in fact Dr. Khalil, the character narrator, Younis representing the figure of the Palestinian resistance in the first hour, however, fell into a coma following a cerebral embolism. Dr. Khalil tries to keep it alive by telling his whole story and that of Palestine. In the book and the film is the story told in a recumbent figure who must thus reviving the memory. The therapeutic aim is common to the novel and film: the setting of the story can breathe life into a story that is dying more than pale and gaunt icon of dense and tragic history of the Palestinians.
However, the structure of the novel and film is different. In the novel, it's bursts of thoughts running through the consciousness of Khalil, the narrator character, and in which collide and intertwine both his personal history and that of Younis and a multiplicity other tragic stories and other paths of exodus and exile of Palestinians. In the novel, the bursting of the story is also fragmented and erupted in Palestinian history. The beauty of Elias Khoury's novel is that it replaces the History of Palestine stories multiple, fragmented and sprawling Palestinians. The unique voice of the main narrator, often leaves room for a kind of polyphony, the characters speaking directly through the voice of Khalil, become transparent. Each story recounts a moment in the Palestinian tragedy, the expulsion of Galilee, through the defeat of Arab troops, the war in Lebanon, etc.. But there, in the novel, no concern for historical reconstruction of the facts, there is only the part of Elias Khoury, a willingness to tell his characters the unthinkable event that none of those who lived it could not understand, and recurring form of mental images and rehashing of the same thought.
The narrative construction of the film is much more structured. Yousry Nasrallah has focused the story around the two main characters of the novel, namely Younis and Dr. Khalil. The construction of the film into two parts corresponds to a cinematographic technique. There was tight story that focuses around two main stories, which speak of two different periods of Palestinian history, the first articulated around Exodus, the second round of the Palestinian diaspora in Lebanon. If the main concern of Elias Khoury is to give a voice to those who have no voice, to gather as much Palestinian stories and put them into a narrative, the filmmaker's desire is to embody, through images, two trajectories representative of Palestinian history.
symbolic and thickness of film history
Doctor Khalil's story begins as "everything starts in Palestine" and then we see images of beautiful splendor of a vast undulating plateau, which runs a boy. The image seems shrouded extraordinarily beautiful, almost magical. The colors of the mountain, the sun, the sort of grandiose majesty that emerges refer to any mythical grandeur. "It starts in Palestine", and opens the story with this incipit that reminds us of the tales. It is as if the verb is transformed into an image. This is the ontological force of cinema in relation to the novel: that it embodies this ghost haunting the Palestinian and Arab consciousness long ago, he shall return in full to both visual and historical. Yousry Nasrallah, while symbolically returning to the Palestinians instead of fiction, can also give their story a universal dimension, by integrating it into the universals of love, sacrifice and compassion. It avoids all the pitfalls that await the film for its political charge. Univocal discourse on Palestine, with this exaltation of martyrdom and neurotic fixation on victimization, is foiled by the depth of both symbolic and stylistic staging.
Let's start with the symbolic. What makes the fascinating beauty and grandeur of the film Yousry Nasrallah, is that two levels of narrative overlap constantly, which also correspond to two levels of narration: the realistic level, seeking to represent this story justly suffers a deficit of representation, depicting the various battles that have marked the Palestinian tragedy, the exodus from 48, to the Oslo Accords, through the formation of Fedayeen, the fratricidal war of Lebanon the defeat of the Palestinians and their new exile to Tunis, etc.. But another instance works in the narrative depth, going beyond the mere representation of Palestinian history and inserting it into a more mythical dimension, by which she joined the universals of human love, death and loss.
The first images show the density of the film mythology. Younes and Khalil, the two main characters, the two incarnations of the hero character, the first and second pure impure, eat oranges. The same scene opens on both sides of the film is that its importance in the founding of narrative economy. Its symbolic power is coupled with a striking visual beauty and departure inexplicable. These oranges will be understood in the second part of the film, are representative of Palestine, they refer symbolically to Om Hassan picked oranges in the orchard of his house now inhabited by a Jewish Lebanese, and it brings in its refugee camp in Lebanon, allegory Elementary lost ground and at the same time sacred trophy of hope in return. Om Hassan were hanging on the wall, and was formally forbidden to touch. Khalil Yunis and violate this prohibition by a feast of oranges. Both hero and eat a kind of host, they integrate in their body the body of the lost homeland. That opening scene of the movie is this image of ritual cannibalism, absorption symbolic body of the country on the face of the two heroes is not by chance. It's the same metaphor of coalescence between individual history and collective history, between the emotional and political, between myth and reality. Is the union of flesh, indivisible, characters and their lost homeland. Beyond the superposition of narrative levels between staff and the collective, so it is that attends to their merger, a union symbolically sealed image, which will continuously show, with delicacy and fury, the human tragedy experienced by the people. It can also read this image meta-diegetic level. When Khalil Younis told "come, eat Palestine before it eats us, it is an attempt to desecration of land became disembodied idea. This land transformed into a symbol stuck in the minds not only of Palestinians but the entire Arab people, too often reduced to a cause, and recovered by the discourse of conflicting ideologies, the film tries to absorb it into the very stuff of fiction. She becomes mother earth instead of being only the distant relic of the lost land. By opening this beautiful double metaphor, Nasrallah refers to both the project and its style. The film will constantly use visual metaphors and strong, to thwart all schematic and open discourse of fiction to a tragic poetry.
The body is thus the place where part of the tragedy. Younis serious on his arm in indelible letters of fire, the fateful date of the destruction of his village and the beginning of the exodus. Khalil is on his back injury indelible the war in Lebanon. Just as Selim, the showman Chahinien, replay with a surreal farce the moment the terrible massacre of Sabra and Shatila. His white hair that become black as jet in for a shampoo quack, are the same metaphor, as we discover later in the story of this atrocity that has experienced child: the bodies heaped on him and around him after the massacre, the paramedics came to cover white lime to mask their stench, and then they covered muck. This is not the killing that we see but shifted its reproduction, pictorial, metaphorical.
superimposed records is also metaphorical and realistic by adding some kind of iconographic images. In many moments of the story, the hero of the film acquire the status of icons. Often these scenes strongly emphasized by the filmmaker, at key moments of his representation of Palestinian history. It was so during the scene where Nahila, female heroine of the first part of the film, followed by all other villagers refused to take refuge in Lebanon and decided to return to Dir al-Asad, the village where they found refuge after the bombing and destruction of their houses in Ain Zeitoun. The director first filmed the general plan of the crowd advancing column in the desert way back, then a closer shot, we see Nahila brandishing a ragged sort of stick, hair disheveled, his face inflamed, advancing a determined look on the road. This image can only refer to a famous painting, one of Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix, in which another woman, symbol of the French Revolution progressed well at the head of the crowd. This scene is poignant because it refers to both the particular path of the Palestinian people but also because it evokes a very subtle way, other contexts, making their story a universal depth. Similarly, the sequence of the foundling by Om Hassan in the middle of the forest reinforces this mythological character. It refers to all the stories of prophets saved by providence and collected by gooders.
There is a constant concern in Yousry Nasrallah to insert the film in a history of images, especially in film history. Any part of the story, particularly in the staging of the exodus returns, like a mirror effect, with many Hollywood films have depicted stories from the Bible. We think including the Ten Commandments Cecil B. de Mille.
This concern is also, in my opinion, to a political bias. This is to emphasize the parallelism between the history of Jewish and Palestinian history in taking over the representation of the first in the history of Western cinema. How to shoot Palestinian refugees and their long wandering in the plains and forests of Galilee that can align to the representation of the history of the Jews and the Palestinians. It a way to emphasize both the tragedy and irony of this story, in which a nation replaces another on the same land of Palestine, and condemns this substitution the other people to reproduce the same history of wandering and exile. In this sense, the film Nasrallah is the founder of the representation of Palestinian history, not only in its entirety and complexity, but also by its inclusion in film history. The filmmaker manages a double purpose, both film and politics: it anchors the narrative history of the Palestinians in a centuries-old tradition of storytelling by the numerous biblical references therein; it also inserts a history of cinema with a screening of several films reversed from the Bible that deal with the Jewish exodus, the political dimension reads between the lines, in this mirror effect that the director establishes so subtly between Jewish history and the history of the Palestinians.
construction into two parts: the epic of exile at the outbreak of the diaspora
As already noted, the film is constructed in two clearly opposed by both their material and staging. The first part, the saga of exile, traces with a lyrical style of a vibrant events that led to the Nakba, through the love story of Younis and Nahila. Married very young, barely out of childhood, they have ceased to be separated by political events. Younis is a fighter, he fought first against the British, then against the Israeli army comes to terrorize the Palestinian population to force them to abandon their villages and to leave for Lebanon. They meet from time to time, in favor of the Yunis returns to his native village. But their love story really is born after the exodus, when Nahila and parents Younis decided to return to the village while he continues to fight in Galilee before being imprisoned by the Syrian army. He then decided to make some inroads towards his native village in Palestine and find Nahila. At this point their love story begins. They find themselves in a cave and love passionately, again celebrating a wedding ritual that is of a more intimate and more pure than their official marriage. The cave is a place mythical place where their romance can be deployed, as in a bubble of pure, pristine, untouchable and unreachable. It is a place of escape and dream that gives the narrative all its splendor and helps maintain a link with the land. It is interesting to see how Yousry Nasrallah filmed there. The lighting is very dark, occasionally streaked with light of a candle which reveals that blurred silhouettes, gestures slow, soft and apneic atmosphere that permeates all contribute to forming a sort of bubble contrast with the outside world filled with noise and fury. This is not absent, and just harass the characters even in their retirement. However, despite all the dramas that are played in their lives, the existence of this shelter gives the first part of this mythical depth and breath of this temporary peace and precarious. In the first part of the cave, a place of passion and romance, the only piece of land in Palestine and pure integrity, as Nahila say at the end of the film works both as a metaphor for purity and as the horizon of the possible return, as the hope of a possible reappropriation of sovereign land.
The second part of the film is much less linear. The bursting of the story, its reduction, staging rather baroque style, with a break of the chronological narrative of return, at the political level, the loss of the original purity, the stagnation of the Palestinian cause in a become increasingly uncertain. The heroism, purity, love and fight lose their idyllic, are marred somewhat by a sordid reality, and whose reading is becoming less clear and unambiguous. The dream is no longer possible, as well as belief in heroism as a liberating action. Reading the reality is blurred by a series of deadly conflict and fratricide. Dr. Khalil no longer has the aura of legendary heroes. He was manhandled and humiliated by the police inspector who returns to his deception and cowardice. He recalls that its qualification as a Doctor is a theft because he has simply followed a course of "nursing revolutionary" in China. It accuses him of having abandoned his comrades, went into exile following the Lebanon war. His love affair ends in bloodshed, as his beloved Shams kills her lover before being brutally murdered by a hundred bursts bales of Palestinian fighters. It stuck like his comrades in a war of Lebanon absurd. And even when he proclaimed in the face of the world, following the first steps of man on the moon, that human beings have become gods, he is quickly brought to reality by the military forces it to crawl shouting Allah Akbar to redeem his sacrilege. This is the double negative Younis antihero who can no longer oppose the horrors of the real grandeur of the dream.
is because the real no longer has the aura of mythical heroic past and pure that its reading is blurred by a set of conflicting discourses. The equivocal nature of reality is underscored by a shift in the scenes. Thus in the first part of the film during the scene where Cham kills her lover, she calls him and when leaving the house, she shoots him in the chest and ran away. This scene was filmed a second time in the second part, but this time when Shams calls his lover, it opens the window of his house, accompanied by his wife, and then comes out of his house to be killed by Shams. We then see the wife of the lover who screams and rushes to the body of her husband, shouting louder than the Chams killed by three bullets. These different versions of the same event revealed the dislocation of reality in conflicting interpretations, as the original image of Palestine away from memory. The chaos narrative that moves into the second part of the film is a reflection of this deconstruction of the narrative and the image of Palestine. We know that deconstruction is an important concept of modernity [1] . It is basically a constant questioning of the relationship to truth and the world. Nasrallah operates both a formal narrative and a questioning of Palestine. The two sides are not only two different periods of Palestinian history, they also reflect two ways of making films. The classicism of the first results and the need for a linear narrative, at once dense and structured, which built the mythical memory of Palestine. The baroque is the second reflects this necessary questioning of the same story over and deconstruction salutary symbolism too easy to "Palestinian cause". Modern film and the film is to instill the heterogeneous and discordance in
[1] is the work of Derrida who systematized the use of the concept of deconstruction and theorized practice.
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