Memorable movies, movies that have aged well and left a durable legacy in popular culture and cinematic art, are often recalled by film buffs through a signature line in the script.
There’s "Gone with the Wind" (1939) with Clark Gable telling Vivien Leigh, "Well, frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn!" an epithet that scandalized Puritan America at the time. Then there’s Humphry Bogart looking into the soulful eyes of Ingrid Bergman in "Casablanca" (1942) and saying, "Here’s looking at you, kid!" In "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951), the image of Marlon Brando hollering, "Stella, Stella!" is unforgettable, as is the collective roar of Arab horsemen-warriors, led by Peter O’Toole, in "Lawrence of Arabia" (1962), "Akaba, Akaba!" And there’s "Shane", without a doubt the best Western ever made, as the homesteaders’ kid runs after Allan Ladd, in the last scene, pleading, "Shane, Shane, come back Shane!"
Closer to our generation, in "The Graduate" (1967), it took but one word to do the trick, "Plastics!" and trust "Easy Rider" (1967) to leave us with the zonked out 60’s line, "We blew it!" There’s Al Pacino in "The Godfather" (1972) telling Diane Keaton about some recalcitrant fellow to whom the "family" had made "An offer he couldn’t refuse." Who could forget Robert de Niro’s existential angst, progressively morphing into psychosis in "Taxi Driver" (1976) as Travis Bickle asks the mirror, "You’re talking to me?" and from "Star Wars" (1977) we get "May the force be with you!" And finally, there’s "Gaza Strip" (2002) with 13-year old Muhammed Hijazi reflecting on existence, "What is death after all, it’s like life!"
"Gaza Strip"? A timeless film with its own iconic line?
Well, not quite. Truth be told, few American moviegoers have heard of it. And if you haven’t either, don’t worry. This is the kind of production — a documentary to be exact — that typically attracts a small audience of movie buffs who patronize art-house theatres like Anthology Film Archives in the East Village and the NYU Film Center in New York, and Visions, off Dupont Circle in Washington. "Gaza Strip" is at once grim, eloquent and searing, a film with a riveting particularity all its own.
American filmmaker James Longley visited Gaza (a strip of misery that is just 28 miles long and four miles wide, inhabited by 1.2 million Palestinians, with 35 percent of it taken over by Israeli settlers and soldiers) in January 2001 with the intention of staying two weeks. He stayed three months, and ended up shooting 75 hours of video footage that he turned into an 87-minute, unflinchingly honest documentary (in Arabic, with English and French subtitles) about the life of an occupied people living under siege, and his powerful use of cineme verite technique, absent talking head interviews, pontificating politicians and voice over, turns "Gaza Strip" into a film, as the Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman put it, sure "to make the stones weep."
Much of "Gaza Strip" follows the 13-year old Muhammed, a newspaper vendor who left school after the second grade, and who spends a great deal of time throwing stones at Israeli soldiers, though his best friend had been fatally shot in the head earlier, and his father (who had spent time in Israeli jails) "once tied me up and even beat me to keep me from doing that." His father, he said, once berated him with the question: "And who will drive your wheelchair around if you get shot in the back and are paralyzed?"
As you follow Muhammed around, you ask yourself where the kid could have gotten his unnervingly sophisticated reflections on life, politics, history, love, death and alienation from. From the adults around him? Clearly not. For as Longley’s camera moves back and forth, portraying the unspeakable pain that Palestinian society daily endures, we know how easy it is in a place like Gaza, even for children, to internalize the politics of experience and process it intuitively.
"I’m not afraid of death," Muhammed muses in one of the most poignant moments in the documentary as he recalls all the kids he had known from the streets who had been killed in the struggle. "I don’t know... maybe the sooner I die... the sooner there will be... you know... a kind of end to my agony... Maybe I’ll end up not going to Paradise, after all, because I haven’t been a good Muslim. Maybe I’ll not go to hell, either. You know... wait... maybe I’ll end up on a mountain top, and a man... no, an angel, will come and bring me food everyday... you know... so I won’t have to worry about going hungry all the time." A long pause, as tears fall down his cheeks, and then: "You know, I feel sad when the Jews bulldoze our trees... my father and I... we talked one night... he told me about the trees, how those trees had been planted long, long before my grandparents and their grandparents were born... Look, we want weapons, we don’t want food."
And where from, you wonder, did this boy get his effective Harold Pinter pauses, his chilling Jean Paul Sartre reflections, and his poetic James Joyce stream of consciousness style? (Since I was taking notes in a dark theatre, with a little pocket flashlight propped up on my lap, translating simultaneously, the above quotes may be off by a word or two.)
You don’t have to go far to know where Muhammed got his precocious perceptions from and how he was able to stylize them so movingly.
Longley was filming at a hospital in Khan Younis one day when Israeli soldiers fired large canisters of sweet-smelling gas at demonstrators and passersby in the Khan Younis refugee camp, resulting in the hospitalization of 216 people. The symptoms ranged from convulsions, muscle spasms, hallucinations and, as one victim described, to wanting "to eat away at my flesh to stop my crazy need to scratch." (And at that, you turn away from the screen in nauseated disbelief at the atrocities that Israelis commit in Gaza.) Doctors at the hospital were uncertain how to treat their patients, since they had no idea what the gas was, but sure as heck, they were certain it was not tear gas.
Throughout the 87 minutes of this heart-breaking, gut-wrenching documentary (with a haunting soundtrack, to boot) Longley’s camera never blinks. How can it blink at suffering so incessant, so pervasive, so beyond all rational understanding?
If we still emerge from "Gaza Strip" not convinced of who the injured party is in this conflict, or do not feel the need to go out there and do something about it that will make a difference, then we will effectively be giving our approval to the prevailing order.
For consider, in this regard, what Edmund Burke said at one time: "For evil to triumph, the good need only to be silent." ([email protected])
