An Interview With Divine Intervention director Elia Suleiman.

By Jeremiah Kipp

Elia Suleiman in Divine Intervention.

"I have no strategy," says Palestinian writer-director Elia Suleiman. His latest film, Divine Intervention, doesn’t follow the cause-and-effect structure of narrative cinema – though there is a strong sense of planning and architecture in its arrangement of scenes. Opening with a bleeding, beaten Santa Claus pursued by a gang of angry children through the hills of Nazareth, immediately followed by an angry older man’s drive through the ghettoized streets cursing at his neighbors, Suleiman paints allegorical pictures of social, political and mental chaos. Often framed in extreme wide shots, the characters are seen as ants scuttling about; an oddly comic effect that undercuts the trauma and hostility inherent in a story about Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Though Divine Intervention is given weight and depth by the filmmaker’s presence (implicating himself as an onscreen character named E.S.), Suleiman veers away from naturalistic behavior and realism at every turn. His film is shaken up by larger-than-life fantasies involving a magically bulletproof woman (Manal Khader) passing through a border checkpoint, or transforming into a black-clad ninja who single handedly takes down a cadre of Israeli soldier. The mundane harshness of daily life in Nazareth, where neighbors toss garbage bags into each other’s yards or wait for buses that never arrive, is given bleak comic counterpoint by the onslaught of these broadly absurd fantasies.

An apricot pit casually tossed at an enemy tank causes an explosion. A command post collapses from one Palestinian’s defiant stare. At one point, the soldiers burst into a buffoonish choreographed dance. These vignettes never stray far from overt slapstick, which is perhaps why Suleiman prefers calling them "gags" instead of "messages". If they don’t provide comfort, at least they can be viewed as an outlet. It’s better than the uneasy shot repetition of the filmmaker and his fantasy girl sitting in a car together at the Jerusalem border, no words exchanged, their hands desperately interlocked.

But the scene that provides a tool for navigating Suleiman’s comic-tragic labyrinth is of the filmmaker poring over a wall of yellow Post-Its that outline scenes within a film he would like to make. Through the artist’s arrangement of events, he provides order amid the chaos. In this sense, perhaps there is some strategy at work. In his placement of moments, epiphanies, disturbances and lowbrow comedy, Suleiman allows a window into his experience as a Palestinian.

Suleiman was born in Nazareth, and has also lived in Paris and New York. His previous feature, Chronicle of a Disappearance, followed Suleiman’s stone-faced, silent character E.S. and his return to Israel from a self-imposed exile. Divine Intervention is subtitled A Chronicle of Love and Pain, and can be seen as a kind of sequel. Since Suleiman plays "himself" and there are elements of his life within the story, these films are informed by his real-life situation.

The E.S. of his films seems to lack the temerity it takes to make a film like Divine Intervention. The character is silent, stone-faced, and marginalized by images and situations much larger than he is. The filmmaker in person, miles removed from his onscreen self, is a vivid personality: boisterous, caustic, and verbose. Filmmaker sat down with him at the Mayflower Hotel shortly before a New York screening of Divine Intervention to discuss his creative process.

Manal Khader and Elia Suleiman in Divine Intervention.

Filmmaker: Why did you choose to open with Santa Claus being attacked by a group of kids?

Elia Suleiman: I absolutely wanted this to come first. We had to start with an action scene that would unfasten the spectator’s seatbelt. I didn’t want them to have weighty preconceived notions of what it means to watch a Palestinian film. These kids who don’t give a fuck about Santa’s sweetness. They have lost their innocence. I think it is a declaration of the film’s viewpoint; it shows the breakdown of communication in Nazareth. It also loosens things up for the spectator. After that, it’s normal for the spectator to anticipate the brutality that might happen and the kind of humor my film has. And I was able to express my personal vendetta against Christmas.

Filmmaker: Your satire has been described in the American press as being very different from what we’re used to here. Could you mark the distinction?

Suleiman: I’m not sure satire is a good word. When they say burlesque, maybe that applies a little more. When they say irony I go for it very much. Or gags. All of these are incorporated into the humor. I don’t know if it’s a matter of East or West, though. In today’s world, I don’t think you can segregate what is oriental and what is occidental. Those cultural codes have mingled in many ways, and some oriental codes are much more occidental than the Occident. But it’s simplistic to talk this way. When you talk about globalization today, there’s a certain degree of homogeneity involved.

It is interesting to ask the question of what is East and what is West. When you talk about [French auteur] Robert Bresson, he was quite an oriental cineaste. If you were to ask me what sort of cinema has inspired me, or the cinema that I self-reflect in the immediate sense, I would think of oriental cinema as well – but from the far Orient. I don’t see any affiliation of my cinema to that of the Middle East.

Manal Khader in Divine Intervention.

Filmmaker: Some reviews have compared your sight gags to Jacques Tati.

Suleiman: Some people use Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati as references. It’s funny that you bring up Tati because he was not an influence on me at all. I do admit it was shocking to see Mon Oncle for the first time, which happened after I completed my first feature. There were many similarities between my work and his sense of humor. But it’s not so unnatural that two people have similar sensibilities in the film world. It is, after all, a big world. There are many people making films. This is something that’s bound to happen.

In another sense, it’s flattering when people compare me with Tati. I have seen what I great filmmaker he is. But I’m not sure who came first, him or me.

Filmmaker: Do those references bother you?

Suleiman: It doesn’t annoy me at all, because I respect their sensibilities. If I were to be compared to someone I don’t feel comfortable with, that would be annoying.

Filmmaker: Your approach seems non-naturalistic. Do you make a conscious choice to push for the surreal or absurd?

Suleiman: When I make a film, I have no strategy. What initiates the work is a tickle, which is to say an inspiration. When I see an independent image in daily life, I see potentiality there. When I write it down in my notebook, I make a tableau. I allow myself to figment that raw material, which can be enhanced and choreographed.

Since I am not satisfied with this initial departure, I continue to add layers of volume and weight. When it gains enough layers, when I feel it is ripe enough to become an image or a scene, then I let it go. I release it into the poetics of the image without any preconceived confinement, and it takes its own departure. Later on, the image belongs to the spectator, each according to his or her own association, desire or pleasure. In doing so, they associate and co-produce the image. That’s what makes it interesting.

Filmmaker: Are you interested in how this process works?

Suleiman: The magical part of this cinema is my search to dig out a moment of truth as sincerely as possible. I’m fascinated by how this works, but I cannot answer why. I can only speak to what makes a gag funny to me, as a person who laughs at his own jokes. But because of the cultural baggage that I carry, it becomes less of a joke and more of a layered tableau. It’s not anecdotal, it’s not superficial – it is the cinema. What makes the construction of the gag possible for me is based on the temporality of making it in that moment.

A scene from Divine Intervention.

The reverse is also worth contemplating. Let’s say I make a gag (as I do in the film) where there is a repetition. This repetition is circular as time progresses, forming a haiku. The second or third time you see the same scene repeated, it’s worth imagining the spectator’s response if I had put the scene a little earlier or a little later. They might say, "We’ve just seen him! Why are we seeing him again?" Or maybe, "Oh, we’ve forgotten about this guy!" As far as I’m concerned, there is only one place where this kind of gag or burlesque can go in the repetition. When I believe it must be in that specific place, the spectator can also consider why it is in exactly that place.

The judging process for art is individualistic, since we don’t all have the same temporality and rhythm. It is not a uniform process, so it’s interesting seeing a thousand people in the screening room, all laughing. It is not intellectual, it is not strategic, and it is not intentional – it is just something you can sense.

Filmmaker: Do you feel foreign to questions about the strategy or intention of making your film?

Suleiman: "What was my intention making the film?" Intention? "What was my strategy making this film?" Strategy? "You think that making it humorous makes it so-and-so rather than so-and-so?" It is not a choice! It is the character that I am made of, with all the experience I have that leads to the ambience of the film. You can never come to any site-specific pinpointing where there are one or two factors that can determine a filmmaker or an artist.

Filmmaker: While you say that there is no strategy, you do make certain artistic choices before you make the film.

Suleiman: When you work, it’s not strategy. If you feel like it works, then you find the harmony in what you are trying to create. This is why I chose to make a film involving the father and not the mother, or the father and not the neighbor. The process of the artist at work is an emotional feeling at many times. Why does the painter choose one color and not another? Sometimes I have just a sensation. If I have an answer, I don’t posit it for you in the image.

In the writing of the film, you could say I employ some strategy. I write extremely precise notes in the script. The script is very, very precise. When I have finished the script and am allowed to shoot it, I have done all my homework. On the set, I leave my homework behind. I don’t carry the script around. I give it to the assistant director and only refer to it when I’m at a moment of loss.

By letting go, it is a way of maintaining the creative process while on the set. It is not an application of the script I had written a year earlier. My creative energy is maintained, and it also maintains the present of the moment that the spectator sees in the film.

A scene from Divine Intervention.

Filmmaker: You respond directly to what’s in front of you while shooting.

Suleiman: I think that’s great, because if the script were 100 percent represented in the film, then it would all feel archival. It would feel like the past, not the present. There is a reality to the present that you cannot control: the direction of the wind, the way the flag is blowing. These are not for you to decide. It’s not only you – it’s the elements, the actors, the birds and all of the things that enter the shot despite you.

Filmmaker: You are in some way involved in collecting these elements, though. What is your casting process like?

Suleiman: I am not at all interested in the psychology of acting or in Stanislavski’s techniques. That means absolutely nothing to me. I think of the characters as being based on certain funny mannerisms, and I choose the actors as I would experimental dancers. I am interested in the imperfections they bring with them. That becomes their power and rawness.

When I chose the gunners for the ninja scene, I could have chosen acrobats. They are doing stunts. [The performers] sweated a hell of a lot when we filmed their dance. At one point, they grew frustrated and said, "You made a mistake [in casting us]. You need acrobats to perform in this scene, and we cannot do it!" I told them they were chosen because I wanted that awkwardness. That lack of synchronization makes it fresher, a little bit inside out.

Filmmaker: What about casting the role of the father?

Suleiman: Sometimes I choose people who are close by, and sometimes the actual people. Using my own father in Chronicle of a Disappearance was an example of this. Between making Chronicle and Divine Intervention, my father passed away. Some of the story is about him getting sick and dying. When I cast the actor (Nayef Falhoum Daher) playing my father, I gave him completely different body mannerisms than my actual father had. The actor is a much more somber person, very stiff. If you see Chronicle, my father was more active and lively. It was a conscious choice to blur that level of reality.

Since I often use myself [as an actor] in my films, people wonder if these are biographies. They are not autobiographical at all. When I come in as a character, we know that is "me" when I am [seen in the film] working on the script. On the wall, you see the text [on yellow Post-Its]. One says: FATHER GETS SICK. Let’s say the scene is about a script I’m writing. It is a blur between autobiography and reality. I wanted to put "reality" in quotes. This makes the fantasy sequences a potential reality and the reality scenes a question mark.

A scene from Divine Intervention.

Filmmaker: Just because you’re putting yourself in the movie doesn’t make it a documentary.

Suleiman: It is an extension. I think that it’s so close to being myself sometimes that it’s so far. I think it’s a document by way of an ambiance that I create, and I am there. It is an extension of myself, but I am someone without psychology. I am a reference. I am more on the side of the spectator. I am also watching.

Filmmaker: When you shoot in different cities, do you respond to them in a different way? Do Nazareth and Jerusalem become characters as well?

Suleiman: I consider the architecture and the state to be the protagonist, normally. You see that the ambience of Nazareth is different from the ambience at the checkpoint, even though these two locations are an hour away from each other. The fact that they are different is so important historically, politically and socially. People might not know this in terms of geography, if they don’t know anything about the situation. They might think the Nazareth characters are Israelis and Palestinians. Which is of course a misreading. But some will understand that simply through the ambiance that the film gives off.

If this film triggers some curiosity about those places, those people can go read a book about the geography and politics. But the space is what happens. This is the stage. Of course, it comes to us – and it is not about me imposing my reality to the place. It’s obvious that when you go to Nazareth, you feel that ghetto very strongly. It’s much more intense than what I tried to project with the characters, the humors, the lightness of my film. But we are kidding ourselves there. You will see the tension and violence of the space in that checkpoint, and that is important. Even though I did not show brutality in front of the frame, many people feel the potential violence in those spaces. You could call it the silence before the storm.

Jeremiah Kipp is a freelance journalist based in NYC.