The Early Films

Michel Khleifi's early documentary films, which were created in the course of the third period, initiated a new era in Palestinian cinema. His first film, Fertile Memories (1980), crystallized and was the culmination of a process that had begun in the early 1970s and which was to be continued in later films. On the one hand, place in Khleifi's film, as in others, is an imagined place that revives the past, drawing on the pre-traumatic era and, thus functioning as a national, unity-constructing symbol that presents an idyllic home and homeland created out of an exilic state. On the other hand, the abstract space is portrayed here as a concrete, familiar, and revered place, where daily life occurs in the here and now. In Michel Khleifi's own words (private interview, Paris, 2003), “In order to defend something one must love it, and to love it, one must know it.” Furthermore, this place that preserves both past and present is meant to function in the future as a relic, as the foundation of the historical memory of what is doomed to be lost in the Israeli reality, in an ever-changing world. These films, therefore, freeze the traumatic time, replacing the existing present with the absent past. Yet, they also preserve the sequence of the actual present and of the future and of both the remembrance and the forgetfulness embedded in them.