Audio transcription

For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.

John Quackenbush  0:00 

2014. The Harvard Film Archive screened Jaffa, the Orange's Clockwork. This is the audio recording of the introduction and post screening Q&A with David Pendleton, HFA programmer, and filmmaker Eyal Sivan.

David Pendleton  0:19 

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I'm David Pendleton, the programmer here at the Harvard Film Archive. And it's my pleasure to welcome you to this evening’s screening of Jaffa, the Orange's Clockwork. This is the middle of three screenings that we are devoting to the work of the Israeli nonfiction filmmaker Eyal Sivan. I just want to say a few words of introduction before bringing Eyal to the podium. First of all, as always, if you have anything on your person that makes noise, or sheds light, please make sure that it's turned off, and please refrain from consulting it or illuminating it while the house lights are down, for the pleasure and concentration of your neighbors. I'd also like to thank Peter Hanly and Boston College for their help in organizing this visit, since Eyal Sivan was also a keynote presenter at a symposium there on the representation of violence a few days ago.

The film that we're about to see dates from 2009. It's the most recent of the three films that we're showing. Tomorrow, in the absence, sadly, of Eyal Sivan, we will be showing his epic film Route 181, co-directed with Michel Khleifi, from 2003. I say epic because it's in three parts. It’s a three-part road movie across Palestine and Israel, and it will be presented with two short intermissions between each of the three parts. So it's a five-hour program altogether, should end right around nine o'clock, in time for you to have a late dinner.

Mr. Sivan has made fifteen films to date, if I'm counting correctly, of varying lengths, dating back to the late 1980s. And most of them about the contemporary geography and politics of Palestine and Israel, the Israeli occupation, and also questions of the history of Zionism, and the history of Israel and the occupied territories. Besides working as a filmmaker, he also is active as a professor, and has taught at a number of universities in Europe and Israel. Tonight's film, like The Specialist, from 1999, which we showed last night, could be called an essay film. Tomorrow night's film– Tomorrow afternoon and evening’s film is very different. It's much more of an observational piece. But as I mentioned yesterday, I think Eyal is extremely skilled at both kinds of nonfiction filmmaking, because all of his work, I think, comes out of a single impulse, about using the cinematic image to get us to look at the way that power works, look at the way that images work, look at the way that images work through power, or power works through images, etc.

Tonight's film begins by looking at a particular image, the image of the oranges from Jaffa, that were the most celebrated export from Palestine, and then from, from Israel. And from this look at a particular image, we're treated to an archaeology of an image, in the sort of the Foucaultian sense. looking at a number of different kinds of images of the oranges of Jaffa. Everything… Not only a number of different kinds of moving images, but also photographs, and even paintings, political posters, and drawings. And gradually this archeological look at what's the ideological meaning of that image of the orange, and how it shifts over time, we're drawn into this question of history, a history of a place, particularly the history of the city of Jaffa, and the way it changed, particularly over the course of the 20th century. And mixed in with lots of moving images and still images, are interviews from a number of people who also have studied various parts of this archaeology, or this history, as well as people who've experienced parts of this archaeology and parts of this history. And out of this very rich collage and montage comes this essay, like I said, that is at the one and same time a sort of a historical essay, but also a semiotic exercise, we might say. That's all I will say about the film. But here to say a few more words, and here to– Mr. Sivan will be back to join us for a lengthy conversation after the screening. But here to say a few words of introduction, please welcome to the podium Eyal Sivan.

[APPLAUSE]

Eyal Sivan 4:45 

Well, thank you so much. Thank you, David, for this invitation. And, as I already said yesterday, but it's true, I'm both honored and flattered to be here, and to show my films for the first time in this famous archive and room. And thank you so much for being here. I mean, I'm sure that there are more interesting things to do outside there and not seeing Eyal Sivan film, so I'm thanking you so much for giving me your time. And I hope that the promise of eighty-eight minutes of your life given to me will be fulfilled [by] what I'm putting on the screen. I'll be here after to answer questions, to debate, in any kind of terms. Let's keep it as specific as much as possible. And if there is somebody that thinks that it's a film about citruses, he will be disappointed, she will be disappointed. I'm a big fan of oranges, but this is not the subject of the film. Thank you so much.

[APPLAUSE]

John Quackenbush 5:55 

And now the discussion with David Pendleton and Eyal Sivan.

David Pendleton 6:00 

Maybe we can start by just talking a little bit about the origin of the project. I guess I'm sort of interested in what came first: your discovering these images that you used, or your idea to make a film using Jaffa and the orange, as a way to sort of talk about...

Eyal Sivan  6:21 

In fact, it starts like, I think, many films or many fiction films. You know, when you read something in the newspaper. It was 1993, it was the period that it's called Oslo Agreements period, and Rabin was Prime Minister. And among the negotiations with the Palestinians, there was this suggestion by the Israelis– I mean, first of all, there was a big wave of privatization of the industry. It was a national industry, and a lot of things were privatized, including the Jaffa brand. And in a moment of the negotiation between the Palestinians, the Israelis suggested to the Palestinians to sell them the brand of Jaffa. And I read it in a newspaper, and I thought, wow, this is fantastic. It's like selling the idea of Israel to the Palestinians. So I started to kind of think about this idea of a visual history of the brand, and how it becomes from a national idea into a private thing. But [for] various reasons, I left the project aside, and I think that it was 2008, 2007, there was a competition in Israel for making a film for the, I don't remember, 40, 50, 60th anniversary of the State of Israel. I never really ask for money from Israeli state, from Israeli grants to make film, but there was a friend of mine, a producer that said, “Don't you have an idea for the competition? They ask [for] a film about archives; you work with archives.” I said, Well, this will be fun, to present to the funds. I’m not completely unknown, and my positions are quite known in Israel. So we presented this project that I left aside ten years before. And we won the grant. And it was a scandal in Israel. And it went to the Parliament and they... “How [is it] possible that a non-Zionist, anti-Zionist filmmaker will make the film of the 60th anniversary?” etc. And in the end, they refused to give us the grant. And I promise that I will make the film not thanks to the Israeli democracy, but despite the Israeli democracy, and that’s what I did. [GENTLY LAUGHS]

[APPLAUSE]

David Pendleton 9:00 

Well, then can you talk a little bit about the, the sources for the images, and how you went about finding them?

Eyal Sivan  9:08 

Well, we are talking here about more than five years of research with a great group of researchers, really around the world. I mean, we went from Israel to France, to a lot in Britain. Quite a lot of work. And many images we [found] in the Library of Congress in the States. We had a lot of problems finding material in the Arab world. But thanks to a real network that we [built], we got those images from the Arab world, and mainly from the Palestine Liberation Organization. I mean, this was really difficult, to find all those posters, and the old Palestinian material. But I had great surprises. You know, I was writing, I found the Popular Front Liberation Organization in Syria, something. So I wrote them, “My name is Eyal Sivan..,” andwell, they will never answer. And then I got back “Dear Comrade, Thank you for writing to us. Whatever you want….” And so it was kind of a funny thing, and suddenly started kind of a movement of people sending me images, you know? People sending in images... “I have a collection, I have this, I worked on that.” But the real [difficulty] was the fact that nowadays, to find in an archive material, you don't look at the images anymore, you look for keywords, right? Before, in the old times, which are not so far, we had to watch material. Now you go on the computer, you put keywords. And of course, I mean, in most of the film done in Palestine, Israel, the oranges appear, but nobody tagged in each film, “oranges, oranges.” So the thing was to go over a lot of material and to find the oranges, and because of financial reasons, the film was really expensive. Because of this archive, I had to renounce on something that I really wanted, which was the appearance of Jaffa in fiction films. But this was too expensive. I mean, there are a few films like Gone with the Wind, for example, where there is a moment that, now I, kind of a blank, who is the actor, main actor, help me.

David Pendleton

Clark Gable.

Eyal Sivan

Clark Gable takes out of his pocket an orange on the stairs, and there is a zoom, and it's written “Jaffa” on the oranges. Or you have a Spike Lee film, for example, that the family is talking about anti-semitism, and on the table there are oranges, and there is “Jaffa.” Louis de Funès, in Rabbi Jacob. You have, the Jaffa oranges exist in many, you have… how it's called? This film, The Sound of the Music? With the,

David Pendleton  11:55 

With Julie Andrews?

Eyal Sivan

Yeah.

David Pendleton

The Sound of Music.

Eyal Sivan  11:58 

The Sound of Music. She's standing on a box. This is a mistake of time. She's standing on a box... The film is around the 30s, happened in the 30s. She's standing on a Jaffa box, and it's written, “Made in Israel,” while Israel didn't exist in the 30s. So you have a lot of those, unfortunately, those are the things that I can talk to the public, but I cannot show. It was too expensive.

David Pendleton

Right. Right.

Eyal Sivan

So this research was a huge kind of research. And the idea was to try out to build something, which will be what you present as the semiotics of that image. But it was completely different, the research that we did in the 90s, to what we [made afterwards] in 2008.

David Pendleton  12:40 

I see. I see. But I'm just really interested in the way that you then stage this material and present this. Because it could, I mean, you could think, this could be a book, or an article that could be sort of a cross between like Said and Barthes's Mythologies, you know what I mean? But what's fascinating to me is the assemblage of these images, along with interviews. And then the choice to have the people who speak to the camera watching, the fact that we watch them watching the images.

Eyal Sivan

Well, there are no interviews in the film. I mean, in a way, it gives the impression that there [are] interviews, and I was doing [that] in my previous films; I'm working a lot [with] interviews. But there was something that occurred to me during the research, and speaking mainly with people in Europe, Western and Eastern Europe: that there is an entire generation that grew up with Jaffa. I mean, in Europe, for years, for Christmas, to bring an orange for Christmas was– And it was a Jaffa orange. France discovered eating grapefruit with Jaffa. Before, they were not eating grapefruit. In Eastern Europe, for example, in Poland, it happened that I was in a film festival in Poland. So they told me that the people in the Communist Party had for Christmas oranges from Jaffa. I looked for it, and then I discovered that the Israeli Communist Party was sending Jaffa oranges to Poland and to Russia, to the people of the Communist Party. So there was this thing about the oranges. Jaffa, it's an old generation in Europe. And then there is the other generation, which is the 60s generation, the leftist generation that boycotted oranges. One of my theses about the left wing in Europe is that they were lacking vitamin C. And this is why they didn't succeed, because they were boycotting Chilean oranges; it was Pinochet. Spanish oranges; it was Franco. South African oranges, and Israeli oranges. So it explains something, maybe, about the left wing in Europe.

But so, people had this thing about Jaffa... Was very known in Europe. And for us as kids in Israel, Jaffa was known but we didn't have Jaffa oranges, because Jaffa oranges were only for export. We had just oranges. Sometimes we could find on the market in the end of the season, what they called “export lefts.” And then we had the impression that we are eating oranges from abroad. Because we knew about them, because we learned, for example, when we were very little, in school, we learned if you take four boxes of oranges that are sent to Germany, and plus six box of oranges sent to France, and two box of oranges coming back from England, how many boxes of oranges are left in Europe? You know, so we had this in the books of math. There is a picture of a book, a school handbook for that. So the Jaffa existed for the people abroad. And I realized suddenly that it is a projection. It's a total mental projection. And the moment that came this idea of the mental projection [was] also about Palestine or Israel, even Israel today. I mean, most of the people that are speaking about Israel, and I'm sure in this country, it's more about a projection than really reality. You know, this place flourishing in the desert, I mean all this, all this ideological rubbish. It's about a mental projection. And my question was, “How [can I] represent this projection?” And from that moment on, I decided that there won't be any interviews. I took my collection of 600 still pictures. I mean, what you see in the beginning of the film, this is really how the interviews happened. I was giving to the people pictures, and they were looking, and they were starting to speak. Or when it was in inside, I was asking the people, “Can I show you something?” So I was taking my laptop, and we had a projector, and we were screening, and people were reacting [to] a [projection]. In fact, they were projecting on that projection. So what you see, those are no interviews. Those are the projection, or the oral projections of the people on those images.

David Pendleton

Well, what I think that, I mean, again, this is picking up on the conversation last night, in terms of your interest in using the cinematic apparatus, or having your films that are somehow thinking about the cinematic apparatus. This like watching somebody else watch something, and then having that person say to you what they think that it means, provides us with this very interesting chain of spectatorship, if you will. And,

Eyal Sivan  17:41 

And there is the other figure, which is this relation between spectator and the screen, which is, I mean, when we are coming with a subject, I mean, “I believe that…,” we say “Palestine and Israel,” immediately means something, or evokes something. It means that any kind of spectator—I'm the first one—is coming with his own images, or with an imaginary [one] and [it’s] projected on what you see. And this encounter is what I was interested in. And especially about [using] the material against its own goal, aim.

David Pendleton

Sure.

Eyal Sivan

I mean, I'm taking those propaganda materials and reusing [them] in order to, if I can make a word, which is to de-propagandize in order to re-propagandize it in another way. Or to, I mean, to use an expression by Benjamin, it's really to “brush history against the grain.” I mean, to take that history that was told in a certain way, and to tell it with those same images in order to tell a different story.

David Pendleton  18:44 

Right, I don't have it in front of me, there's a nice quote that somebody says, I think referring to relations between Jewish and Arab workers, before the establishment of the state of Israel, talks about like, learning how to interpret what somebody– Oh! They're talking about, like how they, yes, how in order for the Jew and Arab workers to work well together, it helped to be able to understand how the other person would interpret what you say to them. And so this question of these chains of interpretation, or learning to see through somebody else's eyes, I thought is nicely exemplified in the spoken word part of the–

Eyal Sivan 

I mean, those were the parts of people that are... It was interesting to see how elements that I am not sure that I could have [gotten] through interviews just came because of that encounter with an image. Between the people that really rediscovered their youth, or Gidon Ofrat, the Israeli art historian that worked for years on [that] imagery, and suddenly I'm giving him back those images, and he knows that, I mean, the subject will be Jaffa and the oranges. So that effort of projection, we in fact, what we are seeing, I believe, as spectators, we're seeing other spectators, as you see, which are kind of– They are closer to us than they are closer to the director, in a certain way, because they are the first one to be the spectators of those images.

David Pendleton

Right. Right. And so then the question of competing narratives about the same city. Or like, or is the city Jaffa or is it Yofa? I mean, like,

Eyal Sivan  20:19 

Is it Yafa or is it Jaffa, on one hand. But in the other hand, which is interesting, it's the question of the refusal to see what there is in the images. I mean, what is part of... The thing was to come and to read the image back, and to see the traces, unseen traces inside the images. I mean, the only, in fact, original, unique, first-time image that is seen is a short film from 1913, which we see in the beginning, with a Palestinian landowner, with, there is over it, I put a French song. And you see in the image that you have Jewish workers working for that landowner. Those are [the] kind of images that disappeared totally. And they disappeared, and this is, I think, or this was for me, anyway, I hope for you too, a kind of a quite striking discovery, that the separation, the segregation, was a left idea. It's the Labor Party, and it's the Zionist left that in the name of kind of this what they call the slogan of “Hebrew work,” “Jewish labor,” they created the segregation and a separation by accusing the right wing to be just capitalist. And there is something interesting when my friend Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, [who] is today the head of the Jewish Studies Department in Ben Gurion University, says, well, this was a very special colonialism. Usually in colonialism, you make the native work. Here, there was even a refusal to make the natives work.

David Pendleton 22:12 

Um hmm. Are there questions in the audience, by the way? Is there anybody who wants...? I was going to mention that part in the film where you talk about, in some ways, Zionism is worse than colonialism, somebody in the film says, because [with] colonialism there's at least—even if it's a degrading or menial role for the native, as it were, as a worker. Whereas Zionism was all about sort of pretending that there were no natives there.

Eyal Sivan  22:37 

I won’t say Zionism is worse than colonialism, because I don't think that colonialism is one.  I think that

David Pendleton

Sure.

Eyal Sivan

there are different patterns of colonialism. In this settlers’ [colonialist] society, which was built out of Zionism, one of the big things is the denial of the native, on one hand, but even the denial of the landscape itself. And there is the sentence of [UNKNOWN] which is interesting when he is saying, “They destroyed the land in the name of loving the land.” You know, this idea that we have in Zionism of the love of the land, which is a peculiar idea; what do you mean to love your land, right? Anyway, then, in the name of that, to deny and to [permanently] erase, anything that could be the Arab origin of this land, including the Arab identity of many of the Jews that live in Israel, which are the Sephardim, the Mizrahim, the Oriental Jews, or the Arab Jews.

David Pendleton  23:40 

Okay, questions from the audience? We’ll take you in the back, and then Damon second.

Audience 1  23:46 

Thank you for the film. It was very informative. And thanks for coming out here and presenting, and answering questions. I have a question. I don't know if it's completely appropriate for you as a filmmaker, because the film is about, you know, the history of the representation of people and of the oranges and the orchards. My question is: it sounds like the premise of the film began with noticing that Jaffa—I guess, was a brand? It was like an Israeli-owned brand—was being privatized. And I'm kind of curious now about how the history of the orchards developed, and what that would tell of the story of Israel. Because it seems like it's going from an agricultural, you know, state, or that, even that part of the economy is agriculturally based, and it's moving into something else. And I didn't really understand where it moved to. In the end, you know, we see an image of McDonald's, and you know, urbanization, what have you. But, you know, how did that agricultural image come to a close?

Eyal Sivan  24:52 

Well, first of all, there is something that maybe we have to remember when we come to orchards, is that there is an [absurdity] by cultivating oranges or, or citruses in the Middle East. I mean, what's an orange? Orange is a pocket of water with vitamin C and some sugar, sent from countries with no water to countries that there is a lot of water. So there is an [absurdity] about that, right? I mean, this is from the very beginning. The thing is that, economically, it wasn't ever– Israeli agriculture—especially the oranges—was never beneficial. I mean, the way of cultivating oranges is... There is a system which is called to “flood the orchards.” You need huge amounts of water. So it was senseless. Israeli agriculture, all the Israeli agriculture, was never for any economic benefit. It was an image issue, if you want. It was a branding issue. Israel invested in the oranges billions of dollars in advertising. The only real beneficial industry of Israel [even] today is security and military industry. And [for] a certain period in the 70s, the diamonds. Not because there are diamonds in Israel, because of a relation, a very special relation between Israel and apartheid South Africa. Israel, as you know, refused the boycott of South Africa during all the years of the apartheid. So the way to continue to transport diamonds from South Africa to Europe was through Israel. So, but Israel was never [an agricultural] state, and all the mythology of the kibbutz as an agricultural thing, it's—as the English are saying politely—rubbish. In fact, it had a very important benefit in terms of image. Because the image, and the most important image–and I think that this is the big success, also, of Zionism—is the idea that there was a desert, and the desert was flourished. Right? This is the main issue. There was a desert before us, there was a desert, we came, and we flourished the desert. While this is, of course, a big lie, because the biggest moment, or the most important moment of citrus as an agriculture element from Palestine, was the 30s when the Brits were in Palestine. They are the ones that will transform Jaffa into a brand. It was a British brand, Jaffa oranges. And they will export. It was a joint venture, and they imposed working together, Jews and Arabs, in order to export the oranges. And it was a success, in terms that [even] today, in countries like Holland, or in countries in Scandinavia, you say “Jaffa,” or “Yaffa,” in fact, they say, in order to say “an orange.” It's a, it's a generic name for orange. I mean, you can say, “Can I have Yaffas from Spain?” for example, they say, for oranges from Spain. This is in Netherlands or in Scandinavia. So this agriculture thing about Israel was never agriculture then. But the image, the agriculture image was important. And it's very linked to this socialist ethos of returning to the land, becoming land workers, etc., etc. I hope that I answered your question.

David Pendleton  28:48 

Damon has a question.

Audience 2  28:51 

I was interested in the first half of the film, there's an interesting dialogue about Orientalism and the view from the West of the East. And then there's that shift in ‘48, where you shift to this idea of the virgin land, or the New World, which is very much like American mythology. And I was curious to know from your own perspective, if the Orientalism, if you feel, does continue post-’48, or what happens to that thread of ideology? And then also just as a note, I thought it was interesting that of course, the bond, the political bonds between the U.S. and Israel start around that mutual ideology, I guess, of the barren land, which is not a colonial image in the British model or the European model, but it's American colonialism, and I guess, very related to the post-’48.

Eyal Sivan  29:45 

Well, if one of the main motifs in American visual history is Western, we might say that the most important Israeli motif will be Easterns, right? I mean, we are not going to the West, we're going to the wild East. And listening to you, I'm thinking about this, the W. J. T. Mitchell’s work, the American scholar, about the landscape, the Israeli landscape and the American invention of Israeli landscape and the American landscape. So, of course, all the beginning, this idea that, in fact Zionism is Orientalism, is a way of Orientalism, it comes from a starting point, which is a school of thinkers that believe that, in fact, Zionism would be—and this is the real link, I would say with, with American, or even more than American, with Protestant thinking—that, in fact, Zionism is an intrusion of Protestantism inside Judaism. That it's not a genuine Zionist, it's not a genuine Jewish thing. But this is really the penetration of the intrusion, the forced intrusion of Protestantism inside Zionism, and reading it from that perspective, obviously, we will find this both Orientalism and the national—let’s call it “capitalistic” take. And those who defend this idea are basing [it] on two main elements, which are two great, two important slogans of Judaism. One is the “return to history.” One of the ideas of Zionism is that the Jews have to return to history. But the ones that consider that the Jews are outside of history, it's a Christian idea. So Zionism is taking on board a Christian idea that suddenly Jews are outside of history, and they have to return to history. This is one of the slogans. And the other important slogan, which is the, in Hebrew, it's called [HEBREW PHRASE]: the denial of exile. The exile, the notion of exile in Judaism is not physical exile. The exile is the fact that God left the world. In a certain moment, he will come back in the form of the Messiah. And in fact, the Jew represents the state of the world in this absence of... This is the idea of the exile. Zionism will come, and will take the exile as an idea, a geographical idea, will deny the exile and will say, all [that] is exile is bad. Exile is the old time, and now we are in a redemption time: [HEBREW PHRASE]. We are in this new time, which is the time of, coming back to, coming back to the land. The gathering of the sons in Israel of the land, which is a fundamental Protestant element. Which explains, of course, I don't have to explain here, this very close relation between the evangelic Christians and Israel. This Zionism out of anti-Semitism, right? And this is the strong, this is the strong link. In this regard, Orientalism would be a byproduct of that. So, of course, there is the becoming native, in a certain moment. We are becoming native, but we are becoming native, as Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin is saying, we are becoming native in the image of Europe. I mean, we are native, but we are European native. And this didn't change. And in this regard, Orientalism is still Israel's, in a way, ideological continuum. We just don't call it Orientalism anymore. We call it Islamophobia today, right? But this is what it's about.

David Pendleton  33:57 

Other questions? There's a question here in the front. James will bring you a microphone, so we can all hear.

Audience 3  34:07 

I also want to say thank you, it was great.

David Pendleton

I think so, you just have to speak up.

Audience 3  34:13 

There was footage you have from the bombing of the Palestinians, how they were jumping into boats. But it looked like it was staged. And I was wondering where was that reference from? And I have another question after that.

Eyal Sivan  34:27 

It's a fiction. It's a fiction. There are no moving images of the expulsion of 1948, of the Nakba. It's a lousy Tunisian fiction film that [has] this scene inside, black-and-white game of people fleeing into the sea. [When] I saw that—It happened that I got an invitation, one in Paris to see the premiere of this really lousy fiction—but I recall that moment of trying to represent the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe, in moving images. And because I knew, of course, those four images that we have, which are the expulsion from Jaffa, I thought that anyway, one of the questions of this film is what is the nature of image itself? I mean, you see a film which is in video, but in the same time, you hear the sound of its film, you can feel the textures. There is all that questioning about what is the nature of the film itself? What is a projection, which is a mental projection? So in that case, I mean, to [make] a piece of fiction anyway, there is something that [happens] in this relation between the screen—because it's a peculiar image. I mean, you feel that there is something going on there, which is enough for me to go out of this ideal for certain cinema, which is not about thinking but just about entertaining, and to bring back the spectator each time into the question of what I'm giving to be seen. This is the answer [about] where it comes, this shot sequence.

Audience 3  36:03 

One quick other question. At the end of the film, they were destroying all the trees. And [INAUDIBLE] if they truly love the land, like they say they do, this wouldn’t even happen.

And there was a metaphor he made about loving a woman. Of course, he was trying to be gentle, but I felt, as a comparison, maybe it was not very feminist, or maybe [INAUDIBLE] feminist. But of course, I just wanted to– So that was one of my understanding of it. But I wanted to elaborate. So I totally agree, if someone really loves the land, they wouldn't be doing that.

Eyal Sivan  36:47 

He is [making] the distinction between loving and possessing. So maybe it's not feministic. But you can say, yeah, even to say “motherland,” it's a non-feminist position. We prefer to say “fatherland.” I prefer to say “motherland.” I mean, anyway, in Hebrew, or in Arabic, we say, “motherland,” right? Okay. So but this idea between the loving of the land, this idea to love the land, [HEBREW PHRASE], it's a very common slogan within Zionism. I mean, one of the things when we were kids, for example, [and even] today, it was to go for walks in the country. To have, for example, a trip that we are doing in school which is called “from sea to sea,” and we are walking. I mean, to, to know the land through walking in it.

There is an Israeli historian that wrote about Zionism as the love of the land. And there is one of the person [who] wrote back to that very important historian, Israeli historian, Anita Shapira, “There are no [other] nations that in the name of the love of the land destroyed the landscape as [much] the Zionists.” But this [recalls] something about the American landscape, also, right? About this...

David Pendleton

I was going to say.

Eyal Sivan

As I said, this “over-love” of the landscape is about making it totally artificial. I mean, it's this deep conscience of the settler colonial society about that any trace is the trace of the native. And what you have to destroy is the native trace. Coming back to this image of destroying, uprooting the oranges... Because in the 90s, there is this moment of privatization, which means... What [does it mean]?, the privatization? It just means that the state stopped [giving] some subvention to agriculture, so they uprooted the trees, and they just started to build buildings. And this was in the most expensive land areas of the country, which is around Tel Aviv, which is the center. So the only oranges that were left were the oranges in Gaza Strip. The orchards, sorry, the orchards in Gaza Strip. But the orchards in Gaza Strip were a security threat, because the Palestinian resistance hid there. So the Israeli army uprooted the images. This is March 2002 or 2003. The images that you see, those bulldozers are uprooting. And in exchange—because it's the most “moral” occupation on Earth—we gave to the Palestinian the possibility to cultivate strawberries. You cannot hide in the strawberries bushes. So you don't have orchards anymore, but now they are cultivating strawberries. The only problem is that they cannot export them.

David Pendleton  39:58 

Yes.

Audience 4  40:01 

What has been the reception of your movie, since you started to show it?

Eyal Sivan

Where?

Audience 4

Actually, everywhere. In Israel, obviously. But across the world.

Eyal Sivan 40:14 

This is a question that I’ve been asked a lot. And generally, it's a very difficult answer. It's like, imagine that I'm going to Tel Aviv, and they ask me, “What was the reaction of the film in America?” So, I mean, what I can tell you is some anecdotes about what happened in the premiere of the film, and the Tel Aviv cinematheque, where I'm inviting all the people that are in the film. And it's the first time that some of the Israelis that you see in the film and the others that were not filmed, or that helped, etc. I mean, a huge bunch of people that are there. Palestinians, Palestinian citizens of Israel, and Israeli Jews. And there's this very moving moment. I tried to make the premiere in Jaffa, but Jaffa doesn't have even one cinema nowadays. It was a city that had seven cinemas before 1948. There is not even one place that you can screen today a film. I mean, there is a small theater, the Arab Jewish theater, that there are fifty seats. So it was in Tel Aviv. But all those people that were sitting in the cinematheque, when they went out, there were a lot of people with tears in their eyes. And one of the things that many people said, they said, “what a waste, what a waste.” And it was fantastic to see this commonality that suddenly happened. And the discovery... the discovery of something that they just, or I would say, we didn't know about. Which is that moment, that there is a society that lives together. I mean, as any couple, it's not an ideal. It's not paradise. But it's living together. So there was a deep feeling of sadness, of yeah, a waste, what a waste, in fact. So this is one reaction. But I would say, more than that, one of the things that happened is that, and it happens with most of my films, as I'm not completely unknown in Israel, so the press, and the media, and the politics are preparing the public for my films. So before this film was released, there was all this big scandal around the fact that I got the grant, that I didn't get the grant. And one of the Israelis’ big newspapers, local, it's not Haaretz, that is now around the world, but it's Maariv, which is a very big popular newspaper said, “Well, next week will be presented the next terrorist attack of Sivan on the screens of the cinema.” So you can imagine, you come, you expect... It's difficult, it's difficult to have a kind of reaction. I can tell you that when I'm screening the film for my students in Israel, which are young, which finished the army, for them, it's a total discovery. And one of the main feelings that they have, and here I’m talking about Israeli Jews, is suddenly to realize that we were lied to, I mean, we were really cheated. And we continue to be cheated. And this is a dominant feeling of people watching that film, you know, among Israeli Jews.

David Pendleton  43:51 

I mean, it seems to me that the heart of the film, in many ways, lies in these memories that people have of Jaffa before 1948. And it sort of points towards, you know, the question of the future of Jaffa and Tel Aviv.

Eyal Sivan  44:06 

Yeah, but this was also, this was also my big worry during the editing, is how not to create an object of nostalgia.

David Pendleton

Um hmm.

Eyal Sivan

And this is why I needed, in a way, this poet Haim Ghouri, which is...we can call him a national poet, saying, it's not a question of nostalgia. It's not just a question of memory, you know. It's not a memory by looking at the past. It’s a ticket to the future. But this goes beyond this idea of just the past in the sake of the past. This is the question of why memory? I mean, what's memory for? I mean, it's kind of an opening to the future. And indeed, the film that I did after Jaffa, it's called Common State, a Potential Conversation, which is about what is called today, or known as the one-state solution or the idea that, in fact, all this two-state negotiation, this two-states idea, that it's a seventy-five-year idea as a solution of Palestine, it's the most illusionary and the most fictionalized idea as a solution to the Palestine–, or if you want, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So this built up the idea [of why] tell history, it's not for the sake of history. But it’s, oh, there is Sting, the singer of The Police, he says history can teach us nothing. History can teach us nothing for the past, but maybe history can teach us something as a ticket. I mean, to use it for the future. When you come and you say, but Jews and Arabs, this is like cats and dogs! You say, yeah, it's cats and dogs maybe today, but before they were not.

David Pendleton

Right.

Eyal Sivan

This is why.

David Pendleton  45:56 

Are there other questions from the audience?

Eyal Sivan  46:01 

I can continue.

David Pendleton  46:03 

[LAUGHS] Well, I mean, I wanted to, well, there's two things, I guess. I think it'd be interesting to hear how you describe more about Potential Conversation. Because, I mean, formerly, what I've seen of it's very interesting. And maybe this can be a trailer for our future screening.

Eyal Sivan

So let's make the trailer. Potential Compensation is very simple [LAUGHS]. Common State, a Potential Compensation is a simple device. It's in fact, it's a split screen, [where] on one side, you have a person speaking, on the other side, you have a person listening. And it happened to be that on the left side are the Palestinians, and the right side are Israelis. They are all sitting, and they are behind, they are in front of a white wall, different walls. And they are discussing the question of the one state. The starting point is that in fact, the one state solution, as it's called, is not a question of the future. We are living in a one state. There is only one state over there, which is the State of Israel. It's the State of Israel that decides, that has the authority on all the territory, I mean, what is called Palestine, historically Palestine in Israel. That the one state exists, that Palestinians and Israelis live together, but bad. So it's not coming and speaking about just the future, it's starting from the present. There is a one state inside a segregated apartheid state, racist, with two different systems of citizenship, if we can call non-citizenship citizenship. And what happened is that, in fact, the people are speaking from the two sides of the screens, one to the other, they are listening, sometimes intervening. But in fact, it's a pure fiction, because those are individual interviews that are edited as if there was a conversation among twenty people. So I built a fiction, a potential conversation, which tries to put a base of what might be, what should be, a conversation about equality, about living together, about commonality, about what will be common. And common is a nice word in English, like in many other languages, because it's just something common, to [no longer] be a state of exception, like Israel is today. And to be a common state, which is common to the people that are living there. And it's an attempt to build a fiction through a documentary, because this conversation never happened. It happened only thanks to the skills of my editor in the editing room.

David Pendleton

And is this part of...

Eyal Sivan  48:54 

There is the trailer for the movie.

David Pendleton  48:57 

[LAUGHS] Which has been completed, and which has started screening.

Eyal Sivan  49:00 

The film is completed, the film was released in Europe, and theatrically, and–

David Pendleton

Just last year, I believe.

Eyal Sivan

Just last year. And next year, we show it here, right?

David Pendleton  49:09 

Yes!

Eyal Sivan

Good.

David Pendleton

And is the idea that there'll be a series of, that Common State will be a series of films, of more than one film?

Eyal Sivan  49:15 

Yeah, so Common State, it's not just– There is that first film. And now we are building a kind of a device for the ‘net. Because the second part... I mean, it happened that this film that in fact was not supposed to be a cinema film, because it was a film that I added to a book, a small essay, political essay, which has the same name, A Common State Between the River and the Sea. It's a book that was published in French, and hopefully will be next fall in English, too. There was a DVD with that film. So there is the political essay with the experience. But since the distributor saw the film in a festival and he liked it very much, and he released it theatrically. And then he said, “Well, you say that it's, it's called Potential Conversation One. So what's Two?” So I said, “Well, I have an idea.” I have an idea, because this one is, you have scholars speaking, you have intellectuals, you kind, I would say, it's a kind of middle-upper class bourgeois film. I wanted to go back, to go also to kind of grassroots experiences. So the new film that we're working on now, it's in fact edited entirely through the intervention of people [who] are uploading their reaction to that film, on the ‘net. And we are editing, through that material, a new film that will be itself edited. I mean, the dream is to create kind of a... to orchestrate kind of a debate, a discussion, following the failure of the Kerry negotiation, and let's hope, the final funeral and burial of the two-state solution. We will need something new. So this will be part of that new. I hope so.

David Pendleton 51:23 

And then– Oh! Oh, sure.

[QUESTION NOT AUDIBLE]

David Pendleton 51:27 

Where has it been uploaded, the film?

Eyal Sivan  51:29 

It's not, not yet. We are working on that. Now the device that’s working, it's the ‘net device [where] the film will be uploaded in chapters, [so] people could react. In fact, it will be a closed thing, it will be Palestinians and Israelis reacting to that film. And this we're going to use, I mean, Palestinians from all over. Including, I mean, until a few weeks ago, we had a contact even from Palestinian refugees in Syria. We just lost the contact in the last week. They were waiting, also, [for us to] upload in order to react. Sometimes it will be through screenings, and it will be shot by other people. I mean, I cannot travel, unfortunately, to Lebanon, and to Syria, which are the two places where there are a lot of Palestinian refugees, and which are really, the core, the main issue of that conflict, the question of the Return. But the film at the moment is available for screening, and for education. Common State, Potential Conversation, One.

David Pendleton  52:31 

Yes.

Audience 5  52:35 

One of the things I was interested to hear you say, that the reaction for people who watched it was, you know, what a waste, and things like that. Because one of the senses that I had, watching it, when you watch one community and one industry, and how it changed, is that it didn't have to happen that way. All those interactions didn't have to result in one group, basically, leaving like that. And it seems like it happened very quickly. And it seems like there were a lot of, you know, accidents, and deliberate manipulations of the situation. But it struck me that, again, because a lot of times when we talk about the problem over here, people treat it like it's inevitable. There's two different groups over there, and they don't agree, and they never will agree. And different people have different approaches to that. They take one side or the other side, or just say it'll never work. But it seemed to me that it didn't have to be that way. And I had the benefit of, in ‘86, going to Sarajevo before, and no one ever expected, that three years later, what I was watching on television was going to happen. And it's just some leaders manipulating images. It's some historical accidents and circumstances that can just, you know, that can just be the cigarette that lights the gas station on fire. And I wanted to know if you had that sense, that part of what is a waste about it is that there were seventy different ways that could have turned out, in the late 40s. And it ended up turning out that way.

Eyal Sivan  54:10 

Well, yes and no, in the same time. Yes, yes, I mean, I think, it happened that I did a film also, in the former Yugoslavia, in Bosnia, and so because of, also, my interest in Israel-Palestine. And in the same time, when you read it backwards, you have the impression that it's one moment that it could go in one way or in another. But in the same time, we have to remember that we are talking [about] a process. We are talking [about] a process, and we are talking about a situation which is a native population that will accept...and I think that there is Mohammed Yazbek that is saying it in the film, he’s saying, well, it's the Palestinians who taught the Jews how to make oranges. But they didn't imagine that the same ones would be the ones that will kick them from the orchards. And I think that what happened is that there was this... The colonial settler attitude of mainstream Zionism was a plan. The idea that we are coming to a land without people, which is for a people without land, was the main slogan within Zionism. You know, there is this big thinker of left Zionism, one of the leaders of the kibbutz movement, that in the 40s say, go to the Galilee. Settle there. There is nothing. There is only Bedouins, cactuses, and rocks. There's nothing. Bedouin, cactuses and rocks. So there was this thing about a total denial [of why there is] an indigenous population. This is one. So there was a movement, there was a permanent movement of uprooting the indigenous population.

But I think that we have to put it in the context of the 40s, what happened in the 40s. I mean, transfer of population in the 40s, it's not a big issue. I mean, imagine all those millions of people transferred from different places. Colonialism. It's not how we looked at it at the time. It looks like progress, like bringing something to the place. And specially that there was a moment that the Brits, and then other Western countries, decided to take the side of Zionism, of main Zionism. But Zionism was prepared [for] that. Zionism started to build a state. And if we think about the Palestine question from 1915 already, the vision was that the solution will be division. In fact, [the whole] Middle East question... and I think that we are living today, the real, maybe, decolonization of that... was about creating divisions within that Middle East that didn't correspond to the way that people were living over there. And if there is a division, among the division of the Middle East is to create Palestine as something that doesn't allow this big union, from the Maghreb to Iran, in a way. I mean, this is the presence of Israel. And this pattern of divide, the division of the division, or if you want, partition of partition, this is what prevails until today. I mean, when we think about what today has brought, or is considered the most consensual position concerning the Israeli conflict, will be the creation of two states, right? Which is a partition. A partition of what? A partition of that partition that was voted in 1947 that was already a partition. That we are working... It's the salami system, you know, it's slice by slice, slice by slice. The problem is that in the salami, in the end, you get this metal thing which you cannot swallow. So it's all the idea of the division. It's this pattern of division. 1947. The vote of 1947 in the United Nations for the creation of Arab in a Jew state, where the minority is getting 66% of the land, while they are owning 5 to 8%, I'm talking about the Jews at the place. This was a deliberate decision of Western countries, but it's not unique. In India, in the same time, also there is a Partition that created millions of displaced people, and millions of deaths out of it. So what we can say is, it could work in another way [but there] would have to be a change in the idea that a geopolitical solution goes obviously through partition. But we can say that since the 40s, until today, partition still prevails as a way of colonial governing. This is the Iraq issue. This is the Syria issue. [These are] the other issues of the Middle East about how to keep partitions in order to rule.

David Pendleton  1:00:01 

Yes, Ann. Go ahead.

[QUESTION NOT AUDIBLE]

Eyal Sivan

Hmmmm??

David Pendleton  1:00:11 

The question is, what would be the boundaries of this new state?

Eyal Sivan  1:00:16 

I think that in the boundary–

[INAUDIBLE QUESTION]

Eyal Sivan  1:00:21 

Well, I think that there is something that we call a citizen’s state. The boundaries will be the boundaries of historical Palestine. And if you want historical Eretzistine? I mean, the border, the northern border is Syria-Lebanon, and the southern border is Egypt, and the western border is the Mediterranean Sea, and the eastern border will be Jordan. This is the first step. And the second step, maybe it will be a bigger, the United States of the Middle East.

[LAUGHTER]

Is it? It's such a, I mean, imagine that we're standing here before the civil war, and I would say the United States of the Middle East, you will laugh as well, right?

Audience 6  1:01:15 

All these borders were created by the British before 1948.

Eyal Sivan  1:01:18 

Not only. There were two drunk people together, it was Sykes and Picot that sat together, and they decided to draw a map, like this. You know, there are even places that you see in the map, when you look at this Libyan moment, you know, there is somebody that holds the pen, but he was with his finger. So straight line, and then it goes like this, and it goes down.

[LAUGHTER]

And just because somebody put the finger.... Yeah, look, look at the Libyan-Sudanese border, you will see there is a finger over there, like this.

David Pendleton

Yes, we have a... Jim, do you want to...

Eyal Sivan  1:01:54 

But this is, there is the solution for the flag. This is maybe the most obvious result from the film, the flag will be like the Japanese one, but instead the red, it will be an orange.

[LAUGHTER]

Well, this was the flag that the Palestinians wanted in the 20s, as you heard. This is what's fantastic with the orange, it’s something which is common. I mean, it's the only common symbol.

[INAUDIBLE QUESTION]

Eyal Sivan  1:02:33 

Yeah, we have the orange, especially the... Soon, I mean, today, there [are] no anymore Jaffa oranges. All the Jaffa oranges that people can buy in Europe, in fact, they are coming from South Africa and from Peru, because it was branded. So you buy Jaffas from South Africa, and Jaffas from Peru, so it would be even a nostalgic flag. But I don't think that the flag is really the issue. I think that really, I think that the real issue, it's not either the borders or the flag. And I think that it's kind of bearing the paradigm of partition as geopolitical solution. And I think that it was shown strong in former Yugoslavia. I mean, these Dayton agreements, which are based on the idea of partition, at the same time, cannot work. They can work only because of military presence, happens to be that it's the United Nations and other... Like the partition of Palestine, which...  the first idea of partition of Palestine: 1937. I mean, seventy-five years, we are being told that this is the most realistic solution. I mean, this is realistic, this is the most realistic solution. We can just wonder how it happened, if it's so realistic, that it doesn't happen.

David Pendleton  1:03:42 

There was a question over here, yes?

Audience 7  1:03:45 

I wanted to come back to the film we just saw. And I noticed the strategy of this film is really different from the one yesterday, which gave so much space for the viewer to kind of draw his or her own conclusions. And I felt that here, you're really... in your efforts to deconstruct and de-propagandize the images, you're very wary of letting them go for even a minute without having someone tell us what we need to be learning from them. Or how it's different from what our first take on it would be. And I wondered about that. I wondered how you thought about... like it's constructed basically as an educational experience for the viewer. And it was, I mean, I didn't realize that deep in my inner recesses of my mind was still this stuff about making the desert bloom, and so on, and so forth, that I heard in elementary school, you know? So that was like, wow! Yeah, I still sort of thought that, you know? But how did you think about creating that whole process?

Eyal Sivan  1:04:54 

Well, it was a big debate, both in the editing room with my editor, the same person that I'm working [with for] the last almost twenty years now, and with myself. Which was, to what extent, I mean, what it means to deconstruct propaganda, in the same time being aware that by deconstructing propaganda, re-articulating it, in fact, you're re-articulating a kind of propaganda. But I took the decision out of my idea that, in fact, my work in Palestine-Israel, and Israel-Palestine is just... this is my white mice. This is my lab. Indeed, I [made] the decision to make a more educational or didactical film, not by exposing just Palestine-Israel, but coming back to the idea that the image is an object of reading, and the image doesn't show, the image hides, and that the question is not what there is in the image, but the question is what I'm giving to be seen, etc. So I would believe, or I want to believe that any image that will be seen by my public following this film, will be critically viewed through the ideas of that film. And this was the decision: to take what you call “education” and a pedagogical way of beginning, to go beyond the Israel-Palestine question, and to go out from that idea that I saw in the image, or this image shows. I mean, I'm continuing to defend, and permanently, the idea that an image—and I said it yesterday, I apologize for those who’ve been here yesterday—that an image is more about hiding than about showing. I mean, in order to make an image, we have to hide, especially when we're talking about nonfiction, or “cinema of reality,” as in French we like to call it. It's about hiding, in order to emphasize something else to be to be seen. And I think that to remember that thing is also a change about the idea of, I saw on TV, right? It's not what I've seen on TV, it's what I've been shown on TV. This relation that I'm interested in... this critical relation to the image. And I said yesterday, it wasn't just a game of words. I sincerely believe that part of my work is in the same time cinematic, but in the same time, it's against cinema. I think I'm highly critical about, of course, entertainment cinema. But not just about that, but about the participation, the [willingness] to participate, if not the collaboration of cinema and image-making in political crimes.

David Pendleton  1:08:08 

But at the same time, cinema can also be a resistance against political crimes, no?

Eyal Sivan  1:08:15 

Yeah! But in this case, the resistance is... You have to assume, in that case, that there is a need also to critique cinema.

David Pendleton

Sure.

Eyal Sivan

I mean, I think that part of our contemporary work is in the same time to work with cinema, but at the same time to work against cinema. I mean, this is a permanent conflict, and a permanent, critical distance that we have to keep. Which is in the same time, remembering. Remembering also the roots of documentary. Accepting the fact that it's not just the creative documentary, or the creative nonfiction cinema on one hand, and there is this bad boy that we call the propaganda. No! It's part of the family, and in the family there are those that you regret that they are part of your family.

[LAUGHTER]

David Pendleton 1:09:10 

If there aren’t any other questions or comments, maybe I'll just ask you to say, in conclusion, a few words to introduce Route 181, for tomorrow.

Eyal Sivan 1:09:20 

Oh, right! Route 181 is a film that was born in… I’m saying “born” because we are two parents of that film. It's Michel Khleifi, [who] is a Palestinian filmmaker, maybe the Palestinian filmmaker, because he’s the first independent Palestinian filmmaker. I mean, the first Palestinian that produced films outside of the Palestine Liberation Organization, already in the beginning of the 80s, with very important films like Wedding in Galilee and others.

In 2002, there's this moment where the Israeli army will reinvade some of the areas that were left for the Palestinian Authority, and [there] will be a massive destruction, and a campaign of violence from the side of the Israelis, but also, it was that horrible period of suicide operations by the Palestinian resistance. And one of the things that Michel and myself, both of us—Michel lives in Brussels; I was in Paris at that time. And we were sitting as friends, [we’ve known] each other many years. And we said, “Okay. So, what can we do?” A few years before, there were the Oslo agreements then, and we were contacted by the European Union, proposing to Michel and myself to make a film together for peace. An Israeli and a Palestinian, we were offered a lot of money, and we declined this very generous offer. We were reluctant to believe that peace is coming. We were right. I mean, we were among those that didn't believe in Oslo at all. But in that horrible moment of suicide attack, Israeli violence, we were sitting, and said, “what shall we do?” And for many years before that, we didn't do films in Israel and Palestine. So we said, “well, let's travel together and figure out what to do.” And that’s what we did. We in fact, went together, we went to travel, and then we had to find how you travel. I mean, to go what, from friend to friend, how to travel? And then we, during a discussion, or all night of discussion, we said, “How [did we get] to this situation that we're living now? In fact, when [did] this moment of separation [start]?” And we shouldn't forget that one of the horrors of Oslo—or what is called the Oslo process, the peace process—is the ideology of separation, which was the big invention of Rabin... was the separation. That we are here, they are there. This was the slogan. But this separation starts, in fact, with this idea of partition of Palestine, which was the first war.

So we took the map that was drawn by the United Nations for the partition of Palestine, that was voted in Resolution 181 of the General Assembly, and we said, “okay, we will travel on that border that never exists, which is the separation.” We named that Route 181. It's a route that doesn't exist, so we had a fictional device. And we took three maps. We took the map with that line. We put the line on a map of Israel today, and the map of Israel that was transparent, we put behind the last map, British map of 1946 of Palestine. So we traveled from south to north, and to travel from the south of Israel to the north of Israel, it takes four hours. The film is almost a real-time journey, right? We just traveled four hours. But we travel on a road that doesn't exist; it's imaginary. And the idea is that each time that we see a person, or we see a place, we stop, and we talk to him. It’s encounters on the road. It's a real road movie, on that road. And basically, it's the people that each time are asking us the first question. “What [are you] doing here?” We said, “Well, we are traveling on the partition road.” “What partition?” And it's kind of an archaeology, both of present and the past. And it's a journey of... On purpose, we don't distinguish between who is interviewing who. There is no reflection, me the Israeli, you the Palestinian, how we were. No! All this doesn’t... It's encounters with people. With people, and especially with this land, with a country that we don't see as such, because we see it always as a news spot, as a media spot. So it's a journey. It's an invitation to travel for those who are afraid, or don't have money to go over there, or wisely enough boycott. So you can just spend a journey of four hours tomorrow and enjoy.

Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE]

David Pendleton

Yeah, thanks to you. Thank you. 

© Harvard Film Archive