Jewish Quarterly » Film

Unothering the Other: Ajami/The Infidel

Josh Appignanesi — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 10:19:12 +0000

If you’re making a film that wants to attack or explode prejudice there are two approaches. One is comic: ridicule, satire, and sheer irreverence are its means. The other is tragic: to bring an audience into close empathy with the Other, and with other ways of life, making them as familiar as possible to us, and then treat us to the sadness, pain and horror that go along with that ‘othering’ — even, or especially, if the oppressor doing the othering is ‘self’.
I took the former route in making The Infidel, a British feature about a Muslim everyman who finds out he was born a Jew, which I directed from David Baddiel’s script. Ajami, an Israeli-Palestinian co-production (though, instructively, paid for with the kind of European subsidy and investment that UK producers are incapable of accessing), takes the latter. Eschewing the conventional Self-Other duality, Ajami evokes a complex world in which the Other is everyone and everyone becomes other. Otherness is the prevailing state of mind. The lives of ordinary young Israeli Arabs, Palestinians and Israeli Jews converge in the Ajami ghetto of Yaffa, where the challenges of living under Israeli inequality drive them deeper into danger and conflict with each other and society. Ajami complicates the ethnic Other with the economic Other, showing how money and its unequal distribution inflames tension as much as political borders. Under these conditions, people inevitably do bad things to each other even when — precisely when — acting in good faith.
No doubt the film’s power is partly a function of the much-touted admixture of the backgrounds of the co-creators — one is Israeli Jewish, the other Palestinian. But knowing your subject is not enough; that knowledge then requires a skilful and committed translation into the filmic medium. One pitfall when attempting to make the Other likeable, sympathetic, comprehensible — less ‘other’ — is a patronising sentimentalism, falling into liberal clichés of the noble victim. Ajami avoids this through a deep knowledge of its protagonists. It has authenticity and verity in spades. The story of Ajami unfolds in what Alissa Quart has called a ‘hyperlinked’ narrative — interthreading stories that reveal new aspects of each other. Its quasi documentary sense of street reality — boys together, hanging out and getting into scrapes — is reminiscent of America’s The Wire. And like The Wire, while still bleak in its final warnings and true to political reality, it avoids both didacticism and cynicism, largely because the scenes of youthful exuberance, camaraderie and kindness are so touching, amusing, and plausible that they constitute hope enough, a potent reminder of the human. In Ajami this crucial verity is largely achieved through close, lengthy work with non-actors in workshops, preparing the ground for a shoot where the actors weren’t given the script, with each scene shot only once to preserve the freshness and reality of reactions — very hard things to do. It’s an inheritance going back via Ken Loach and neo-realism to Jean Rouch, the anthropologist who coined the term Verité and was the first to use such revelatory techniques.
But even with other technical approaches, I feel recent Israeli cinema has been distinguished by a particularly empathetic eye for empathy, for allowing us to empathise with empathetic people, people trapped in all sorts of ways, internal and external. Whether in dramas like Broken Wings or the recent spate of penitent war films about hunkered-down, insecure young men with guns, the hope enlivened by these moving depictions of trapped humanity, of hope beyond hope, is perhaps the only kind that a generation of Israeli filmmakers feel they have access to.
With the comic approach, the narrative and performative pitfalls are the same but in the diametrically opposed direction: how far do you go with comic exaggeration, with an implausibility or untruth that hopes to reveal the truth of our prejudices, less through empathy than through the equally visceral and explosive mode of laughter? Here, hope hopes to be resuscitated less through the depiction of hope itself than through the reminder of our own foolishness. The danger is that, in resurrecting (and exaggerating) those stereotypes so necessary for comedy, one recycles them rather than harness their subversive power. In The Infidel we tried to keep the comic ball moving so that each character, each joke, each stereotype would undermine itself in the next scene. We choreographed a sequence of comic inversions and upsets intended to amuse and to complicate our understanding of those precious categories and false dualities so central in our imaginations : Muslim and Jew, religious and irreligious, British and immigrant, American and British. I wanted to walk a tonal line between the comic and the dramatic, between the subversive potential of the cartoon, and a humanising, plausible narrative about an everyman whose dilemma engages just enough to want to follow him through ninety-minutes — something that the pure cartoon or the sketch doesn’t need to bother with. In this, I was greatly assisted by the big, warm fuzzy heart of the star, Omid Djalili.
Both films want to disturb entrenched views, but is that their only similarity? The fact that I’ve even been asked to write this article suggests not. Yet what can the specificities of life in Ajami, in modern Israel with its bleak immigrant realities —Arab Muslims, Arab Christians, Israeli Arabs and corrupt Jewish cops — really have to do with Omid Djalili’s Infidel, a buffoonish Homer Simpson figure, a British Pakistani, an ordinary London bloke who likes football and beans on toast, a man hurled into a comic abyss of identity politics through the discovery of a hidden Jewish history? They’re totally different stories, places, historical structures. Perhaps the terms “Jew” and “Muslim” have become so calcified that despite the infinite political, religious and ethnic diversity of a billion Muslims and of a worldwide diaspora of Jews, they are fated to inhabit a single, uneasy duality in the common consciousness, no matter where in that diversity you peer.
Certainly the overdetermination of Israel and the Middle East, and the burden placed upon it by two thousand years of competing ideologies, oil and postwar colonial history, have enabled a toxic slippage of the term Jew with Israeli and Arab with Muslim. The Infidel depends on this duality for its comic mileage. In the post 9/11, post cold-war era this false Jew-Arab duality has come to embody the the battlelines upon which the global geo-political struggle is pitched. It’s worth remembering that to many Arabs, of course, Jews are more often seen as European colonisers, another kind of Other. Once again, the very malleability of that wandering, spectral identity par excellence — the Jew — seems to attract and function as a barometer for prejudice. If nothing else, therefore, the burden of that identity is one that is also full of hope for change.
Perhaps the underlying philosophical link to these wildly contrasting films is the notion that new generations are questioning those inherited prejudices upon which the continuity of communities has rested. What remains most radical here is perhaps the vexed and shifting notion of community itself, so closely allied to the idea of the family, but also, crucially for filmmakers, to the idea of the audience.

The Infidel will be released on dvd in August 2010.
Ajami is released on June 18th.

My Jewish Oeuvre

Paul Morrison — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 09:59:18 +0000

It was 1987. I was working as a documentary maker in television. A puzzle was eating away at me. It had dawned on me that I saw nothing on TV that reflected the lives of the ordinary Jewish folks I had grown up with. No characters in dramas or sitcoms. No documentaries. No British Lennie Bruce or Woody Allen. No nothing apart from Miriam Karlin’s character in The Rag Trade, an East End sweat-shop sitcom that had been out in the early sixties and reprised briefly in the seventies. And Jack Rosenthal’s Barmitzvah Boy. Why?Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

Paul Morrison will be answering questions at a special Jewish Film Festival screening of Solomon and Gaenor at the Tricycle Theatre on June 23 at 8.30pm. Wondrous Oblivion and Little Ashes are available on DVD from the usual outlets, Solomon and Gaenor via assistant@metfilm.co.uk.

Notes From A Bimah

Judy Batalion — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 13:46:27 +0000

*severe spoiler alerts

Ruthie, in her gold dress, mumbles a line of her speech about Judith and then is silent. Her hands tremble. We see her cue cards. But she’s not reading what’s on them.
Cut to congregation members who are shouting at her: Louder / Can’t hear you / Speak up / What’s wrong with her / Is she a mute?
Finally, cut back to Ruthie. She responds:
You ask me to be louder, when I’m normally told to be quiet
You ask me to smile, eat more but diet
You tell me today I’m special, when I’ve never been before.
I’ll give you louder… (music begins, voice changes, new scene) hear me roar!

When we decided to make a film that reflected a key moment in Jewish women’s experience, the Knish Collective decided to focus on the moment just before delivering the bat mitzvah address on the bimah. This hyper-important moment, emblematic of the transition into adulthood, is a staple scene for all bar mitzvah films; it’s a sign of the trope. The ‘Bimah moment’ might be said to characterize the genre.Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

Stephen Poliakoff in conversation with Melvyn Bragg

Rachel Lasserson — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 18:23:23 +0000

The annual Jacob Sonntag Memorial Event at RIBA, November 20th.

MB:    Let’s start at the beginning, taking the strands from your early life; your family — Russian-Jewish; your education — prep school, public school, Cambridge; and your Left-ish culture and politics. So let’s take them one at a time, what you think they gave you and how they matter to you.
SP:        My father and his parents came over from Russia in 1924, when he was fourteen. His fourteen years in Russia were the most vivid part of his life, he told stories about them again and again throughout my childhood. And very good stories they were; told quite slowly — maybe that’s where I get my pacing from. They had a flat near Red Square and he literally witnessed the October revolution from his bedroom window. They had rather a dramatic time: near-starvation after the revolution in their rundown Chekhovian dacha after the revolution. And many adventures: they escaped with one diamond hidden in shoe when Stalin came to power. So they were great stories. My mother came from Jewish aristocracy, Viscount Samuel was head of the family — he was head of the Liberals during the General Strike and led the Liberals in the House of Lords. A cousin had been in Asquith’s cabinet. So it was quite a flamboyant background and that was a pivotal thing in my life, I suppose.
MB:    Your father’s stories about Russia, were they stories of regret that he was not still there?
SP:        No. He was fascinated by Russia, loved talking about all things Russian. He was impatient with what he considered any form of banality and I think my straining for originality comes from that. Anything remotely commonplace that you came up with at the dinner table was jumped upon. He had a violent Russian temper, which was very frightening. Russia was a sort of drumbeat behind it all. My Russian grandmother lived at the top of the house until an enormous age and told very romantic stories — about meeting Tolstoy, going to see the first production of The Cherry Orchard. She was very monosyllabic: ‘That was it. I was there’! You couldn’t get anything else out of her!
MB:     So your father brought Russia with him?
SP:        He did, yes.
MB:    Did you feel, therefore, that not only was he in a foreign country but — even though you’d been born here — you were in a foreign country?
SP:        Well, no. He was a great Anglophile, he loved Rolls-Royces and Georgian architecture. My grandfather behaved like a Russian count; he dressed very formally and everything had an ornate Russian gilt to it. My father would kiss peoples’ hands. I grew up feeling that I had nineteenth-century parents.
MB:    That’s the Russian-ness. What about the Jewishness?
SP:        My mother was strongly religious. I mean, she wasn’t very orthodox, we went to the Liberal Synagogue with Rabbi Louis Jacobs. But we always did Friday night, the candles and all that. My father had a fascinating relationship to his Jewishness; he was definitely an atheist but he was fascinated by Jewish stories and culture. So there was an extraordinary schizophrenia, in the sense that he was both distancing himself and obsessed at the same time.
MB:    You say you lit candles on Friday nights; was it in any sense an orthodox family?
SP:        No. Well, we didn’t have seafood or pork. But no. It was fairly hit-and-miss; I’m sure non-kosher things got into the house. My mum would have been appalled at me saying this! But no. We were sort of shambolic.
MB:    What was your father’s occupation?
SP:        They ran a firm which made hearing aids. They did Churchill’s hearing aid and, apparently, MI5 thought — because they were Russians — that they were bugging Churchill’s hearing aid! They were stopped from servicing Churchill’s hearing aid, just in case. They literally had the ear of power! My father was very interested in the idea of power, in seeing it at a glance: as a boy he stayed a night at the Kremlin. He never met Stalin but he remembered an official being called to see Stalin. He loved telling that story — this official scurrying off to Stalin — and I loved hearing it.
MB:    Did the chap who went to meet Stalin come back?
SP:        Ha, yes. That’s why they escaped! The Commissar of Labour who my grandfather had managed to befriend — which was why they’d been allowed to come back to Moscow — was liquidated soon after. They were right in the middle of the revolution. Obviously, it was a very middle-class experience of the revolution but it was extremely vivid.
MB:    You went to a prep school when you were five, and then public school, then Cambridge. You met the English middle classes, upper-middle classes, head on. Were your opinions of them formed then, and if so, what were they?
SP:        My prep school was incredibly old-fashioned, even for the sixties. I was the only Jewish boy there. It was incredibly stereotyped: the headmaster had a wooden leg — straight out of Evelyn Waugh. He was in constant pain and would hit us over the head all the time. I loathed my five years there. We were horrendously badly taught. All the boys were very nice to each other because we were so frightened of the staff. It was like being in a POW camp, there was no bullying at all because we were all suffering these horrible schoolmasters!
Westminster was a more liberal school, and I had a very good time there. Cambridge, interestingly, was the only place I encountered anti-Semitism. It was quite a subtle anti-Semitism: stereotypical assumptions that if you’re Jewish, your parents must be incredibly wealthy furriers or businessmen. Extraordinary in 1972. They weren’t unpleasant to me, they just made these assumptions — their ignorance was quite startling. It may have also been to do with the anti-Semitism of the left: an anti-Semitism based on the assumption that ‘Jewish people are rich’.
MB:    (As a trivial aside, this just proves that Cambridge is far behind Oxford and always has been! I was at Wadham and it was entirely run by people who’ve ever since been my best friends, all of whom were Jews!) Did you leave Cambridge early because it wasn’t giving you what you wanted?
SP:        I took two years off before going up, during which I wrote plays and my academic side somewhat withered. But also the history course at Cambridge, then, was terrible. We had to do the French Revolution in one week! I spent a whole term on it. I wrote a very long essay and my supervisor ran out of the room and vomited! Partly because of excess the night before, but maybe it was also my essay. Anyway, I left.
MB:    You came back to London. It’s said that it was very hard to get on in London at that time if your leanings weren’t to the left. Left politics was driving new ideas in the theatre. Did you fit in with that?
SP:        Yes, I think that’s true. But I was never a didactic writer, I didn’t write agitprop. To my amazement, my leaving Cambridge early earned me a lot of ‘street cred’ on the fringe. Most of us — David Hare, Howard Brenton — were Oxbridge playwrights. And I’d left! The fringe was quite anarchic at that time; there were lots of surrealist plays. It wasn’t all hard-left plays but they were all connected to some sort of agitation about the world: if you’d written about two middle-class people breaking up, you wouldn’t have got the play on. I was writing plays about young people in restless urban settings.
MB:    What inspired you? Your first play was put on when you were fifteen …
SP:        It was only a school play!
MB:    Well, a pretty good school and a pretty good play.
SP:        I was inspired! I loved watching Armchair Theatre, work by Pinter and others. Going to school in Westminster was wonderful. You could walk across the river to the Old Vic and pay three shillings to sit in the gods and watch Olivier. It seems amazing now that the theatre wasn’t always full. Theatre was really exciting.
MB:    But a lot of people have a passion for the theatre. How did that passion transfer into you wanting to write?
SP:        Well, I was in love with the theatre, I wanted to be an actor but I was hopelessly untalented. I realised that I had some talent for writing dialogue. Like many kids, I wrote short stories much of which was in dialogue. Prose didn’t come so easily so I concentrated on what I could do. Then it evolved into plays; that’s really how it started.
I had watched so much television drama and was enchanted by the idea that it touches so many imaginations. Television is incredibly democratic. It reaches across all walks of life, into different geographies, different dwellings. I’ve always found that magical. Even as a child I was aware that, even though I was alone on the carpet watching Pinter and trying to understand it, there were millions of other people all over the country watching it and trying to understand it too.
MB:    Can you talk a little about the distinction between live theatre and television?
SP:        Theatre is like going over the rapids. It’s exciting, nerve-wracking and unique because it varies from night to night. But it can be a struggle to stop the actors coarsening it and playing for laughs. Theatre’s very combustible: there can be magical nights or nights which just don’t work because the audience is very ungiving. It’s also very ephemeral: it used to be said that the reason people — certain people, never you! — didn’t take television seriously as an art form was because it was ephemeral. It just went and how can you take something seriously that’s just gone? With video, and now DVD, it’s become a lasting form. In theatre, very few contemporary plays stay in the repertoire, perhaps one in three thousand. I found that irksome, that my successful plays were never revived. That was a fate shared by every other playwright. Also, theatre doesn’t allow you to reach many people. And often they’re the same people! I’d look at the audience and think, ‘ah, you’re back again’! Theatre is a very tiny club.
The unique thing about television drama is that it can produce worlds without genres. Most movies, to sell, have to be in genres, a thriller or a romantic comedy. In television, writers can dream different visions: some are social-realist, some are completely abstract, some naturalistic, some — like Potter — were extremely bold. That’s a unique tradition: reaching a lot of people without being governed by the American box office. It has been a hugely important tradition in British cultural life.
MB:    I was criticised for my interest in television, but it was superior to anything I saw on the stage. It’s a wonderful example of the way that technology drives culture: as soon as you have access to posterity, then the idea of television being ephemeral has gone and the idea of television being ‘light’ has gone.
Let’s pick out some of your work, starting with Shooting the Past. It has themes that have pursued you, as much as you’ve pursued them, in all your work. Can you tell us what led you to do that film?
SP:        This is a film about a photographic library threatened with closure. I wanted to return to long scenes in television. I’m sure we’ve all seen a still image in a documentary and wished it had stayed for longer. And I wondered how that might apply in a drama, where the photos are actually the story. I also wanted to fight the idea that people couldn’t concentrate for long. I was amazed at the audience reaction.
MB:    Taking aside all modesty, why do you think that was? What nerve do you think it struck?
SP:        Without being falsely modest — not something I suffer from — I think that there was a dearth of authored drama at that time and it all tended to be within genres. The BBC had abolished single plays in the late nineties, so people were grateful to see something that was a surprise. People like being taken into worlds they haven’t seen before.
MB:    Something that seemed to come out of left field was The Lost Prince. It was an amazing hit … where did that come from?
SP:        It related back to my previous work, Perfect Strangers, a drama about a Jewish family reunion. One of the mysteries in that piece was a photograph of this boy in a prince costume. Then The Independent ran a piece on Prince John, the hidden prince. I was haunted by this but thought someone else should do the story; the royal family’s not really for me. Years went by, and I thought I should. ‘Faction’ was new for me. I felt that someone would ask me what I had invented — in order to reflect a wider dramatic truth — and what had really happened. But nobody ever did ask that question. When the script was published, I published all my ‘homework’ with it. I don’t know if anyone’s ever read it! Anyway, The Lost Prince was the conjunction between my imagery from Perfect Strangers and a true story. The life of that boy is an extraordinary dramatic arc from the Ruritanian splendour of Edward VII’s court, to the abstemious household of George and Mary at Sandringham, and ending with the First World War. John died the day they sat down to negotiate the Treaty of Versailles. They were related to the Russian royal family as well as the Germans they were fighting! It was an irresistible dramatic arc but extremely hard to write. I just couldn’t write the words ‘Buckingham Palace’! It felt ludicrous! So I ended up writing ‘the big house in London’! It was also hard to animate the family. I didn’t want Mary as a total dragon and George V shouting the whole time. He was a very short man, the head of the Empire. Queen Mary was rather bright and actually quite good-looking before the First World War, which aged her dramatically. So I tried to be historically fresher.
MB:    Did you enjoy this departure into faction?
SP:        Not enormously. It worries me. I prefer to go sideways into history, with fictional characters near things that we know about.
MB:    And the recent trilogy? What was the starting point for that?
SP:        A house, really. I’m very nosy about property, I love locations and thinking about what goes on inside. Imagery from the past, and especially what happened in the thirties, had been filtering into my work from an oblique angle; Shooting the Past and Perfect Strangers are both stories connected with the Holocaust. One thing that I’ve always wanted to dramatise is the people that stood and watched. I had this image of a man troubled with where his father’s money came from. I wanted to get there through a contemporary story about the disjointed sense of urban loneliness. It’s a cliché, but there’s a sense that the further you get away from what happened [the Holocaust], the nearer it seems to come. Now, with distance, we can think about it — possibly — more piercingly. So all those things came together.
We’re all continually troubled and fascinated by the past. Because I had elderly parents — they were born before the First World War and had children late — they shared memories of the whole twentieth century. The first memories my father had were of 1913 and 1914. I suppose that’s why I’m so interested in the past. I spent a lot of my youth writing very contemporary works — because you react against your family — about urban, pop culture, the world of disc jockeys and shopping precincts. As I got older, I was pulled towards a European perspective because I was finally embracing my cultural heritage. I think that’s why I started peering more and more into the past.