VHS, 43:00, col., USA March 1990. Director, Camera, Script, Editing und Sound:
Elia Suleiman und Jayce Salloum.
So many films about Palestinians seem to concede defeat at the outset, trying
to prove, for instance, that Palestinians are also human, that they too
deserve freedom, that they too are heroic, and so on, ad infinitum. While there
is nothing inherently wrong with such messages, it seems to presuppose that
assumptions of the oppressor to be correct, since they must somehow be proven
wrong.
The problem is that many of these films simply end up reinforcing "positive"
imagery just as one-
dimensional
and stereotypical as the "negative" imagery of Arabs in pro-
lsraeli
or Western films without really emerging with a unique or original point of
view. In this sense, Elia Suleiman and Jayce Salloum's work-
in-
progress,
INTIFADE: SPEAKING FOR ONESELF, is quite unlike anything that has been done on
either the Palestinians or Arabs in general. Here, the filmmakers have taken
the dominant and oppressive structures to tast at their own game by redeploying
the most blatantly racist and stereotypical imagery they could find in an
entirely new context.
