Society and space

“Five Broken Geographies”

Emad Burnat & Guy Davidi (2011) 5 Broken Cameras New York: Kino Lorber. Available at http://www.kinolorber.com/5brokencameras/ or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIdm3BJJv3s

5 Broken Cameras documents approximately five years of political protests and other aspects of daily life in the Palestinian village of Bil’in between 2005 and 2010. It is similar to a number of other recent documentary films about contemporary Palestinian life including Budrus (2009), The Iron Wall (2006) and Slingshot Hip Hop (2008). That 5 Broken Cameras has managed to stand out from this crowd to garner an Oscar nomination and various other awards speaks to its strength at depicting what I here term five broken geographies: the ways in which Palestinian space has been fractured, degraded, destroyed and stolen by Israeli colonialism. While such geographies have certainly been studied and written about, they have rarely been seen, which is to say, made see-able, in the lucid and compelling way that 5 Broken Cameras accomplishes. In what follows I want to summarise the film’s depiction of these geographies.

1. Land

Israel began to build its Wall/barrier/separation fence, largely in the Occupied West Bank, in 2002 during the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising. Although ruled illegal under international law by the International Court of Justice in 2004 <http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/files/131/1671.pdf>, construction of the Wall on land belonging to the village of Bil’in began in the same year. Bil’in, a small, largely agricultural village in the West of the Ramallah governorate, first had land stolen by Israeli settler-colonists in the 1980s (Hammad 2011). After roughly 60% of the village’s land was confiscated by the construction of the Wall in 2004, the villagers formed a popular committee in early 2005 and began weekly non-violent demonstrations each Friday, after noontime prayers. This is, chronologically, where 5 Broken Cameras begins (although see section 3 below).

The film’s protagonist, Emad Burnat, uses his cameras to visually record Israeli colonialism and Palestinian resistance to it. Throughout the film, Burnat vividly captures the ways in which colonialism as an everyday practice attacks and steals the land. The viewer witnesses olive trees being torn up from the ground at one point, and then an olive grove set on fire during the night by settler-colonists. The result of such practices, clearly visible when the barrier is finally removed in 2011, is a scarred earth. In another scene, Emad and his friends stand imprisoned behind the newly constructed barrier, watching the rapid construction of one of the two nearby Israeli settlement-colonies that have been built on stolen village land. Emad explains what is being lost in a concise voice over. The land of Bil’in not only feeds, but also connects the people of the village.

Emad’s mother pleads with an Israeli soldier to release her son Khaled after he is arrested (Credit: Kino Lorber, Inc)

2. The Body

The second space 5 Broken Cameras stages with often sickening immediacy is that of the body – maimed, detained and broken. We listen to the gut-wrenching cough of Emad’s youngest son, Gibreel, as his lungs desperately try to exhale the tear gas that has been fired all over the village by Israeli soldiers. We see Emad himself with a line of staples running down the length of his torso like a zip, after his car crashes into the illegal Israeli Wall. Emad’s brothers disappear and then reappear later in the film after periods of imprisonment. The filmmaker himself is placed under house arrest outside Bil’in for one month, on charges of stone throwing. Settler-colonists destroy one of the titular five cameras while beating Emad and other villagers who try, non-violently, to prevent their land from being stolen. Perhaps the most shocking image of all is when Emad films the lifeless body of his friend, ‘Phil’, killed by a high velocity tear gas canister.

3. Intimacy

At the core of the film, and perhaps what makes it so powerful, is the intimacy between family members and friends. The film begins when Emad gets his first camera, on the occasion of his youngest son’s birth. From this moment onwards, 5 Broken Cameras is testament to the intimacy of colonial violence (Pain and Staeheli forthcoming). Everyday family practices are frequently disrupted by the imprisonment or hospitalisation of family members. At one point, Emad’s parents cling to an Israeli army jeep inside which their son, the filmmaker’s brother, is being detained. Later, Soraya, Emad’s wife, pleads with her husband not to continue filming for fear of being arrested for a third time. Through Emad’s camera lens, we see family homes being invaded by the Israeli army in the middle of the night. Intimacy in Bil’in is strained and stretched, and it also becomes a means of marking broader political events. Emad tells us how each of his four sons experienced a different childhood according to the political events that were occurring when they were born: hope, uncertainty and death.

Adeeb & Phil participate in a protest against the Israeli settlements (Credit: Kino Lorber, Inc)

4. Law

Law has long been a colonial technology of dispossession (Harris 2004). 5 Broken Cameras cinematically renders law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories in a manner akin to an Escher lithograph. The camera films Israeli settler-colonists placing trailers in the middle of the night on Palestinian land. These are illegal under even Israeli law, but are used to create ‘facts on the ground’ – colonialism as fait accompli. However, when the villagers from Bil’in mimic this gesture and create their own facts on their own ground, their container is removed the very next day. A second attempt meets the same fate. The illegal trailers of the Israeli settler colonists meanwhile become concrete structures. This material transformation enacts a legal transformation, as illegal structures become ‘legal’ (according to Israeli law), and cannot be removed by the Israeli army. Even more perversely, later in the film Emad’s family are told to leave their own home, because the village of Bil’in has been deemed a ‘closed military zone’ by the Israeli army, and thus the act of residing in their own home becomes illegal.

5. Technology

The titular 5 broken cameras embody the vulnerability of Palestinian technology in the face of the violence of colonial occupation. But the cameras are also a figure for a more general destruction of Palestinian productive capacity. This includes both the loss of agriculture land (which we see in the film), and the near paralysis of the manufacturing sector caused by colonial borders that won’t allow key materials to enter or leave the Occupied Palestinian Territories (which the film does not show). Coupled with this destruction are forms of Israeli construction. Periodically throughout the film, the seemingly benign, but thoroughly complicit machines of the Israeli construction industry hum away in the distant background, perpetuating the creep of the colonizer’s land grab.

The 6^th camera, the sixth geography

The geographies outlined above mirror the titular cameras. However, at the end of the film we find out that there is nevertheless a 6^th camera, that endures (at least until the completion of the film). Likewise, alongside the five broken geographies there is also a sixth geography. This is a geography of resistance that works through and retools these five other broken geographies. The villagers are able to occupy their own land, and prevent further theft, by constructing their own fact on the ground: a concrete hut. Whenever they have a chance, the villages also continue to access and nurture their land on the ‘far’ side of Israel’s wall that has become accessible only through a small gate with erratic opening hours. Their bodies also relentlessly confront the Israeli Occupation forces. For the most part, those that are injured and maimed endure and heal. The intimacy of family and friendship enables the protests to continue for five years, and supports those whose loved ones are imprisoned or killed. Some of the footage of Emad’s family life also provides occasional glimpses of what the Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish once termed hope for a ‘normal’ life, where Palestinians are neither heroes nor victims, < http://www.wworld.org/programs/middleEast.asp?ID=132>. Law ultimately becomes the tool by which parts of the Israeli Wall are moved, allowing the village to reclaim some of its land. And Emad’s camera provides – both literally and figuratively – a focal point for the resistance. We watch as he screens footage to a large group of villagers, and tells us that this act enables not only the building of solidarity within Bil’in, but beyond, in other Palestinian villages. And subsequently, the film that became 5 Broken Cameras has been screened around the world and proliferates those connections. Undoubtedly a form of what Suzanne Hammad (2012) terms ‘emplaced resistance’, which nevertheless travels beyond Israel’s Wall and checkpoints, prisons and settlement-colonies, 5 Broken Cameras will be useful for both teaching and activism.

Christopher Harker, Department of Geography, Durham University, Science Laboratories, South Road Durham DH1 3LE, UK

References

Hammad S, 2011, “Senses of place in flux: a generational approach” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 31(9/10) 555-568

Hammad S, 2012, What I say comes from my everyday reality, from deep inside: An ‘Emplaced’ Study of Resistance in Bil’in Village, Palestine PhD Thesis, School of Sociology, Social Policy & Social Work, Queen’s University Belfast

Harris C, 2004, “How Did Colonialism Dispossess? Comments from an Edge of Empire” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94(1) 165-182

Pain R, Staeheli L, eds., forthcoming, “Special section: Remapping Violent Insecurities” Area forthcoming

Films

Budrus. Directed by Julia Bacha. 2009. Washington, DC: Just Vision. Available at http://www.justvision.org/budrus or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Axh6qvHCTLA

Slingshot Hip Hop. Directed by Jackie Reem Salloum. 2008. Unknown, USA: Fresh Booza Productions. Available at http://www.slingshothiphop.com or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5VZm_lwqX8

The Iron Wall. Directed by Mohammed Alatar. 2006. Jerusalem, Palestine: Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committee/Palestinians for Peace and Democracy. Available at http://palestineonlinestore.com/shop/the-iron-wall/ or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFBamQ2aONA