TV Note: "The Band's Visit" (9/28)
David Shasha
“The Band’s Visit” will be screened on Encore Drama (DirecTV channel 531) on Monday, September 28th at 7:40 AM
http://www.starz.com/titles/TheBandsVisit
Making the Present Absent: Dissembling Arab Identity in “The Band’s Visit” (Biqur ha-Tizmoret, Eran Kolirins, 2007)
“The Band’s Visit” is a film that can be seen in two mutually conflicting ways:
First, the movie is a deeply moving and compassionate examination of the lives of two groups of human beings; one Israeli Jewish, the other Egyptian Arab. In this reading of the film the malignant politics and hatreds of the region take a back seat to the common humanity that all of us share. In spite of the mistrust and cultural alienation of the two groups, “The Band’s Visit” seeks to find the bonds that link us together. It is a movie that has a strong humanistic undercurrent; a humanism that looks to transcend the things that divide us by showing the viewer that we all have feelings and problems which define who we are as individuals.
Second, “The Band’s Visit” defines for us what the scholar of Israeli cinema Ella Shohat has called the “personal” aspect of Israeli movie art. In her classic book Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation, Shohat presents the development of the Israeli cinema from its humble roots in social realism and a concern for Zionist narratives, to a more personal and intimate art that does not necessarily deal with social and political issues, rather, under the influence of the French New Wave and other cinematic movements of the 1960s, the “personal” aspect of the Israeli cinema took on different ways of telling stories and viewing society.
In her words:
The films’ hermetic discourse that is “provincial,” i.e. Israeli, is repressed as part of a process of complete assimilation to the “universal,” i.e. the West, without demonstrating awareness of the exclusionary mechanisms and discursive formations which determine what is to be regarded as “provincial” and “local” and what is “universal.”
Diverse strategies of inclusion and exclusion are engaged to create this “effect of universality” in the personal films. Often the main characters remain unnamed, thus avoiding specific associations with Israeli milieus, locales, or ethnic origins. (p. 201)
This critical analysis allows us to see how certain facts are left absent in an attempt to give such Israeli films a universal appearance and sublimate within them the ethno-racial component. Given the vast complexities of the political difficulties in Israel, such a strategy has allowed Israeli filmmakers to project a very different, and oftentimes benign, view of the country.
In “The Band’s Visit” the rhetorical strategy outlined by Shohat is made complicated by the nature of the two competing groups that appear in the film.
The story of “The Band’s Visit” is a simple one. A troupe of Egyptian musicians comes to Israel to perform at the opening of a new Arab cultural center. In the first scenes of the movie we learn that the band is left on its own when it first arrives in Israel. No one has come to escort them from the airport to the Arab cultural center. On top of this, the band makes a simple mistake about the name of the place that they are supposed to go to. Because of the peculiarities of the Arabic language which lacks the letter “P” (of course, a great irony given that the name “Palestine” begins with that letter; a letter that turns into a “B” in standard Arabic pronunciation), the band’s leader pronounces the actual locale, Petah Tiqva, as Bet ha-Tiqva. This mispronunciation leads to the band being stranded in a remote Israeli town for a day.
The film then tracks the overnight stay of the Egyptian musicians in the town.
It must first be stated that the town Bet ha-Tiqva is fictional; there is no actual place in Israel by that name. The use of the name, pace Shohat, is a device that enables the story to take on its ironic cast. More importantly, the Jewish residents of Bet ha-Tiqva are not identified as to ethnic origin. All we are told is that the town is in the middle of nowhere and has no real cultural life. A young woman who greets the band as they disembark off the bus tells them that there is no Arab cultural center, “no culture at all” in the town.
This fact has led some Sephardi commentators to remark that Bet ha-Tiqva is what is known in Israeli parlance as a “development town”; a place where many Sephardi immigrants were placed in the 1950s and 60s. These towns were underfunded and the place of much misery for Sephardim. Outside the main centers of Israeli life, the development towns bred crime and unemployment while often serving the larger aims of settling remote border areas of the country in the face of dangerous Palestinian recidivism.
But “The Band’s Visit,” as I have said, does not make clear who the people are who live in this remote and godforsaken town. None of the Jewish characters are given last names and there is no real physical way of determining whether they are of Sephardi or Ashkenazi origin. Indeed, the Israelis of Bet ha-Tiqva are quite generic in their Israeliness. They are – as the cliché would have it – gruff but loveable, tough but compassionate – examples of the Zionist myth of the sabra – prickly on the outside, sweet on the inside.
As the Egyptians walk through the town, lost and alone, they are embraced by a restaurant owner named Dina (played by Ronit Alkabetz) and a couple of young men who are sitting at her café. After having been taunted by what appears to be an Israeli of Middle Eastern origin – his dark skin would indicate as much – the Egyptians find a warm and receptive town that, in spite of the occasional stare and discomfort, treats them with great respect and affection.
“The Band’s Visit” is about the intimate feelings and concerns of its characters. The crusty Egyptian manner of the band’s leader, Tawfiq (played, as has been the case in many Israeli films, by the Jewish actor Sasson Gabbai, himself of Middle Eastern origin, allowing him to look the part of an Egyptian), reflects accurately a very rigid and conservative type that is common in Egyptian culture. The relationship between Tawfiq and the young upstart Khaled is one that speaks to the intimate narrative arc of the movie. Tawfiq is a strict and formal man who follows rules without deviation. The free-spirited Khaled looks for thrills and adventure and does not much care for formalities. Each of these human types brings the viewer closer to the intimate humanity of the Arab characters, marking them not as enemy figures or demonizing them, but as complex human beings with their own issues and difficulties.
The movie takes great pains to bring the Israeli and Egyptian characters together in a way that transcends the parochial issues that we would have expected them to have to deal with. Love, passion and emotion are all filtered through the common language of music that all human beings share.
In the musical aspect, it is fascinating to see the use of the song “My Funny Valentine” – in its Chet Baker version, as we are told on a number of occasions by Khaled – as a marker of unity. Rather than focusing on the music that the band normally plays – that of the classical Arabic tradition, itself an antiquated concept in Arab society these days – the film looks to bring the characters together by deploying somewhat outdated Western standards – the Gershwin classic “Summertime” also makes an appearance in the course of the movie.
This leads us to another peculiarity in the way that the story of the movie is told: the characters’ only common language is a thickly-accented English. As the Israelis do not understand Arabic, and the Egyptians do not know Hebrew, most of the movie’s dialogue is in English. In very practical terms, this created complications for the movie when it was entered into international competitions. As a “foreign” film must have the majority of its dialogue in the country’s native language, the use of English disqualified it from entry in some cases.
On top of this, we need to return to the idea of cultural unification in the context of the tale.
While it is always dangerous and somewhat tricky to analyze a movie for what it does not say, in the case of “The Band’s Visit” it is important to note that the surface humanism the film presents hides the possible presence of a shared cultural vocabulary between the Arabs and Israelis. Indeed, as is common in Israeli culture and its native self-perception, the idea that Jews might be Arabs is a highly contested idea that is left unexplored and unarticulated in the movie. It is simply taken for granted that the Egyptians and Israelis are two completely different groups with nothing but their generic humanity in common.
The movie emphasizes this point in a critical scene which features Dina and Tawfiq sitting in a restaurant discussing music. Dina asks Tawfiq what the importance of the classical Arab music is to him. He responds – in true Arab fashion – by insisting that such a question is akin to questioning the existence of one’s very soul.
This cultural dissonance is a rare moment in the movie that opens for us a cultural gap that marks a split between Arabs and Jews.
But what is left absent from the discussion is the fact that Sephardic Jews maintain the same existential attitude towards the Arabic musical tradition as Tawfiq (made even more ironic by the fact that Mr. Gabbai is himself of Arabic origin).
To take a single example of this fact, we can point to the use of the Um Kulthum song “Inta Omry” in Moshe Mizrahi’s classic Israeli film “The House on Chelouche Street”; a rare Sephardic film that remains a central part of normative Israeli culture. Many years ago, while watching the movie at the Sephardic Film Festival – curated by Ella Shohat – in Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater, I began – as I usually do – to cry when the song was played in the film and was questioned by the incredulous Ashkenazi woman sitting next to me about why I was so emotional about an Arabic song. My answer to her was not nearly as wise as that of Tawfiq to Dina in “The Band’s Visit,” but it tried to communicate the same basic idea: that Middle Easterners have strong ties to the classical Arabic music.
But in “The Band’s Visit” such an existential imperative is left absent. More precisely, it is left absent in a Jewish sense. The Egyptians are naturally permitted to make their musical culture a central part of who they are, but the idea that this same music might also play a critical role in Jewish people is left absent and unspoken.
So the restaurant scene between Tawfiq and Dina works on two different levels – as does the film as a whole: first, we have the sincere attempt to have the two protagonists discover a common humanity by speaking to one another in a free and open manner. There is great poignancy in these exchanges; all of which take place in the context of the misadventures of the story. In this context, the dilemmas and passions of the two groups emerge. We learn the story of Tawfiq’s tragic family life, as we discover the pain of Dina’s childlessness. The stories open up purely human vistas that cannot but impact the viewer. Beyond this, we are kept aware that these people are Arabs and Jews – “enemies” in a political sense.
But to see the film in this manner is to allow it to exclusively determine the terms of engagement in its own way.
Interestingly, the film’s Hebrew title contains an untranslatable pun involving the use of the word “biqur/biqoret.” In Hebrew the word’s root has two meanings: it can mean, as the title rightly indicates, a “visit,” but it can also mean in more technical language, “critical analysis” of some sort, an engagement of an analytical matter. In this dual sense, the Egyptians are not only “visiting” Israel, but are undergoing a sort of “trial” that the film’s narrative seeks to resolve in a humanistic fashion.
Thus it becomes crucial to the film’s storytelling to maintain the binarism without allowing the matter of Arab identity to complicate things. Therefore, the Sephardi/Mizrahi thematic is left absent, even as the cultural complexity of Israeli Judaism involves such a dynamic and has been strongly marked by it. Sephardim are theoretically present in “The Band’s Visit,” but for the purposes of the narrative flow are left absent. We do not have ethnic markers that would identify Sephardim for us.
In another important moment in the film that has been carefully noted by critics, Dina shares her childhood memory of watching the Egyptian films shown every Friday afternoon on Israeli TV. For Israeli Sephardim, the weekly screening of the old Egyptian movies was an event of great importance and Dina rightly brings this to Tawfiq’s attention. But in sharing this information with him, we never get a sense of the relevance of the matter. We are not told whether Dina’s family is Sephardic. The film has closed off any possibility of cultural symbiosis in order to reinforce its generic humanistic cast.
I believe that this move to the “universal” – as Shohat has wisely taught us – is an attempt to valorize the Ashkenazi at the expense of the Sephardi. By complicating the narrative with such cultural absences, the movie implicitly extols the moral superiority of the European tradition. Only Ashkenazi liberals really know how to deal with the Arab-Israeli divide. It is among the Ashkenazi elite that we find truly “humane” values and not in the hybrid syncretism of the benighted Sephardi masses. Sephardim resolutely remain outside the discourse; their Arab culture absent and their existence irrelevant to the movie’s concerns.
Cleverly, the movie leaves absent the Sephardi reality by not naming its characters or giving them actual, empirical ethnic features. The viewer is led to be impressed by the great pathos of the Israeli characters who relate to the Egyptians in a pure and unmediated way. Their feelings are warm and inviting. The personal pain and anguish of the protagonists is shown to be real, even as the narrative is left without any realistic ethno-cultural markers.
As we have said earlier, this rhetorical strategy is a critical part of Israeli cinema in its universalistic aspect. In the past, it has allowed Israeli filmmakers to avoid dealing with the many complexities of the political situation on the ground and tell human stories without the detritus of the endemic and perpetual violence that is a constant presence in the country.
In the case of “The Band’s Visit,” this “universalism” seeks to white out any possible identification of Jewish culture with Arabic culture. By way of compensation, the movie extols the values of the universal humanism of the Zionist founders – all Ashkenazim – who sought to create in Israel a liberal, secular state that would live in peace with its Arab neighbors.
But what the absence of Arab Jewish culture in Israeli society teaches us is that Zionism sought to eviscerate the native culture of the region and to rewrite that history in order to elevate the Ashkenazi-European civilization at the expense of the Arab-Eastern one.
A film like “The Band’s Visit” thus recapitulates the standard Ashkenazi-Zionist view by leaving Sephardim out of the narrative. Israeli Jews are not Sephardim – nor are they Ashkenazim – they are just Jews who have no ethnic marker. But their default culture is presented in opposition to that of the Arab. It does not take a rocket scientist to realize that Israeli culture is that of the European. The Eastern tradition does not play any role in it whatever.
So in analyzing the complex process of cultural dissonance in the movie, we are faced with the dual meaning of the term “biqur/biqoret.” The Egyptians come to “visit” Israel, implying an engagement with the “enemy.” But the Egyptians are faced with a series of trials that force them to shed their specific ethno-cultural identity and enter into a human encounter with the Israeli Jews.
Given the state of difficulty that Arabs and Jews face in the Middle East, most viewers will see their encounter and the way it is presented in the movie as progressive and enlightened. Indeed, the movie is skillfully executed in the way that it brings the stories of the Egyptians and Israelis together. Kolirins has created an inviting and appealing context that warms the hearts of its audience. Using pathos, comedy and drama to marvelous effect, “The Band’s Visit” is an impressive statement that the writer Youssef Ibrahim marked as a model for peaceful dialogue in his 2007 New York Sun review of the film.
Going back to the argument that I have been making in my writings on Middle Eastern dialogue, it can just as rightly be seen that “The Band’s Visit” overdetermines the manner in which such a dialogue is to be conducted. Without looking to constrict the movie to some variant of social realism where the political must exclusively take precedence over the personal, it must be said that the film’s cultural blankness serves to valorize one cultural tradition over another. Rather than examine the ways in which Jews and Arabs share a culture, the movie militantly asserts that dialogue can only take place between enemies.
This discursive model has been the dominant modality for many decades of discussion on the Middle East conflict. The absence of Sephardim from the conversation has closed off the possibility of a unifying discourse that would connect Arabs and Jews at a more essential level of existential meaning. The simple fact of a song like “Inta Omry” being part of both the Arab and the Jewish cultural tradition(s) is proof positive that there is another way for us to speak to one another. As I have also argued, Sephardim have regrettably bought into this “truth” and have come to reject their own cultural heritage in the process. This has, ironically, led to Sephardi Arab-hatred as a critical part of the Israeli landscape.
But it is critical to note that the “biqur/biqoret” of “The Band’s Visit” is a “visit” by one group to the home of the other; a crossing over from one domain to an-other. The two domains are seen as mutually exclusive in ways that are strictly determinative. That “biqoret” can also mean an existential or critical challenge is something that the movie overlooks.
Thus, “The Band’s Visit” is a movie with two mutually conflicting agendas:
On the one hand, the movie seeks to bring Arabs and Jews together in a way that valorizes their common humanity.
On the other hand, the movie demarcates cultural lines of exclusion by emphatically denying Arab Jewish identity and its connection to Arab non-Jews.
By refusing the idea that Jews can be Arabs, the institution of a generic humanist posture supports the supremacy of the European culture over the Arab and, even more importantly, privileges the Ashkenazim – those Jews who hold the European civilization as their own – over the Sephardim; the Sephardim being more like the very Arabs that the European Jews are so skillfully and compassionately engaging.
Thus, at the surface level, “The Band’s Visit” is a rich and rewarding film that speaks to the humanity in all of us. Its characterizations of the Egyptians and Israelis resonate with the universal imperatives of liberal humanism. It is in the common parlance a “feel-good” movie that has been designed to ennoble us in our search for better and more productive ways of dealing peacefully with problems that are often seen as intractable. It is a movie that many viewers will see as “enlightened” and “progressive.” It is skillfully made and successfully tells a compelling story of human beings caught in circumstances beyond their control, simply trying to express their basic humanity.
But under the film’s surface lies a complex of issues that seeks to exclude cultural identities in a way that extols the value of the “generic” (here read: “Ashkenazi”/European). The second reading of the movie undermines the surface reading of a progressive, liberal humanism.
By forcing Sephardic Jews and Sephardic culture to remain absent from the film, the ideological force of the movie is subverted. What was once a warm, “feel-good” story becomes, by dint of a more critical analysis (“biqoret”), a more subversive tale of an exclusionary politics. That this subversion is not apparent from a surface reading of the film makes our critical analysis even more vital. By relying on an Israeli cinematic convention that allows for such an ethno-cultural “whiting out,” the movie stands comfortably within a certain national discursive tradition that marks it as normative and would seem to allow it to resist such an analysis.
After all, “The Band’s Visit” is a representative product of a film industry that, at its purported best, reflects the privileged values of an Israeli ethical humanism which is both ecumenical and compassionate. This is the image that Israeli liberals like to project to the outside world. And indeed, by comparison with the benighted racism and atavistic prejudice of Zionist culture, such an approach is to be applauded. But hidden in this Israeli liberal humanism is an exclusionary aspect that cuts to the very heart of the progressive idea.
What I have called “The Levantine Option” is rooted in the native cultural traditions of the region. “The Levantine Option,” in opposition to much of the atavistic religious extremism that now permeates the region, contains the harmonious values of an old, forgotten Religious Humanism that is immensely important and valuable for us today because, unlike the general universalism of works like “The Band’s Visit,” it is organically rooted in the region itself.
But for “The Levantine Option” to function, it would have to be admitted that Jews are a native and organic part of the Arab world. It would mean that Ashkenazim would have to find some way to make a transition into a Sephardic culture that is not merely Jewish, but also Arabic. The hybrid term “Arab Jew” has been deeply contested by Israelis in a Zionist context. “The Band’s Visit” does nothing to question this offensive Zionist assumption.
In fact, the forced suppression of Sephardim in the film in favor of a generic Israeli identity that, as we have argued, is Ashkenazi/European in origin, “The Band’s Visit” reproduces and re-enforces a racist worldview that marginalizes Sephardic Jews and marks them as irrelevant to the more valuable “enlightened” Western civilization.
So in the end, “The Band’s Visit” is two different movies that only become one on the field of critical analysis (“biqoret”).
The first movie is a profound and moving examination of the Arab-Israeli conflict through the use of humanistic principles that are generic and universal in nature. That movie is warm and inviting and gives us hope that Arabs and Jews will find a way to relate peacefully to one another.
But the other movie that is carefully hidden inside the one we are seeing on the screen promotes a rabid Eurocentrism which seeks to forcefully control the discourse and to exclude from that discourse the traces of the Arab in the Jew. The Arabs themselves are accurately presented in the film and given their own autonomy as cultural actors. It is only in the Jewish context that this Eurocentrism comes to play a critical role in the dramatic denouement. The engagement between the Egyptians and Israelis can only take place within the confines of the generic and the universal, i.e. the European. The idea that Jews and Arabs might themselves share a culture is unimaginable in the context of the film.
This second movie, an alternative conceptual trajectory, serves ultimately to subvert the pacifistic nature of the first movie. The insistence on a confrontational modality undermines the human encounter and marks the terms of the discourse as exclusively Ashkenazi.
The absence of Sephardic culture from the film is duplicitous in two ways: first, it distorts the actual realities of Israeli life, where Sephardim have traditionally been an oppressed and marginalized class. But secondly, it falsifies the cultural history of the region by dismissing the possibility of a Jewish-Arab entente that is based on a common, shared culture rather than a confrontational, oppositional culture that has become the default “truth” in the minds of so many.
Until the true cultural reality of the Arab Middle East is allowed to emerge, films like “The Band’s Visit” will continue to distort our conceptual understanding of the region and impair our ability to deal with the problems that divide its inhabitants.
David Shasha