Films of Palestine: "Fertile Memory" (1981)
This is the second post in a series focusing on the films of Palestine. See the first post here.
The gap between the personal and the political is almost nonexistent in Fertile Memory (1981), the feature debut from Palestinian filmmaker Michel Khleifi. Blurring the line between documentary interviews and fictional narrative, the film follows two women living in the occupied West Bank who come from different generations, though their experiences both speak to the need for personal dignity in the face of political trauma as well as the extent to which settler-colonialism upends nearly all facets of everyday life.
The older of the two women, Roumia, had most of her ancestral lands confiscated by Israel in 1947, the year in which the United Nations partitioned Palestine into two independent states—one Jewish and the other Palestinian Arab. Married off at a young age, Roumia became a widow in her early twenties and made the decision to never remarry. At the time of the film’s production, she works in a factory owned by an Israeli company (as many Palestinian women have chosen to do, since it makes more money than tending to family farms) and continues to support her two adult children, a son and daughter.
A younger woman, Sahar, provides a marked counterpoint to Roumia. Sahar, too, was placed in an arranged marriage to an older man in her late teens, but after a difficult thirteen-year marriage (which Sahar guardedly alludes to but doesn’t describe in detail), she arranged a divorce. Surprisingly, it was the Arab-Israeli War of 1967—aka the Six-Day War, during which Israel occupied even more Palestinian land (the Gaza Strip and the West Bank)—that allowed Sahar to flee her marriage and find work in Libya before returning to the West Bank. In Fertile Memory, we see Sahar as a proudly independent woman, a published author and an intellectual who teaches at a Palestinian university. An impassioned Marxist and feminist, Sahar has become content in her solitude, finding it one of the only ways that Palestinian women can claim agency in her society.
Though they never share the frame together, Khleifi places the two women in conversation with each other in subtly provocative ways. “One character’s words corner those of the other,” Khleifi explains, “and I insisted on the film to work in that way, so that the viewer reacts to it, takes active part in the film, becomes an accomplice.” In this dialectical nature, Fertile Memory conveys ideas of womanhood and oppression, showing how two women trapped by the same environment have taken wildly diverging paths to reclaim control over their own lives.
Sahar has the eloquence and the educational background to give voice to her subjugation; late in the film, she even offers an agenda-of-sorts for Palestinian women over thirty (especially those who are widowed or divorced) to chart their own path. One montage in particular places Sahar and Roumia in stark contrast, as the film cuts from footage of Roumia sewing clothes in a factory to a scene in which Sahar theorizes, “Nobody can enslave another without becoming enslaved themselves. It’s a human problem and one of class.” A similar contrast arrives near the end of the movie, as Roumia visits an imam whose adamant prayers are meant to instill in her a kind of blind faith. But as the film suggests the imam’s words to be dubious at best (for one thing, he keeps calling her by the wrong name) and Roumia’s devoutness to be somewhat misplaced, it then cuts to a scene in Sahar’s classroom, in which her students sing a Palestinian folk song of liberation while sepia-toned footage of Israeli occupation plays onscreen. It’s clear that Fertile Memory places more value in Sahar’s erudite militancy than in Roumia’s stoic composure in the face of struggle.
Juxtapositions like these suggest Sahar as an academic equipped to resist her plight and Roumia as a quietly suffering victim, the product of an older, voiceless generation. But Khleifi makes sure to push back against this assumption too. Roumia does express her viewpoint, albeit in words that are more aphoristic than intellectual: “For us, mourning lasted twelve years,” she says about her generation of Palestinian women. “Mourning for our youth and mourning for our children.” Furthermore, she takes great pride in her ancestral lands, belligerently refusing to cede what little property she has left to the Israeli government. Her resistance is no less courageous than Sahar’s, even if she doesn’t always have the politicized words to express it.
The latter subplot about Roumia’s familial land and the question of whether to grant it to the Israeli government is one of the movie’s most remarkable instances of fact blurring into fiction. Her son strongly encourages Roumia to give the land to Israel without a fight, since the family will at least receive some (inferior) land in exchange. If Roumia continues to stubbornly hold on to her ancestral property, her son argues, the Israeli government will likely take it forcefully anyway, without any kind of exchange taking place. (Roumia protests that they have rights as Palestinians and their land can’t be obtained without approval, but her daughter-in-law reasonably counters that Israel rarely takes Palestinians’ rights seriously.) This subplot culminates in a dramatic encounter between Roumia and her son in which they visit the land in question and debate which action they should take. The way this scene is cut indicates that it was performed numerous times from various camera angles, and the erratic sound design reinforces that impression. So, while Roumia’s predicament is based in fact, this confrontation appears to have been carefully staged and performed to present opposite sides of a political debate then raging in Palestine, with frequent mention of the Absentees’ Property Law by which Israel took possession of land belonging to Palestinian refugees.
Significantly, both Roumia and Sahar decide to stay in the occupied West Bank despite the oppression from their own society and the constant threat of violence they face there. In one remarkable scene, Roumia discusses the framed photographs hanging in her home, which depict her siblings and their families, who have all emigrated to the United States or Canada over the years. Roumia and Sahar’s ties to their homeland, though, are too profound to sever. The same might be said of writer-director Khleifi: though he studied and lived for many years in Belgium, he was born in Nazareth and was committed to making Fertile Memory the first feature to be shot in the Green Line of the Palestinian West Bank. Ideals about patriotism and dedication to one’s homeland propel Roumia, Sahar, and Khleifi, and the critique of Palestinian patriarchy and immobility proffered by Fertile Memory is simply proof of the ambivalent love that all three figures have toward their embattled nation.
While the dual figures of Roumia and Sahar drive Fertile Memory forward, the film takes plenty of time to convey Palestine in the early ‘80s in all its vibrancy. The landscape is lovingly recorded (maybe a little too lovingly, with some endless panning shots across verdant greenery), and scenes of life in Nablus and Haifa, among other cities, reveal bustling (if sometimes contentious) communities. Young women are a particular focus in the film, with one montage depicting women from childhood through middle age going about their daily lives in the West Bank as a female singer’s performance of a folk song graces the soundtrack. Cinephiles will likely appreciate the movie’s scenes of families crowding around a small television to watch black-and-white melodramas in both Arabic and English. These fascinating and impressionistic slices of life provide a welcome respite from Roumia and Sahar’s central dichotomy—Fertile Memory is an admirably political film, but some of its most striking moments simply show us what everyday life in Palestine looked like about forty years ago. Mainstream media images typically show us a world of constant chaos, but Fertile Memory thankfully leaves room for quieter moments of joy and tranquility.
Khleifi’s visual style can be a little too aimless and repetitive at times, allowing scenes to go on much longer than they should (and diluting their political and thematic impact in the process). At other times, though, unexpected formal flourishes arrive to inject a dash of aesthetic as well as agitative boldness. One example occurs near the end, with footage of Roumia slowing down to a slurred, degenerative tempo, suggesting her toil will never end. My favorite instance, though, arrives much earlier, and may not be a result of authorial intention, but rather of imperfect production equipment: a close-up of two ancestors in a photograph, a man and a woman long since passed, comes to strange, stuttering life thanks to the shaky camera (or maybe due to celluloid passing unevenly through the camera’s gate). In an echo of La Jetée (1962), a still image takes on uncanny cinematic life as it’s propelled into motion, seemingly against its will. It’s a small, poetic moment that, beyond the stark political contrast between Roumia and Sahar, poses questions about the nature of visual reproduction, the absence and presence of memory, the importance of ancestry and family, and other tangential themes. If Fertile Memory functions mostly as a didactic analysis of two women and the nation in which they fight for autonomy, the movie really comes to life in these smaller, enigmatic scenes where poetry encroaches upon the personal and the political.