Towards

TIME

From the nineteenth century onward, the West has been regarded as a compass of temporality, especially when viewed as the interpreter of modernity. All countries could be evaluated on a scale in their various stages of ‘progress’, with the Western world recognised as the apex the rest aspired towards. The temporal totalisation of the globalised no-place is in line with the conception of cinema; a device capable of possessing time and releasing the results of its conquest into the a-temporal place of modernity. After all, ‘technological modernity’ was introduced on the post/colonial site through advanced weaponry; a more efficient way to exploit, torture, and exterminate the colonised. The post/colonial screen is then doubly resistant: reclaiming the oppressors’ weaponry while deviating from their temporal understandings. This is why the brutalised nation of Palestine, has been one of the most powerful sites for national cinema. Colonialism is a totalitarian practice not content only to conquer and rule the colonised, it ‘turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it.’ (Fanon 169).

Conjugated in a perpetual coil of defiance through transformation, Elia Suleiman chronicles the journey of displaced bodies and meandering souls as mimetic narrative gives way to an account of fragmented temporalities. The everyday assembles itself into a mesmerising resistance, one that simultaneously carries the burden of its past, and the hope of its present. Each sign of disintegration is pregnant with its opposite; despair coupled with humour, militarism paired with slapstick, trauma dealt with irony. Chronicle of a Disappearance roots itself into the death of time; the ultimate un-fillable present. In this cinema of no-narrative, whose whole has been lost, time is concretely present. And it is precisely through his rootedness to the cinematic moment that Suleiman is able to dramatise an ontological chasm whose colossal injustice cannot be expressed. The national temporal is only visible in its present motions. There it stands alone as a pure symbol; anodyne and infinite. There is no assertion of time as absurdity meets terror in an endless loop of displacement and senselessness.

To reclaim time within and despite the colonial

settlement that has made exiles of its citizens

اختفاء

سجل

To question, dismantle and seek anew

the definitions of the democratic national self

Works Cited

Fanon, Frantz. ‘On National Culture,’ in The Wretched of the Earth. Penguin Books (2001): 166–189.

Last Update: September 2024