Japanese director retraces footsteps of Edward Said
By Hiroko Tabuchi
TOKYO: Out of Place by veteran Japanese director Makoto Sato — which retraces Edward Said’s steps through Lebanon, Israel, the West Bank, Egypt, and the United States — is as much about the late professor’s life as it is about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Sato shot almost 300 hours of footage over 12 months to compile the 137-minute film, spending time on both sides of the conflict: with a Palestinian family in the Ein El-Hilweh camp in Lebanon, residents of the Kibbutz Dan in Israel, Israeli teenagers and Palestinian tobacco growers in the segregated Galilean town of Ma’alot-Tarshiha.
“I used Said’s texts as a guide for my journey through the Middle East,” Sato said in an interview in Tokyo. “But I also tried to go there without preconceptions. I felt that task was easier for me, as a Japanese, somewhat removed from the conflict.”
The result is a carefully nuanced and beautifully filmed documentary. Sato’s shot of mist rolling into the Lebanese town of Dhur Choueir — where Said spent his summers as a child — is evocative of a Chinese brush painting.
These scenes only highlight the harsh realities depicted elsewhere in the film.
In one scene, Sato talks to young boys playing in a devastated section of the Palestinian city of Ramallah who talked about the wall Israel is building that will meander into the West Bank.
“This place used to be beautiful. Bulldozers came and destroyed it,” one boy says. “Once I was just sitting here and the (Israeli) army came...A soldier asked, ‘How do you like the wall? Is it pretty?’ I told him, ‘It’s ugly, like your face’.”
Perhaps because of Sato’s perceived distance from the conflict, the subjects in the film appeared to easily drop their guard — sometimes seeming to forget the film crew’s presence as they continue with their daily chores.
Born in 1935 in Jerusalem, then part of British-ruled Palestine, Said moved to Cairo and then to the United States at age 15. He eventually received a master’s and PhD from Harvard University, and launched a successful academic career, most of it as a professor of English literature at Columbia University in New York.
Said wrote passionately about the Palestinian cause, as well as on a variety of other subjects, from his academic specialty to music and culture. He won a cultish following for his polemic Orientalism in which he denounces a long tradition of false and romanticised images of the East in western culture, which he claimed served to justify colonialism.
Said was also a prominent member of the Palestinian parliament-in-exile for 14 years, stepping down in 1991. After the signing of the Oslo peace accords in 1993 between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Said criticised Yasser Arafat because he believed the PLO leader had made a bad deal for the Palestinians.
Out of Place quotes liberally from Said’s works, including his memoir of that name, and many of his political writings. The film also draws on interviews with a number of academics, including the outspoken critic Noam Chomsky, and members of Said’s family.
“It always made him sad that despite his writings, and despite his massive popular following, and all his admirers, he always felt kind of inadequate because he hadn’t changed things on the ground,” Said’s son, Wadie, says.—AP
