Greek Tragedy
Every shot is a piece of art, stunning imagery.
Dispossession within and dispossession without.
Madness, desire, incest, patricide, a tantalizing turquoise shirt, flushed fingertips yearning against a rugged stone wall, golden bullets clinking like a heaping handful of treasure chest coins as they're languidly shifted like water and sand from hand to hand, a metallic cup spiralling dizzily down with its contents of water slowly coating in scattered motion a small patch of heated clay, a sunburst of blinding white water, a cigarette carefully inserted in an ashtray gap, long black hair cascading across an embroidery of sand, a daughter chewing on a stick and father drenching her with a quick hard burst of fanning water, tinkling chimes of lyrically plucked chained-link fencing, the writing of a name on a wall, the clay of the earth.
Beyond this, post-traumatic Palestinian and Israeli cinema during the second intifada. The interdependence of Palestinian and Israeli violence. The
brutal relations existing between the father and other family members are reflected in violence wreaked off-screen by the IDF (turning a Palestinian village into piles of rubble). Patricide carried out by son and by IDF actions. The oppressive hegemonic gaze of father turns into sexual conquest, and later, a plea of mutual dependency. A Palestinian patriarch experiencing the consequence of [Israeli] conquest [self-defense, settlement growth] who in turn subjects his daughter to a sexual conquest. As a subject of consequence, the father mentally and physically subjects his family to an endless acting out of the traumatic experience of Israeli conquest [self-defense, settlement growth].
The subject (father, Israel) dries up/destroys/controls a water source and establishes his(her) existence in the world as a primary presence and spectacle to which everything else must gravitate toward, projecting its subjectivity towards its field of perception and habitation so as to rein in and control everything, to make everything in its presence his(her) property. This subject absolutely and resolutely territorializes the ground and the things within it. But Nature wins out in the end. The victims deterritorialize and reclaim and reterritorialize, upheaving the upheaver. But in the process, transform themselves into victimizers. The cycle repeats because the state of Israel and the Father and his son Shukri cannot change themselves. They cannot liberate their minds, their consciousness, their beliefs, and thus they cannot change themselves.
And Atash is one of many brilliant films in the world of Israeli and Palestinian cinema that makes the calls for liberation on behalf of those who cannot do it themselves.
The Palestinian historical presence, a geographical absence. Palestine, an imaginatory, hallucinatory space, mountains of rubble, Palestinian cinema, a place to live and relive their postponed drama of return. Palestine, a memory of things past, not present. Dememorialization. Israel, destroying the physical memory, using military force to force people to ignore and forget, requesting Palestinians to forget in exchange for peace, and forcing Palestinians to live in-the-moment, hiding, surveying, smuggling, stealing, invisible, a thirst to become visible. The father, defiantly forcing his family into exile, blocking them from integrating into a nearby flourishing Palestinian community, blocking them from their thirst to be visible, blocking them from forging new memories.
Israelis and Palestinians, victims and victimizers, as unstable as water, and like water, prevailing....and capable of change....
There's also a feminism dynamic in the film that re-enforces the Greek-tragedy ambience of the plot. We have patricide, and we have an adult daughter, Gamila, who is the root cause of the family conflict. There was consensual father-daughter sexual relationship, which led to the family's self-exile, and there's a hint that the father has a cultural duty to kill his daughter for her sexual affair, but he can't do it....because he still thirsts for her....which makes him realise the cultural duty is designed to punish the victim because the victim's existence is a reminder (memory!) of the iniquity of the victimizer (paralleling Israel punishing the victim because the victim's existence is a reminder (memory!) of the iniquity of the victimizer). And brother Shukri thirsts after her, which causes a subtle rivalry between the father and son.
10/10, three viewings in one year and wow, what a piece of art.