Homage by Assassination (Elia Suleiman, 1992) (Patreon)

While doing a little research on Suleiman's latest film It Must Be Heaven, I came across this early work I'd never seen. I was vaguely aware of it, as it turned up in Video Data Bank and Facets Video catalogs long before I knew who Suleiman was, and the description always caught my eye. Alas, I never rented it.

Although Homage is a minor component of Suleiman's overall body of work, it is well worth checking out. The first thing you'll notice is that the director's signature style was pretty much in place from the get-go. Suleiman plays himself as a silent, sad-sack protagonist who watches more than acts, and seems to discover all manner of absurd human situations that are tinged with the melancholy weight of shadowy metaphor. He is a man whose nationality doesn't exist. He is living in a ghost country, whose centuries of history exist only in the minds of those determined to remember it.

This point is amplified in a scene where Suleiman is thumbing through old photographs from Palestine, some of which appear as though they may date back to the early 20th century. But this analog memory is contrasted with the breakdown of newer technologies in Nazareth. At the start of the film, we hear a radio host introduce Elia and try to get him on the phone. We see Elia on his end, waiting by the phone. Each time, the phone rings, but when Suleiman picks it up, he gets a busy signal. Later on, he tries to call out, only to get a message that "all the lines in the country you are calling are disabled."

For much of the second half of the film, we see Elia at his old-school Macintosh, working on what appears to be a script. Apart from some file names in the classic, blocky Chicago font, everything is in untranslated Arabic, which is intentional. He is typing what turn out to be old Arab proverbs, which are presented in translation at the end of the film. What we do see, in English, is a kind of deconstructive meditation on the word "terrorist." What is a terrorist? Could we all be terrorists? (Homage was made in the midst of the first Gulf War.) And, depending on what a terrorist is or could be, perhaps we should all be terrorists, until there are no terrorists at all. 

Regardless, Suleiman's connection between Arab oppression and unequal access to technology is summed up in a single image, where he presses a key on his Arabic keyboard. This one is labeled in English. It reads "return."

Homage by Assassination can be viewed (in a very degraded copy) here.