Eric Johnston

10744454

Draft 2

3/9/17

Background and Banality in The Time that Remains

Settler colonial violence surpasses the initial moment of settlement.

Settler colonialism does not anchor to specific temporal or geographic

locations, but instead cuts through boundaries that limit violence to an

instance. Settlement rescripts land into capital, while disarticulating differing

ties to land, in a processual and ongoing transfiguration, which is reasserted

in every passing day of occupation. Grammars of violence, and thus also

recognition, stop at this point, because this relationship to violence is

quotidian and exceeds what can be described as an event. In following

Patrick Wolfes framing of settler colonialism as a structure and not an event,

Tuck and Yang describe this violence as epistemic, ontological, [and]

cosmological. (Tuck and Yang 2012:5) These theoretical breaks reorient

violence as a specific affiliation to the everyday. That is, settler colonial

violence is not an occurrence, but is instead a relationship that is uniquely

banal. The Time that Remains foregrounds this banality. The narration is

subsumed in violence, but is never consumed by it. Elia Suleiman uses the

cinematics of the background to infiltrate the narrative in the foreground to

express occupational violence as a relationship to the everyday. Background

is the structure that haunts the narrative of the film.

 Every background shot is filled with noise. Each frame is packed with

information, yet despite all thats captured, theres little eye movement

thats ever really necessary. From mountain ranges to multiple pastel

buildings, all caught in single frames, your eye isnt forced to leave the

center because all of the narrative content necessary stays dead middle of

the screen. The movie is more like a massive collection of stills, each frame

having the capability to be a picture in its own right. There are some scenes

that take in entire landscapes and neighborhoods that seem to shrink

characters down to the size of any other part of the scenery. Some shots look

like they were meant to capture scenery and only barely happened to catch

the narrative. Despite all this, no matter how small the subject of a particular

shot is or how busy the screen may be, characters stay centered. This

centering keeps the audiences eyes focused on people and not

backgrounds. The surroundings dont overwhelm the characters because

establishing shots dont exist in this film, since movement and people are

always in the middle, regardless of how much area gets caught on film.

When the camera isnt shooting vast landscapes and neighborhoods, each

scene still carries noise. Most shots are colorful and contain multiple

ornaments or utensils. These tend to draw attention from the corner of our

eye, but the focus still stays on the center. This centering washes over the

disorder present within the background. The form of these shots speaks of a

chaos that stays on the margins of the film. As the film progresses, we

witness this commotion edge closer and closer to the foreground.

Backgrounds and foregrounds are only coherent insofar as they maintain a

distinction from one another, but these lines blur with the passing of each

scene. Background performs a haunting that permeates the narrative more

and more with each passing scene.

Fuads capture scene alternates between shots that juxtapose

positions of Israeli soldiers and Palestinian prisoners. The audience begins to

spectate Fuads interrogation from behind a tree, and then the scene

abruptly cuts to a close-up of him blindfolded. We see a gun pointed at

Fuads head, a close-up that could

only be of that from the position of

the Israeli soldier. From this

perspective of the soldier, the

camera angled at Fuad from behind

a tree is placed in the background. The former camera angle positions the

viewer as part of the background, navigating an unseen existence that

remains synonymous with the landscape. From this angle, the camera hides

from the soldiers, as half of the shot is taken up by a tree. Audience

members occupy the dual role of bearing witness to and embodying a

perspective that inflicts violence. That these delineations between

background and foreground are so clear near the start of the movie

communicate a violence that has yet to be fully embedded. This reflects the

form violence takes at the onset of occupation. The latter portion of this film,

however, plays between the bounds of violence and non-violence, fantasy

and reality, and background and foreground, erasures of lines that mark the

extension of settler futurity. Reconfigurations of violence complicate the

scope of occupation. As Israeli settlement entrenches itself into every facet

of Palestinian life, the background absorbs the once overt displays of

violence.

Theres a lack of intensity happening after the first initial scenes of

settlement that refuses to paint violence as a spectacle. Suicide and

executions are filmed in the same way as taxi rides and cigarette breaks,

because Israeli occupation is painted as a constitutive element of the

quotidian. This relationship to the everyday blurs the boundaries between

peace and violence and frames settler colonialism as a structure, not an

event. Dousing yourself in gasoline barely skims the limits of the abnormal.

The irregularity in this scene is not in the gasoline, but in the intrusion of
 family dinner and a smoke cut short.

Theres nothing uniquely

extraordinary that sets this scene

apart. The narration is equally

ordinary let me end it all, but

put out the cigarette first. The

cigarette was Fuads greatest

dilemma, and he tosses his cigarette

out the same way he grabs the old

mans match. This scene is filmed in

a manner akin to every other scene where someones life is on the line. Its

totally unremarkable, like pulp. Violence is narrativized in this scene as

background completely unnecessary to the movies chronological coherence.

Any single one of these scenes could be removed from the movie without

changing it as a whole, but if every one of these scenes were removed, the

movie wouldnt exist. Violence infiltrates every crevice in this films

structure, from conversation to gunshots.

Even the most spectacular instruments of violence become subsumed

in pulp. Theres a scene where a man talks on the phone with a tank pointed

at him. The tip of the tanks barrel follows his pace. Whether this portrayal of

military rule is a realistic representation or not detracts from the point that

the tank is always there, and its always aimed. The tank is always aimed

regardless of whether one is throwing stones at police or laughing on the

 phone. It is the backdrop that is

always present regardless of event. This scene is shot the same as any other.

The camera itself doesnt move, but captures the movement of the tank and

the man. Although the tank itself may be hypervisible in this scene, as

opposed to other landscapes that exist only as background, our eye still

follows the man first, and the tank second. We dont have to stare at the tank

directly because we know its also doing this same work of following

movement. That the tank physically takes up a large bulk of the screen,

while the shot itself is framed to fixate on this man speaking to his phone,

only lays bare settler colonialisms relationship to the banal. A tank is

juxtaposed to a phone call; the fantastical potential held in the muzzle of a

tank and the normality of a phone call are blended together within the

everyday, as the violence of background melds into the foreground.

 Similarly, parties and military Humvees take the same frame. There

seems to be almost no focal point in this shot. The center dominated every

still prior to the last ten minutes of the film. Now the center has become the

background. Theres no difference between the party and the Humvee in this

scene. Its no longer enough to even describe a juxtaposition here, because

juxtapositions assume a distinction that can be drawn between two different

things, which are placed near each other to highlight a contrast. Violence

maintained some degree of coherence at the onset of Israeli encroachment

through these very contrasts; people were explicitly captured and

interrogated and bullets could be traced back to their guns. At this point, its

unclear whether or not the Humvee does or does not exist. The drivers

threats are whimsical, and he even bobs his head to the music as he shouts

empty threats and curfews through a megaphone. Borders between the real

and the fantasy, lines between violence and social life, dissipate as the last

few breaths of the narrative fade into the background. These final scenes lay

bare an advancing system of occupation, where it no longer matters who or

what is centered, because the center becomes subsumed into the

background.

Suleimans reconfigurations of violence are matched by an equal

frivolity. Frivolity is not only communication articulated through a certain

lightheartedness, but specifically the absence of seriousness in tone, the

implication here being the presence of an absence. Where violence in The

Time that Remains is frivolous, whats just as noteworthy is the omission of

the usual somberness and obscenity surrounding displays of violence,

especially when shown through an allegedly semi-biographical drama. Hamid

Dabashi enunciates these links between frivolity and obscenity, as between

the most fearful streak of the collapse of all serious discourse and the ability

to show the obscenity of this spectacle (Dabashi 2006:134) Suleimans

on-screen violence is one that uses frivolity to collapse obscenity, turning the

language of violence into something playful. Violence cant be obscene,

because that would make it out to be something other than the everyday.

Laughter and anger are both dialects that come from this non-recognition of

grammar. Dabashi maps these nonsensical plays with violence as something

emancipatory, as a praxis for resistance while making conditions of utter

domination more bearable. Beneath laughter and anger is an absurd

remembrance of what dwells beneath both comedy and tragedy; that is, the

recognition of the conditions that produce this metaphysical violence are

passed on through bleak frivolity. Absurdity and play perform where

recognition fails. To return to the tank scene, the lightheartedness between

the tank and the phone call is an absurd form of remembering through play.

The tank is always present, maybe not in a literal physical sense (were

never quite sure), but its representation is frivolous and playful to abstract

violence from a reductive obscenity. This tank is remembered exactly

through its play between imagined and real, as is the inadequacy in

describing any real instance of settler colonial violence. Frivolity is

precisely a response to the banal.

 Suleiman, and Dabashis reading of Suleiman, both highlight the limits

of ever describing or relating to violence. Pisters notion of [affect] on an

impersonal level is an attempt to recognize violence through an incoherent

relation. She describes the Deleuzian plane of the impersonal as not an I

nor a We, but the impersonal of anyone it addresses anyone young and

in love, an anyone that is nobody in particular, and yet exists as any body.

(Pister 2010:215) On this level, any film can communicate to the totalizing

impersonal, so long as an impersonal level assumes the universal level of

one, [where] anyone can be reached by the paradoxical pleasures and

pains of violence and laughter, and as such, change established visions of

the actual world (Pister 2010:217) Her language of the impersonal

assumes a stable ground of recognition across all categories of peoples.

Suleiman and Dabashis point, however, is that violence is shot as frivolous

precisely because the bars of communication between occupier and

occupied prevent any form of recognition. Pisters faith in the impersonal

supposes a grounding in a ubiquitous relationship to violence, but her

scholarship does not grapple with banal forms of violence that are

unrecognizable by the settler state. She complicates this, however, in

arguing that Deleuzes concepts of perception are not escapes nor

abstractions from the world, but are rather fundamentally personalized to

individual experience; insofar as this is true, everyone has their own specific

reading of any film or piece, since interpretation is always overdetermined by

life outside the theater. The imaginative work of The Time that Remains,
per Pister, is one that is produced by lived experience. Yet, Suleimans

complication of the relationship to settler violence is one articulated through

opacity, not empathy. The lines between real and imagined are mystified not

to leave room for the audiences imagination, but to express the difficulty in

describing a quotidian relationship to violence. That all violence can

potentially affect us on an impersonal (yet personal) level, assumes the

conditions for recognition, since an impersonal affect relies on the presence

of an outside spectator to change established visions of the actual world.

(Pister 2010:217) Moreover, the spectator is implicitly European, as noted

when she draws parallels to Fanons call for Europe to wake up.

Independently, Pister fails to discuss The Time that Remains as an

independent piece. Rather, this work acts only as a medium for an

explanation of Deleuzian thought, surrendering the piece back to a place of

recognition within an ensemble of Western metaphysics, and effectively

recentering the European philosopher as the interlocutor for thought. The

films positioning of violence as background to the plot is one that doesnt

give attention to the European spectator, insofar as background violence was

never recognizable to the settler state. Frivolity was always the forfeiture of

any hope in visibility.

Frivolity is Suleimans response to the absence of a coherent grammar

of violence. Dabashi writes that, Elia Suleiman does with his camera what

the Palestinian fighters do with their mutilated bodies. (Dabashi 2006:136)

Suicide and frivolity are modes of exchange with the incommunicable. These
forms of play are purposely opaque, given that the settler colonial modes of

violence are just as indescribable. Frivolity, then, forges a new grammar to

describe the indescribability of banal violence through its explicit opacity.

Any description of anything related to settler colonialism must thus be just as

murky and vague, including resistance. Any detailing greater than a sketch is

metaphorization. Tuck and Yang describe the metaphorizing of decolonization

as a move to innocence, where settler futurity is secured through the

reconciliation of guilt. (Tuck and Yang 2012) The opacity in Suleimans work is

precisely a preemption to the metaphorizing of decolonization, insofar as the

lines between the real and imagined fade into one another. Decolonization

cannot be described as an instance, but only through the repatriation of land.

Suleiman makes resistance equally frivolous, matching the indescribability of

an everyday relation to violence with an equally opaque response.

Resistance is not an instance nor a spectacle, but instead just a whimsical

transition from a gaze outside a window.

Similarly, Suleimans works provide an analytic into the metaphorizing

of settler colonial violence as a

whole. Descriptive analyses of a banal violence fail before they begin, insofar
as they provide a narrative that reshapes the overarching structure of settler

colonialism as articulated as an event. Suleimans The Time that Remains

uses the background as a medium to situate settler colonial violence as

exceeding grammars of recognition.