Between Two Memories: the Nation in New Palestinian Film

Abstract

The decline of the nationalised film industry of the 1960s and 1970s ushered in a period of great change for Palestinian cinema. As the local infrastructure that briefly supported a flourishing Third Cinema began to diminish, the locus of film production shifted outward, forging a new Palestinian cinema that was contextually national but structurally transnational. Yet, emerging from one of the last bastions of colonialism, the political agenda that characterised Third Cinema remained pertinent for those making films for and about Palestine. Within the cinematic transformation of Palestinian cinema, there lies a tension between the prefigured politics of Third Cinema, and the new systems of production and dissemination new Palestinian filmmakers began working in, once construed as institutions formed by the very economic and imperial forces it so vehemently opposed. This thesis traces Palestine's cinematic transition, examining how filmmakers negotiate the national movement in these new systems and spaces of meaning production. The political agenda that characterised Third, I argue here, is not forgotten but re-inscribed in the new cinema.