Educational Media Reviews Online

Early in the film Out of Place the director Sato Makato wonders aloud whether he is “in any way fit to make a film about Edward Said,” the former literary theorist and activist Palestinian exile who passed away in September 2003. The question is slightly misleading, in that Out of Place is not quite about Said directly, but rather about his legacy. To be more specific, it is about the effects that Said’s life continues to have, and may yet have, following his death. In any event, and despite the minor verbal misstep, Makato can absolve himself of any doubt about his capacity for the task. The film he creates is sufficiently thought provoking and compelling that it not only constitutes a striking contemplation of Said’s legacy, it may even come to comprise a small part thereof.

The film begins with an exploration of Said’s formative personal history, including the exile of his family from Palestine. Throughout this process, as he does through the entirety of the film, Makato consistently employs techniques that intrinsically contextualize the film’s footage and which invite the viewer to reflect on the broader reality that the film must ultimately and inevitably fail to capture. To this end Makato frequently uses the camera to pan from close shots to much deeper, wider perspectives as scenes move towards their conclusion. At other points in the film footage rolls, whereupon the camera seamlessly and smoothly pulls away to reveal one of the various interviewees watching the precise same footage on a screen, at which point they begin to offer their own commentary on the viewing material before them. In employing these techniques the director, fittingly given Said’s foundational theoretical contributions to the field of post-colonial studies, acknowledges the inherently limited frames of reference that constrict what might otherwise have been taken to be a natural or complete representation.

The film continues with interviews with members of Said’s immediate family, which leads into a narrative concerning a return visit to his original neighborhood in Jerusalem. A section follows wherein a series of academics outline Said’s considerable impact upon the humanities and social sciences.

Makato, surely taking his cue from the example Said made in his own life, moves from theory to practice, and departs from discussion of Said’s theoretical contributions, and instead sets about pursuing a documentary treatment of the present condition of Israeli-Palestinian (Palestinian-Israeli) affairs, informed by Said’s theoretical vision.

Entering the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, Ayn al-Hilwah, scenes of camp life develop at a measured pace, gradually constructing a portrait of the inhabitants lives. The common life of one family is used as a prism through which the audience witnesses the resident’s pain of exile, and the squalor in which they live, but also the humor and tenderness that feature in their lives.

Moving to the Israeli occupied West Bank, we hear Palestinian journalists questioning the strategic value of violence in their national struggle, and giving sober consideration of the sum effects of a violent Intifada. Traveling on to Israel Makato pauses to draw out the details of life for some Jewish-Israeli settlers on a kibbutz, and to give time for a recounting of the horror that befell one interviewee’s family during the Holocaust. The film takes the time to illustrate the remarkable diversity of Jewish society in Israel, skillfully drawing a portrait that will likely be as uncommon to Western audiences as is its depiction of Palestinian refugee life. Spending time in the company of an Arabic Jewish woman and her family, she explains how they came from Syria to live in Israel. Portraits develop of an Arab Muslim who did not flee as Israeli troops took control of his area in 1948, and of Christians in the same town who also remained.

The film concludes with a haunting musical score that merges with the sounds of a steady rain. Various scenes revisiting earlier parts of the film flit through, while music provides a fleeting unity. This too is utterly fitting, as Said had sought to advance mutual musical projects between Jewish and Muslim children in Israel-Palestine, as he hoped that common respect and understanding between the peoples of the region could perhaps develop from a shared early engagement with music, and that as a result, music could one day provide unity in a much broader and ultimately lasting sense.

The film gradually fades to black over footage of the Palestinian refugee we have come to know best, as he continues his uncomplaining efforts to eke out a living to support his family in the camp, amid squalor, and amid a rainfall that we understand touches all the featured participants. This blackness represents perfectly the void – the absence – that has effectively constituted the representation of his life, and that of the other camp dwellers, in North American mainstream television reports on Israel-Palestine.

One of Edward Said’s major intellectual interests was to assess and draw out the difference between representation and lived experience. In its careful construction of a series of portraits of individual and group life of the largest constituent groups in present day Israel-Palestine (Palestine-Israel) Out of Place undertakes just such a task. In omitting the fundamentalists from each side it perhaps leaves the audience with something of an overly optimistic sense of the ultimate possibilities for peace, but the fundamentalists are probably well enough represented in the more commonplace depictions of the area. As such, the sum effect of the film is to provide an altogether gentler, generous, and complete representation of the peoples of Israel-Palestine than has generally found its way into the public sphere.

Makato’s powerful film should reward those that make the effort to understand it, and invariably, those who view it more than once.

Out of Place is highly recommended and would constitute an altogether positive addition to any post-secondary institution’s library holdings.