Little Red Balloons
Whenever I see Zionuts commemorating the bottle rockets that have fallen on Israel since the so-called “disengagement” from Gaza, it reminds me of a certain moment in the history of cinema. Well actually two moments, one inspired by the other.
If you’re like me and you grew up with semi-hippie parents who wanted to expose their children to foreign film at an early age, you have probably seen the wonderful little rose of a movie called The Red Balloon. In it, a french boy– the son of director Albert Lamorisse– finds a curiously sentient red balloon which, according to the flexible logic permitted in French abstract film, proceeds to make friends with the boy. They wander the grim alleyways of post-WWII Paris, the red balloon leading the way, a stark note of color and happiness against the urban decay. The film wears on and the balloon gets more and more anthropomorphic until we start to care about it as if it were the most innocent and cheery of children. When, inexplicably, the balloon gets popped by an unfeeling boy mob, we can only weep. The film is an oh so subtle commentary on sad realities and senseless cruelties that always seem to interrupt children’s dreams. “Subtle”, of course, is a word too nuanced, too measured for Zionuts to understand, since they believe in a doctrine of massive and disproportional force. In film criticism too!
Director Elia Suleiman, a big old french cinephile, brought back the Red Balloon in his masterpiece Divine Intervention, a film that, to me, produces more powerful metaphors for the absurdity of occupation that any more explicit documentary ever could. An instance in which fiction bothers us even more than non-fiction. In Suleiman’s treatment, the sentient, anthropomorphic balloon now bears the face of deceased Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. What is the balloon thinking? What does it want? It heads straight for the Dome of the Rock, over the heads of soldiers and silly checkpoints and man-made borders, and hovers there, smiling.
Nowadays, this wonderful, multivalent symbol has been cheaply reduced to the level of an Israeli PR campaign that publicizes the rockets that have fallen on Southern Israel. There would not be many balloons to inflate if the victims of such bottle rockets were to be counted, which is why they have to count the rockets themselves. See here a picture of one such Qassem rocket count at the Israeli mission to the UN. Of course, it looks more like an art installation by Christo, the French-Bulgarian landscape artist who famously draped museums and trees. This is just another instance of theft that the Israeli state has perpetrated, this time intellectual.
And now for something totally unrelated… you know who is obsessed with, and still totally not over draping? Rami Kashou, the finalist of last year’s Project Runway! He said he’s passionate about draping. I have a picture taken with him for all those of who are jealous.
To end this post, I would like to inaugurate a world-wide contest for suggestions on just what symbol best represents the current suffering of Palestinians in Gaza. A piñata? A pest extermination? I’m all ears.
