The second in a series of meeting organized by IRES explores the theme of history and memory in world politics through the screening of Elia Suleiman's film 'The Time That Remains' and the reading of Gabrielle Spiegel's article 'Memory and History: Liturgical Time and Historical Time'.
'"The Time That Remains" is a semi-autobiographical film, in four episodes, about a family, my family, from 1948 until recent times. The film is inspired by my father's private diaries, starting from when he was a resistance fighter in 1948, and by my mother's letters to family members who were forced to leave the country. Combined with my intimate memories of them and with them, the film attempts to portray, the daily life of those Palestinians who remained and were labelled 'Israeli-Arabs', living as a minority in their own homeland'.
Elia Suleiman
'Recent or contemporary experiences acquire meaning only insofar ... as they can be transfigured, ritually and liturgically, into repetitions and reenactments of ancient happening. In such liturgical commemoration. the past exists only by means of recitation; the fundamental goal of such recitation is to make it live again in the present, to fuse past and present, chanter and hearer, into a single collective entity. History. in the sense that we understand it to consist of unique events unfolding within irreversible linear time, is absorbed into cyclical, liturgical memory'.
Gabrielle Spiegel