THE STORY – Celebrated as a prophet and vilified as a terrorist, Palestinian-American scholar Edward Saïd was America’s most outspoken critic of the West and Palestine’s fiercest advocate. Twenty years after his death, Saïd guides viewers through the untold history of Palestine through a kinetic assemblage of footage, recordings, and newly digitized archives.
THE CAST – N/A
THE TEAM – Maiken Baird (Director)
THE RUNNING TIME – 107 Minutes
For people of a certain age, the name and face most associated with the Israel-Palestine conflict is that of Edward Saïd. The Harvard-educated Columbia University professor, born to an affluent Christian family in Western Jerusalem (then in Palestine), was the leading authority on the Palestinian side of the story. Indeed, he may have been the first, in his 1979 essay “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims” and book “The Question of Palestine”, to express the now widespread belief that Zionism is a form of colonialism, enabled by the West even as it reckoned with its own colonialist history in the wake of WWII. How, exactly, a professor of English and Comparative Literature whose family left Jerusalem at the start of the Palestine War in 1947, ended up becoming the world’s foremost authority on the Palestinian people is the subject of Maiken Baird’s documentary “Edward Saïd: Between Worlds”. With unprecedented access to the Saïd family archives, Baird reconstructs Saïd’s journey entirely in the man’s own words, painting a sharp portrait of a man whose mind remained as sharp as a sword right up until his death from leukemia in 2003.
Baird opens his film in a rather typical way: stitching together behind-the-scenes videos of Saïd preparing for filmed interviews, offering greetings and a quick glimpse into his personality. While the film doesn’t deviate from the standard cradle-to-grave format adopted by most archival bio-documentaries, Saïd is so charismatic and well-spoken that it doesn’t matter much. Baird also organizes the film’s material so it is always about Saïd’s history and Palestine’s at the same time, connecting the region’s history with Saïd’s experiences in his own special kind of exile. This makes perfect sense: Saïd’s story is one of slowly realizing the unique place he holds in the world and then dedicating his life to making the most of it, educating the Western world about the peoples and lands that make up the Middle East in language they can understand.
And they did understand, as evidenced by the uproar that greeted Saïd’s first book, “Orientalism”. A furious rebuke of decades of Western scholarship that marginalized the people of the Middle East, Saïd tore into the colonialist attitudes of those academics who wrote so confidently that the Arabs were inferior to Western people, pointing out how their own ingrained sense of superiority blinded them to the truth of the Arab world and people. Naturally, the Western world was none too pleased about being called out in such a way, but “Orientalism” had the effect Saïd desired, changing how his homeland was perceived not just by academics, but by regular people around the world. His continued writings about the Palestinian experience have resonated so deeply with people around the world, Baird posits, because of his own feelings of exile from his homeland, and how he managed to express those feelings in a way that connected his Palestinian heritage with American cultural values.
Baird has a lot of ground to cover, helped immensely by the wealth of archival footage at his disposal. After “Orientalism”, Saïd became one of the world’s foremost authorities on the subject of Palestine, interviewed just about any time the Middle East was in the news. Even before that, though, his life was incredibly well-documented. His father was one of the first in the country to have a video camera, and that home video footage of the country in the early 1900s proved invaluable, capturing a place that quite literally no longer exists; Saïd even details the stunning story behind his passport, which uniquely lists his birthplace as just Jerusalem, with no country, because when he was born, the city wasn’t in Israel. This identity of a man without a country, without a proper home, haunted Saïd his whole life, and his eloquent explorations of his feelings around that identity make for some of the film’s most striking, effective passages.
The film’s one big problem lies in its archival format. Baird has locked into telling Saïd’s story through his words, and his words alone, meaning that his views on Palestine and the Palestinian people are presented as gospel, with little to no supporting evidence. Given his academic bona fides and his personal connection to the subject matter, having grown up there in a family that had been there for generations, it’s difficult to argue with him. However, this leaves the door open for Saïd’s critics to question the film’s motivations in its uncritical presentation of Saïd’s views as fact. Perhaps a stronger film would indeed present more opposing views and/or more evidence to support Saïd’s views, but the film isn’t an academic treatise; it’s a biography.
Granted, it’s a biography that intertwines its subject’s life with one of the most explosive geopolitical news stories of the past century, but it’s still a biography, and Baird’s work connecting Saïd’s unique cross-cultural upbringing to his work as a public intellectual is strong. Telling the story of Palestine through the lens of Edward Saïd’s life and work is perhaps the most effective way to explain that Gordian knot of a situation in simple terms, while acknowledging the humanity at stake on all sides. Far more than a regurgitation of a Wikipedia article or other biographies, “Edward Saïd: Between Worlds” opens up its subject’s story to encompass so much more than just his life, simultaneously educating and entertaining audiences. Saïd expanded his audience’s world while also making it more understandable, and Baird does much the same with his film, capturing his subject in a way that feels both appropriate and revelatory.
