Edward Said: The Last Interview

by Mike Dibb
First Run/Icarus Films, Brooklyn, New York, 2004
114 minutes, col.
Distributor’s website: http//:www.frif.com.

Reviewed by Andrea Dahlberg

dahlberg@bakernet.com

Less than a year before his death on 25 September 2003 Edward Said gave this, his final interview, over the course of three days. Said speaks of his illness and how he was virtually unable to read, write, and listen to music. But there is no sign in this remarkable film of any abatement of his immense intellectual energy or passionate engagement with life. Said speaks for almost two hours about his life, his major works including Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, his films, his role as a member of the Palestine National Council and his subsequent profound disillusionment with Arafat and the Oslo Accords. It is hard to think of another individual who could carry an entire film of this length merely by speaking to an appropriately low-key interviewer like Charles Glass.

With a face that could have been painted by el Greco, Said is blazingly articulate. He illustrates his points with references to Vico, Foucault, Jane Austen, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Conrad, Graham Greene, Daumier, Tagore, Faulkner, Shakespeare, Hemingway, Mailer, Eliot, Roth, Chomsky and Napoleon. He describes his obsession with counterpoint and his preference for Rossellini over Verdi (Verdi is always "in italics"). Said also discusses American self-identity, the US educational system, and the provincial nature of its intellectuals, like Roth and Mailer who remain focused on the interior life of the country and do not engage with its immense impact in the world. Yet he is always accessible and engaging. Whether describing his schooling in Cairo and the US, his views of his parents, his existential experiences of exile or his intellectual and political passions, Said makes sparks fly and paints a vast, vivid world that he inhabits more intensely than most. Said's emotional and imaginative range is as great as his intellect. I have had the pleasure of watching this film with people who are well versed in Said's work and others who had barely heard of him. Not one of them failed to be drawn in, energised, and left wanting to respond to Said's ideas.

The director of this film, Mike Dibb, was a friend of Said's who knew his subject sufficiently well to make the roles of the interviewer and the camera as unobtrusive as possible. Said wears the same clothes over the three day period when the film was shot, which helps create the illusion that the viewer is the third party in a small room listening to Said and, to a lesser extent, Glass conversing. The result is an intimate portrait of a great mind.

With the passing of Edward Said the world has lost a great intellectual and an articulate and credible spokesman for Palestine. This film has captured the man himself.