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Abstract
Available on publicly accessible websites, interactive documentaries are typically free to use, allowing audiences to navigate through amounts of information too large for standard film or television documentaries. Media literacy, however, is needed to understand the ways that interactive documentaries reveal or conceal their power to narrate. Examining ARTE France’s Gaza Sderot (2008–9), Zochrot’s iNakba (2014), and Dorit Naaman’s Jerusalem, We Are Here (2016), this article discusses documentaries that prompt audiences to reflect upon asymmetries in the power to forget history and the responsibility to remember it by mapping Palestinian geographies that have been rendered invisible. Since media ecologies are increasingly militarized, particularly in Palestine/Israel, interactive documentaries like iNakba and Jerusalem, We Are Here can disrupt Israeli state branding as technologically innovative while minimizing risk of surveillance by avoiding the use of location-aware technologies that transform interaction into tracking.
Acknowledgments
I am deeply indebted to the anonymous readers, as well as Maia Tabet, Emily Smith, and Maggie Nye Smith for their support of this work and suggestions for its improvement.
Notes
1 Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
2 5 Broken Cameras, directed by Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi (Palestine/Israel: Kino Lorber, 2011), DVD.
3 For an analysis of unequal power in the Greenhouse Project, which facilitated the transnational funding of the film and transformed Burnat’s original idea into a character-driven film, wherein Burnat received “empowerment” from Davidi, see Yael Friedman, “Guises of Transnationalism in Israel/Palestine: A Few Notes on 5 Broken Cameras,” Transnational Cinemas 6, no. 1 (2015): pp. 17–32, https://doi.org/10.1080/20403526.2015.1022345.
4 Gaza Sderot (Paris: ARTE France, 2008–9), http://gaza-sderot.arte.tv.
5 “About IDFA DocLab,” IDFA, 2019, https://www.idfa.nl/en/info/about-idfa-doclab.
6 iNakba mobile app, iPhone ed., v.2.4.8 (Tel Aviv, Israel: Zochrot, 2014), iOS 7.0 or later, https://zochrot.org/en/keyword/45323.
7 Jerusalem, We Are Here, directed by Dorit Naaman, with research and tour guiding by Anwar Ben Badis and Mona Halaby (Canada/Jerusalem, 2016), https://jerusalemwearehere.com/#/.
8 Others include The Holy Road, directed by Dirk-Jan Visser and Derk Walters (Amsterdam: Prospektor, 2017), https://www.theholyroad.org; Divided Jerusalem, directed by Showkat Shafi and Zena al-Tahhan (Doha: AJLabs, 2018), https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2018/east-west-jerusalem/index.html; Asma Jaber and Sami Jitan, PIVOT (Point of Interest Visual Optimization Tool, forthcoming), https://www.pivottheworld.com/product.
9 Craig Hight, “The Field of Digital Documentary: A Challenge to Documentary Theorists,” Studies in Documentary Film 2, no. 1 (2008): pp. 3–7; Dale Hudson, “Undisclosed Recipients: Database Documentaries and the Internet,” Studies in Documentary Film 2, no. 1 (2008): pp. 79–98; Kate Nash, “Modes of Interactivity: Analysing the Webdoc,” Media, Culture and Society 34, no. 2 (March 2012): pp. 195–210, https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443711430758; Judith Aston, Sandra Gaudenzi, and Mandy Rose, eds., i-docs: The Evolving Practice of Interactive Documentary (London: Wallflower, 2017); Patricia R. Zimmermann and Helen De Michiel, Open Space New Media Documentary: A Toolkit for Theory and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2018).
10 See Teresa Iturrioz and Monica Wachowicz, “An Artistic Perspective for Affective Cartography,” in Mapping Different Geographies, ed. Karel Kriz, William Cartwright, and Lorenz Hurni (Berlin: Springer, 2010), pp. 74–92, and Indiana University Press’s Spatial Humanities series: see the “Spatial Humanities Book Series,” The Polis Center, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, https://polis.iupui.edu/about/spatial-humanities/spatial-humanities-book-series/.
11 Timothy Mitchell, “The Middle East in the Past and Future of Social Science,” in The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, ed. David Szanton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 74–118.
12 Julie Peteet, Space and Mobility in Palestine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017).
13 Helga Tawil-Souri and Miriyam Aouragh, “Intifada 3.0? Cyber Colonialism and Palestinian Resistance,” Arab Studies Journal 22, no. 1 (Spring 2014): pp. 105, 107, 199, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24877901.
14 Joseph Massad, “The Weapon of Culture: Cinema in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle,” in Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema, ed. Hamid Dabashi (London: Verso, 2006), p. 32.
15 Nash, “Modes of Interactivity,” p. 196.
16 Zimmermann and De Michiel, Open Space New Media Documentary.
17 Dale Hudson, “Interactive Documentary at the Intersection of Performance and Mediation: Navigating ‘Invisible’ Histories and ‘Inaudible’ Stories in the United States,” Studies in Documentary Film 14, No. 2 (2020): pp. 128–46. See also, Diana Taylor, Performance (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 133.
18 Curated by Debby Farber and Eyal Weizman, Ground Truth: Records of Displacement, Return and Environmental Destruction in the Negev/Naqab Displacement, Tel Aviv: Zochrot, 1–2 January 2016, https://zochrot.org/en/event/56254.
19 Dale Hudson and Patricia R. Zimmermann, Thinking through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 81–85. Visuals are available at https://www.visualizingpalestine.org.
20 Alessandro Petti, Sandi Hilal, and Eyal Weizman, Architecture after Revolution (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013). For additional information, see Decolonizing Architecture Art Research, “Oush Grab Diary,” active 15 May 2008–28 February 2010, http://www.decolonizing.ps/site/diary-oush-grab/; and Collectif Urgence Palestine’s “Brief on Oush Grab Situation,” http://www.urgencepalestine.ch/images/actu/OushGrabEN.pdf.
21 Helga Tawil-Souri, “Cinema as the Space to Transgress Palestine’s Territorial Trap,” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 7, no. 2 (2014): pp. 169–89, https://doi.org/10.1163/18739865-00702005.
22 Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (London: Oneworld, 2006), p. 226.
23 Olga Blázquez Sánchez, “Collaborative Cartographies: Counter-Cartography and Mapping Justice in Palestine,” Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies 17, no. 1 (2018): p. 81. OpenStreetMap operates under Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL), allowing anyone to share, create, and adapt its data so long as they attribute, share-alike, and keep it open. Open Data Commons, “ODC Open Database License (ODbL) Summary,” Open Data Commons, accessed 25 November 2013, https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/summary/. Data is contributed by individual users as well as national mapping agencies and other organizations.
24 Blázquez Sánchez, “Collaborative Cartographies,” p. 78. As of October 2020, the wall is no longer labeled on OpenStreetMaps.
25 Arthur Jay Klinghoffer, The Power of Projections: How Maps Reflect Global Politics and History (Westport: Praeger, 2006), p. 6.
26 Jeremy Black, Maps and Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 11.
27 Google Maps adapts the Eurocentric Mercator projection model, which was developed in the sixteenth century to facilitate maritime navigation and also placed the European subcontinent in the position of mastery at center top of the world.
28 Klinghoffer, The Power of Projections, p. 12.
29 Edward Said, “Permission to Narrate,” JPS 13, no. 3 (Spring 1984): p. 34, https://doi.org/10.2307/2536688.
30 Greg Bensinger, “Google Redraws the Borders on Maps Depending on Who’s Looking,” Washington Post, 14 February 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/14/google-maps-political-borders/.
31 Caitlin Dewey, “Google Maps Did Not ‘Delete’ Palestine—But It Does Impact How You See It,” Washington Post, 9 April 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/08/09/google-maps-did-not-delete-palestine-but-it-does-impact-how-you-see-it/.
32 As cited in Tawil-Souri and Aouragh, “Intifada 3.0?,” p. 102. For analysis of Mercator and other projections, see Klinghoffer, The Power of Projections. For an overview of Google Maps as a platform for user-generated content, see Evan Ratliff, “How Google Maps Is Changing the Way We See the World,” Wired, 26 June 2007, pp. 154–9, https://www.wired.com/2007/06/ff-maps/.
33 Ravi Sundaram, Pirate Modernity: Delhi’s Media Urbanism (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 13, 174.
34 Linda Quiquivix, “Art of War, Art of Resistance: Palestinian Counter-Cartography on Google Earth,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104, no. 3 (2014): p. 445, https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2014.892328.
35 Quiquivix, “Art of War,” pp. 446, 447.
36 Quiquivix, “Art of War,” p. 451.
37 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972).
38 Pierre Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoire, new edition (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1997).
39 Hagit Keysar, “A Spatial Testimony: The Politics of Do-It-Yourself Aerial Photography in East Jerusalem,” Society and Space 37, no. 3 (June 2019): p. 524, https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775818820326.
40 Keysar, “A Spatial Testimony,” p. 536.
41 Stephanie Hankey and Marek Tuszynski, “Exposing the Invisible: Visual Investigation of Conflict,” in Image Operations: Visual Media and Political Conflict, ed. Jens Eder and Charlotte Klonk (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), p. 176.
42 Jess Bier, Mapping Israel, Mapping Palestine: How Occupied Landscapes Shape Scientific Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017), p. 11.
43 Gil Z. Hochberg, Visual Occupation: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), p. 5.
44 Juda Leman, Land of Promise/L’Chayim Hadashim (Jerusalem: Urim Palestine Film Company, 1935); Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation, updated edition (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), p. 40.
45 Nadia Yaqub, Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018), pp. 3, 7.
46 Yaqub, Palestinian Cinema, p. 7.
47 See “They Do Not Exist—Film by Mustafa Abu Ali,” YouTube video, 24:57, produced in 1974, posted by Palestine Diary, 30 December 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WZ_7Z6vbsg.
48 Golda Meir, interview by Frank Giles, Sunday Times London, 15 June 1969; reprised as “Golda Meir Scorns Soviets: Israeli Premier Explains Stand on Big-4 Talks, Security,” Washington Post, 16 June 1969, A15.
49 Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 101.
50 Alan Dowty, Israel/Palestine, 3rd ed. (2005; repr., Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012); Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel (London: Verso, 2017). Even when not articulated explicitly, ahistorical myths arise in documentary today, as in Karim Miské, Juifs et Musulmans. Si loin, si proche/Jews and Muslims, Intimate Strangers (Paris: ARTE France, 2013).
51 Nuit et brouillard [Night and Fog], directed by Alain Resnais (France: Argos Films, 1955), DVD.
52 Looted and Hidden: Palestinian Archives in Israel, directed by Rona Sela (Israel, 2017), 46:10, Vimeo video, https://vimeo.com/213851191.
53 For this history, see Yaqub, Palestinian Cinema, pp. 198–202.
54 Rasha Salti, “From Resistance and Bearing Witness to the Power of the Fantastical: Icons and Symbols in Palestinian Poetry and Cinema,” Third Text 24, no. 1 (2010): pp. 39–52.
55 Hochberg, Visual Occupation, p. 6.
56 Raya Morag, Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013), pp. xiv, xvi.
57 Morag, Waltzing, p. 131.
58 See “Arik Bernstein,” American Israel Cultural Foundation, https://aicf.org/artist/arik-bernstein/.
59 IDFA, “Gaza/Sderot,” IDFA DocLab, 2008, https://www.doclab.org/2008/gaza-sderot/.
60 All screenshots and stills were captured by the author.
61 Siobhan O’Flynn, “Designed Experiences in Interactive Documentary,” in Contemporary Documentary, ed. Daniel Marcus and Selmin Kara (New York: Routledge, 2015), p. 80.
62 Judith Aston and Sandra Gaudenzi, “Interactive Documentary: Setting the Field,” Studies in Documentary Film 6, no. 2 (2012): p. 130.
63 Ella R. S. Harris, “Introducing i-Docs to Geography: Exploring Interactive Documentary’s Nonlinear Imaginaries,” Area 49, no. 1 (2017): pp. 25–34, https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12275.
64 Jacqueline Levitin, “Gaza Sderot: Personifying the Conflict,” Jump Cut 57 (Fall 2016), https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc57.2016/-LevitinGaza/index.html.
65 Levitin, “Gaza Sderot.”
66 Levitin, “Gaza Sderot.” The actual figure is two million.
67 Philippe Bourmaud, “Gaza-Sdérot, la vie malgré tout,” Vingtième Siècle, Revue d’histoire 103 (July–September 2009): pp. 236–39, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40495822. Translation is the author’s.
68 Helga Tawil-Souri and Dina Matar, “Introduction,” in Gaza as Metaphor, ed. Helga Tawil-Souri and Dina Matar (London: Hurst and Company, 2016), p. 3.
69 A. A. Thabet et al., “Exposure to War Trauma and PTSD among Parents and Children in the Gaza Strip,” European Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 17, no. 4 (June 2008): pp. 191–99, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00787-007-0653-9.
70 Zochrot, “Our Vision,” Zochrot, 2014, https://zochrot.org/en/content/17.
71 Zochrot, “Our Vision.” Documentaries available at B’Tselem Shorts: Visual Impact Documenting the Seldom Seen (Israel: B’Tselem, 2007), DVD.
72 Zochrot, “Our Vision.”
73 Zochrot, “Our Vision.”
74 Nasser Abufarha, “Land of Symbols: Cactus, Poppies, Orange and Olive Trees in Palestine,” Identities 15, no. 3 (2008): p. 365, https://doi.org/10.1080/10702890802073274. It also symbolizes loss, familiar to audiences from flashback scenes in Al-makhdu’un [The Dupes], directed by Tewfik Saleh (Damascus: National Film Organization, 1973).
75 Kamal Boullata, Palestinian Art: From 1850 to the Present (London: Saqi, 2009), p. 183.
76 Boullata, Palestinian Art, p. 184.
77 iNakba mobile app.
78 Pappé, Ethnic Cleansing, p. 228.
79 Saree Makdisi, “The Architecture of Erasure,” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 3 (Spring 2010): pp. 519–59, https://doi.org/10.1086/653411.
80 iNakba mobile app.
81 iNakba mobile app.
82 iNakba mobile app.
83 Jan Selby, “Dressing Up Domination as ‘Cooperation’: The Case of Israeli-Palestinian Water Relations,” Review of International Studies 29, no. 1 (January 2003): pp. 121–38, https://doi.org/10.1017/S026021050300007X.
84 Ghada Karmi, In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story (London: Verso, 2002); Dorit Naaman, “Lessons for the Future from Jerusalem’s Palestinian Past,” The Conversation, 13 May 2018, https://theconversation.com/lessons-for-the-future-from-jerusalems-palestinian-past-95768.
85 Naaman, “Lessons for the Future.”
86 Dorit Naaman, interviewed by interns, “Interview with Dorit Naaman about ‘Jerusalem, We Are Here,’” Jerusalem Fund, 11 May 2017, http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/17755/interview-dorit-naaman-jerusalem.
87 Naaman, “Interview.”
88 Naaman, “Interview.”
89 As cited in Mary Pelletier, “Take a Tour of West Jerusalem’s Palestinian History,” Al Jazeera, 19 April 2017, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/03/jerusalem-170319103904879.html.
90 Jerusalem, Naaman.
91 Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, new edition (London: Verso, 2017), xvi–xvii.
92 Olga Gershenson, “‘We Are Victims of Our Past . . .’: Israel’s Dark Past Comes to Light in New Documentaries,” Tikkun 33, nos. 1–2 (Winter–Spring 2018): p. 75, https://doi.org/10.1215/08879982-4354534.
93 Gershenson, “‘We Are Victims,” p. 75. In Israeli parlance, the term “Arab” undercuts Palestinian existence.
94 Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 123–24.
95 Morris, Palestinian Refugee Problem, p. 123.
96 Morris, Palestinian Refugee Problem, p. 124.
97 Morris, Palestinian Refugee Problem, p. 393.
98 Zimmermann and De Michiel, Open Space New Media Documentary, p. 74.
99 Gershenson, “We Are Victims,” p. 75.
100 Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016); Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2018).
101 Naaman, “Interview.”
102 Zimmermann and De Michiel, Open Space New Media Documentary, p. 73.
103 Mark Poster, “The Information Empire,” Comparative Literature Studies 41, no. 3 (2004): pp. 317–34, https://doi:10.1353/cls.2004.0036.; Anders Albrechtslund and Thomas Ryberg, “Participatory Surveillance in the Intelligent Building,” Design Issues 27, no. 3 (Summer 2011): pp. 35–46, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41261942.
104 Linda Quiquivix, “When the Carob Tree Was the Border: On Autonomy and Palestinian Practices of Figuring It Out,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 24, no. 3 (2013): p. 185, https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2013.815242.
105 See the website of the Occupy WiFi performance piece: Israeli Pirate Party, “Occupy WiFi,” 2014, http://occupywifi.org/en/.
106 See “Welcome to Google Maps Platform,” Google Cloud, accessed 15 October 2020, https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform.
107 These features are promoted widely, for example, by Google Cloud partner Sword Connect, “Work Smarter and More Efficiently with Google Cloud Solutions by Sword Connect,” Sword Connect home page, https://www.sword-connect.com; and on the website of the app Iconic Framework, “Google Maps: A Comprehensive Maps Platform That Drives Real-World Insights and Immersive Location Experiences,” Iconic Framework (n.d.), https://ionicframework.com/integrations/google-maps.
108 Recent news coverage includes “Why Does Google Maps Not Recognize Palestine or Its Roads?” Al Bawaba, 18 October 2018, https://www.albawaba.com/loop/why-does-google-maps-not-recognize-palestine-or-its-roads-1201730.
109 “Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0),” Creative Commons, accessed 15 October 2020, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/.
110 Adi Kuntsman and Rebecca L. Stein, Digital Militarism: Israel’s Occupation in the Social Media Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), p. 9.
111 Armand Mattelart, The Globalization of Surveillance, trans. Susan Taponier and James A. Cohen (London: Polity, 2010), p. 161.
112 This aspect of occupation made international headlines in March 2014 when Hollywood actor Scarlett Johansson traded an Oxfam ambassadorship to be a paid spokesperson for SodaStream, whose factories are in the occupied West Bank.
113 Lena Jayyusi, “Introduction Arab Jerusalem and Colonial Transformation,” in Jerusalem Interrupted: Modernity and Colonial Transformation, 1917–Present, ed. Lena Jayyusi (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2015), p. xxi.
114 Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (London: Zone Books, 2010), pp. 45–46.
115 Recent articles include: Hagar Shezaf and Jonathan Jacobson, “Revealed: Israel’s Cyber-Spy Industry Helps World Dictators Hunt Dissidents and Gays,” Haaretz, 19 October 2018, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-israel-s-cyber-spy-industry-aids-dictators-hunt-dissidents-and-gays.
116 Hudson and Zimmermann, Thinking through Digital Media.
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Dale Hudson
Dale Hudson is an associate professor in the Film and New Media program at New York University Abu Dhabi, where his teaching focuses on film and digital media that connect the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. He is the author of Vampires, Race, and Transnational Hollywoods (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017) and coauthor of Thinking through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). He is also digital media curator for the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival and coordinator of Films from the Gulf at the Middle East Studies Association Film Festival.