Judea and Samaria in Israeli documentary cinema: displacement, oriental space and the cultural construction of colonized landscapes

Abstract

This article argues that Israeli documentary cinema represents Judea and Samaria as an oriental space. An analysis of some prominent films reveals common conventions used by filmmakers in the cinematic representations of the region. These conventions establish a series of distinctions between ‘here’ and ‘there’, such as domestic versus foreigner, familiarity versus strangeness, safety versus danger, and belonging versus alienation. The orientalization of Judea and Samaria is considered here as a rhetorical strategy that enables filmmakers to perform a cultural construction of the region as a colonized landscape.

Keywords::

• displacement
• Israeli documentary cinema
• Judea and Samaria
• landscape, orientalism
• rhetoric in films
• travel writing

Acknowledgements

The article is part of the research project ‘Democratic Efficacy among Periphery Groups: the Case of Judea and Samaria’, Conducted by the Samaria and Jordan Rift R&D Centre, Ariel, financed by the Israeli Ministry of Science, Technology and Space.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. Raya Morag, “The Living Body and the Corpse – Israeli Documentary Cinema and the Intifadah,” Journal of Film and Video 60, no. 3–4 (2008): 3.

^2. See for instance The Settlers (Ruth Walk, 2002) or Beyond Mountains of Darkness (Tsach Nissenboim, 2004). The Disengagement Plan (2005) paved the way for documentaries showing more sympathy towards the settlers: In Freiman's Kitchen (Hadar Bashan, 2007), Awaken (Menora Hazani, 2007).

^3. See, for instance, Yael Munk, “‘Dreams Often Lie’; on ‘Compromise’, the Subversive Documentation of an Israeli–Palestinian Political Adaptation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet,” Altre modernità 3 (2010): 174–81; Yael Munk, “Motherhood as an Oppositional Standpoint: On Michal Aviad's ‘For My Children’,” in Gender in Conflicts: Palestine–Israel–Germany, ed. Christina von Braun and Ulrike Auga (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2004), 143–8; Michal Peleg, “To Be a Child of a Colon,” Drorit Gur-Arie, “Absent Place, A Place without a Place,” and Yael Munk, “Detained” [in Hebrew], in South Cinema: Critical Writing After the 8th South Cinema Film Festival, ed. Erez Peri and Avner Feingelrant (Sderot: Sapir Academic College, 2009), 74–91; Gali Gold, “What is your Story? The Israeli–Palestinian Conflict in Recent Women's Documentaries,” Third Text 20, no. 3–4 (2006): 475–86; see also Janine Halbreich-Euvrard, ed., Israéliens, Palestiniens, que peut le cinéma? (Paris: Editions Michalon, 2005).

^4. Morag, “The Living Body,” 4.

^5. The founding father of this cinematic genre within the Israeli occupation documentary cinema is Amos Gitaï's 1982 Field Diary.

^6. See Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992); Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourse of Displacement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Billie Melman, Women's Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918 (London: Macmillan, 1992).

^7. Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin Books, 1995), 25.

^8. The term ‘orientalization’ is not restricted, however, to the representation of geographical spaces and can be ascribed to practices outside of the immediate context of the West/East dichotomy. See Aki Uchida, “The Orientalization of Asian Women in America,” Women Studies International Forum 21, no. 2 (1998): 161–74; Michael Haldrup, Lasse Koefoed, and Kirsten Simonsen, “Practical Orientalism – Bodies, Everyday Life and the Construction of Otherness,” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 88, no. 2 (2006): 173–84.

^9. A.L. Macfie, Orientalism (London: Longman, 2002), 59.

^10. David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travail Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 109–24. See also the entry “Colonial Patronage” in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Triffin, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (London: Routledge, 1998), 43–45.

^11. Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” Art in America 71 (May 1983): 125.

^12. John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 43–67.

^13. On the traveller-writer's ambition to appear as objective observer and on the naturalist influence on romantic travel literature, see Valérie Berty, Littérature et voyage au XIX^esiècle (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2001), 84–97.

^14. Ibid., 169–98.

^15. Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire.

^16. On the ‘drogman’, the interpreter and guide in the oriental space, see Sarga Moussa, La relation orientale. Enquête sur la communication dans les récits de voyage en Orient (1811–1861) (Paris: Klincksieck, 1995), ch. 1.

^17. On disorientation in travel writing see John Zilcosky, Kafka's Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the Traffic of Writing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 44–9.

^18. The sub-regional distinction between Palestinian villages and towns and Jewish settlements deserves further examination. This will include examples that are less restricted to the theme of displacement. Nonetheless, in many cases it is the Palestinian space that enables filmmakers to convey feelings of stability, confidence, safety, and belonging, while Jewish settlements arouse a sense of alienation, instability, and in extreme cases even deviation or insanity. See for instance Danny Verta's 2010 film, The Human Turbine, which follows Israeli-Palestinian activists' venture to produce green energy in a poor Palestinian neighbourhood of shacks and tents near Hebron, and Ruth Walk's 2002 The Settlers, which intimately depicts the family lives of Hebron Jewish settlers. While the first places at its core themes related to solidarity, humanity, and the pursuit of a normal way of life, the latter produced an extreme effect of the absurd through the juxtaposition of the everyday pastoral family routine of the settlers with the military presence just outside their home in the surrounding Palestinian quarters.

^19. Shamir's film Checkpoint does not use a narrative form of displacement, and thus will not be discussed in this essay. However, it should be noted that Shamir also chooses to place his camera in checkpoints, which are classic places of passage (lieu de passage).

^20. Assa Ofek, “IDF Presents: The Theatre of Absurd” [in Hebrew], interview with Yoav Shamir, Third-Ear Magazin, July 11, 2004, http://www.third-ear.com/p_article.aspx?id = 69 (accessed July 25, 2010).

^21. In an opinion article published in the Boston Globe (November 1, 2002), after the release of To Die in Jerusalem, Medalia writes: ‘I grew up in Ramat Hasharon, Israel, 16 miles from Tulkarm, a Palestinian refugee camp. But until three years ago, I had never set foot in one of the camps that are the crux of the hostilities. The closest most Israelis (other than as soldiers) get to Palestinian life is what they see in the media, which focuses almost exclusively on military activity and civil unrest. I entered one of these camps, Dheisheh, not with a machine gun but with a camera…’, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/01/opinion/01iht-edmedalia.1.8145320.html?_r = 1&scp = 1&sq = %22in%20humanity%20lies%20hope%22&st = cse (accessed July 25, 2010).

^22. On the feminist perspective as an alternative and critical ‘look’ at the conflict in Israeli documentary cinema, see especially Gold, “What is your Story?”

^23. Interestingly, Checkpoint, which takes place at various checkpoints all over the region, does not take the classic form of a journey film, although Shamir places the camera in classic ‘lieux de passage’ (sites of passage).

^24. Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema. East/West and the Politics of Representation (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010 [1989]), 231.

^25. Ofek, interview with Yoav Shamir.

^26. For similar statements by other Israeli filmmakers discussed here, see Avi Mograbi, “Death Cultures, The Occupied Territories and Film,” Vertigo 3, no. 3 (Autumn 2006): 34; interview with Yulie Cohen Gerstel, BBC Four website (November 18, 2004), http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/storyville/my-land-zion-yulie.shtml (accessed July 25, 2010).

^27. Doxic elements are ‘pre-existing points of agreement and consensual views’ without which ‘a dynamic interaction could not develop’: see Ruth Amossy, “How to Do Things with Doxa: Toward an Analysis of Argumentation in Discourse,” Poetics Today 23, no. 3 (2002): 476.

^28. Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, or, The New Pilgrim's Progress (New-York: Signet, 1966 [1869]), 379–380.

^29. Gary P. Henrickson, “The Missing Landscapes of Mark Twain,” The Mark Twain Annual 2, no. 1 (2004): 41–9.

^30. Said, Orientalism, 21.

^31. Tzvetan Todorov, “Les récits de voyage et colonialisme,” Le Débat 18 (January 1982): 8.

^32. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1995), 61.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Israeli Ministry of Science, Technology and Space [project number 3-9142].

Notes on contributors

Eithan Orkibi

Eithan Orkibi (PhD) is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ariel University, and a research fellow at the ADARR (Analysis of Discourse, Argumentation and Rhetoric) research group, Tel Aviv, Israel.