Visualizing the Palestinian Struggle

Towards a Critical Analytic of Palestine Solidarity Film

Terri Ginsberg

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9783319397764
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319397771
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

© The Author(s) 2016

Terri GinsbergVisualizing the Palestinian StruggleGlobal Cinema10.1007/978-3-319-39777-1_2

Begin Abstract

Chapter 1 After Al-Aqsa

Terri Ginsberg¹

(1)

The American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt

End Abstract

In the current age of digitalized media, a new wave of political activist filmmaking has emerged that takes as its primary focus the anti-colonial struggle in Palestine/Israel. Issuing from the West, including Israel, and often produced collectively by anti-occupation movement workers to motivate people to activism and resistance (Standing With Palestine [Paper Tiger TV, U.S., 2003]), build legal cases (In the Name of Security [Emily and Sara Kunstler (National Lawyers Guild), U.S., 2002]), and raise consciousness amongst the general public (Breaking the Silence: Israeli Soldiers Talk about Hebron [Shovrim Shtika, Israel, 2005]), this wave of Palestinian–Israeli struggle films has courageously offered previously suppressed, socially marginalized perspectives on a situation considered one of the world’s most contentious and emotional. By their very content, as they expose the devastation of Israeli occupation and the contradictions of Zionism, these Palestine solidarity films pervade both U.S. corporate news coverage and Hollywood’s representation of the Middle East. Indeed, many of the films overlap with a similar cinematic movement examining television and print media coverage of the events of September 11, 2001 (“9/11”) and the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions, which Jonathan Curiel of the San Francisco Chronicle has described as the “War and Media Studies” genre (see Ginsberg and Lippard 202–203).

An unfortunate factor for the purposes of many of these films, especially those aiming to raise public consciousness, is their limited distribution, and sometimes more limited reception, within the art cinema circuit, elite-popular film festivals (Sundance; Human Rights Watch), film/cultural studies conferences, and alternative Internet streams (YouTube, Vimeo, Bullfrog). Few of these films have been the subject of scholarly analysis, and those which have are often well-funded European or Israeli co-productions, some of them products of the Israeli hasbara (“public relations” or “propaganda”) initiative meant to boost the failing image of Israel in international eyes. Notwithstanding ongoing Israeli attempts to infiltrate and co-opt digital media networks in an effort to pre-empt their effectiveness (Kuntsman and Stein), however, these films have become useful resources for movement activists and others seeking visual evidence of the worsening situation in an effort to organize against it, a situation that is still widely obscured and skewed by the U.S. corporate film and media industries and the U.S. Jewish and Christian Zionist communities as they continue to deem the struggle “controversial” despite the arguable claim that, among the international community of scholars, including most Israelis, “the range of political disagreement [on the facts of Zionism and Israeli occupation] is quite narrow, while the range of agreement is quite broad” (Finkelstein, Beyond 6).

The cinematic techniques preponderant within this developing cinematic wave draw largely from political documentary movements such as cinéma verité and direct cinema, as well as from traditional explicative and expository modes (compilation, talking heads; see Nichols). However, in contrast to much documentary filmmaking of the 1930s and 1940s and the experimental, often activist films and videos which emerged in their wake, all of which were decidedly politically motivated and frequently explicitly informed by the theatrical, painterly, and photographic intertexts of the cinematic avant-gardes, a majority of the activist films now being made about the struggle in Palestine/Israel employ so-called “reality-TV” aesthetics. These approaches are generally unconcerned with the significatory properties of the cinematic medium per se (form), much less the related institutional structuring of spectatorship (the apparatus)—that is, the matter of political aesthetics—because, instead, they tend to utilize the camera as a relatively transparent index of external reality: an empirical device of raw “witnessing,” a progressive-populist instrument of social intervention and mobilization.

This phenomenon may be attributed to a longstanding sense that is still common within many contemporary activist circles, for which attention to aesthetic form and institutional structuring is elitist and exploitative because it is perceived either to symptomatize collaboration with the Hollywood industrial hegemon (see Horak) or to unnecessarily manipulate and complexify a presumed self-evident pro-filmic. While attempting to advance, through the mass medium of cinema, political agendas that are certainly welcome and commendable from Palestinian liberationist perspectives, contemporary North American Palestine solidarity films made in the documentary tradition echo predominantly what Palestinian filmmaker Omar al-Qattan refers to as the “commando” reportage of international corporate news agencies, with its conventional and banal aesthetic that “smack[s] of political tourism” in its subordination of oppressed voices and perspectives to Western political priorities (al-Qattan 121, 126–127). Due in part to limited resources and amateur production conditions, these well-intentioned and committed cinematic responses to reactionary policies and practices may offer little more than generic compilations of damning footage juxtaposed with revelatory interview testimonials which, for reasons no longer subject to serious debate in film circles, supply limited and sometimes ironically self-contradictory counterproof because of their relative aesthetic alienation from larger explanatory contexts. The problem is shared with concurrent Palestinian activist filmmaking, in which a similar simplification of aesthetic form has occurred under the contradictory rubric of Western state, corporate, and NGO patronage, resulting in works that often starkly contrast with the aesthetically rich, frequently poetical, self-consciously revolutionary films of the exiled Palestinian liberation movement of the 1970s and early 1980s (see Ginsberg and Lippard 320–322). A nonetheless noteworthy example of this tendency is the documentary, Where Should the Birds Fly? (Fida Qishta, U.S./Palestinian, 2012), which is important for being the first film about the 2007–2008 Israeli siege of Gaza to be shot and directed by Palestinians indigenous to the region.

I hold throughout this book that aesthetic concerns—attention to the ways in which form relates to content, and in which that relationship produces subject-effects in viewers and spectators—are nonetheless crucial to the effective making and informed comprehension of Palestinian solidarity cinema. As Gail Day argues strenuously in her book on dialectics in art theory, “[T]oward the end of the twentieth century, attention to aesthetic questions figures not so much a retreat from but the very presence of radical political aspirations, sometimes even their tentative return” (19). For Day, citing critical cultural theorists from Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin to Theodor Adorno and T.J. Clark, aesthetic concerns do not necessarily bespeak an empty formalism or even the more substantive constructivism so feared by Stalinists and anti-Communists alike. There is nothing self-evident about pro-filmic reality, that is, insofar as “reality has slipped into the functional” (Brecht qtd. Day 7), and artifice and construction have therefore become “necessary to sidestep the inevitable flattening out of social complexity by the matter-of-fact image” (Day 7). Rather than a retreat from politics, then, “we can read this same drift into consideration of art and aesthetics as resulting in an insistent social loading of aesthetic categories” (ibid.). Thus aesthetics advances “a realism that is primarily concerned with reconstruction and reorientation of meanings” (34), whereupon the relationship between a work’s form and its content may be understood as a “network of real complex relations between the two” (Clark qtd. Day 43)—real, substantive concentrations of a work’s historical moment that must be analyzed for their ideological tendencies, social contradictions, and material constraints (Day 29, 42).

This chapter takes as counter-examples of the numerous laudable efforts to prove the horrors of occupation and displacement three exemplary works of contemporary Palestine solidarity filmmaking: Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land: U.S. Media and the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict (Sut Jhally/Bathsheba Ratzkoff, U.S., 2003); Zero Degrees of Separation (Elle Flanders, Canada, 2005); and Still Life (Cynthia Madansky, U.S., 2004).

These films, all made in the wake of Israel’s violent military reprisals against the Al-Aqsa Intifada (see Ginsberg and Lippard 191–192), represent a markedly different approach to the struggle in Palestine/Israel, each from the perspective of the socio-political “outside.” Each film stands to influence prevailing moving-image projections of the struggle by supplying a structurally and aesthetically engaged analysis without jeopardizing—indeed the films promote—answerability to and solidarity with the aspirations of Palestinian liberation: Peace through a reasoned analysis of media misrepresentation of the struggle, Zero Degrees through a cross-generational/cultural queering of Israeli/Zionist history, and Still Life through compassionate post-Holocaust judgment of the occupation’s devastating immorality. Rather than merely exploiting the cinematic apparatus for the sake of political messaging and melodramatic pathos, these works exemplify crucial directions for Palestine solidarity filmmaking, according to which the association and proximity of moving-image technology with the ethnic cleansing of Palestine is as important a site of textual critique and thematic engagement as are Zionism and the Israeli occupation themselves.

Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land

Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land: U.S. Media and the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict is an exceptional documentary. One of the few that bucks the general trend, it offers an atypically analytical critique of U.S. corporate media misrepresentation of the anti-colonial struggle in the region, while also having been produced and directed by media scholars and educators who are non-professional filmmakers. Peace was produced by the Media Education Foundation, a progressive media initiative based at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and directed by Sut Jhally, a Professor of Communication there who is well-known for his critical communication theory, and his then-student, Israeli ex-patriot Bathsheba Ratzkoff. Their film resists the typically object-centered quality of media studies as it elides counter-historiographic approaches. In fact, Peace is a self-conscious and cinematically reflexive work, noteworthy for its compelling implementation of montage and computer graphics to form a layered horizon of critical intelligibility that serves to reposition predominant formulations of cinematic “witnessing” into contexts that are increasingly conducive not only to the possibility and necessity but also the plausibility (Bronner, Blood 25) of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East.

Peace’s critical acumen is ironically refracted through its U.S. corporate media reception. Mainstream reviews of the film at once applauded its exposure and criticism of what Jack Mathews of the New York Daily News called “the partisan American view of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict” (“Showing the movie would be a great way to open a debate”). However, Mathews questioned the effectiveness of what he also saw as the film’s resistance to partisanship in general (“I would love to hear its charges answered as clearly as they’re stated”). Joshua Land of the purportedly more liberal Village Voice argued, by extension: “Ultimately Peace is limited by the very success of its critique; by the end it’s difficult to conceive of large-scale change as even possible.” Although Land surpassed Mathews when he concluded: “But both the movie and the propaganda assault it describes teach one important lesson: Get organized,” both critics clearly expected the film to furnish ideal solutions to the struggle. In their implied estimation, the only way to have done that would have been to marshal some vaguely defined notion of partisanship, as though the only or preferable way to intervene cinematically into the Palestinian–Israeli struggle is to propagate a political platform that predetermines answers to most if not all of the problems and questions the issue raises—a rare practice even for Palestinian revolutionary cinema.

In fact, Peace is not a partisan political film, but this by no means prevents it from taking a position that challenges what one of its interview subjects calls Israel’s “ideological occupation of the U.S. media,” or from in turn proposing a partial and adaptive end to the struggle. While its content is comparatively mild by contemporary movement standards, that proposal is simply not acceptable to the mainstream corporate media, which also purports to offer serious analysis of the struggle. ¹ In today’s chilling atmosphere of neo-McCarthyist intimidation, fear-mongering, and squelching of dissent, ² many more moderate, bipartisan, liberal-ecumenical perspectives have been denied legitimacy and credibility by their de facto association with “radicalism”—notwithstanding the fact that partisanship and radicalism entail neither the same concept nor political strategy, and despite Norman Finkelstein’s sardonic remark that the “[Radical Left’s] combined constituency could…comfortably fit into a telephone book” (Finkelstein, Beyond 25). At best, Peace is a fitting example of progressive filmmaking on the issue of Palestine/Israel. While affirming New York Times critic Ned Martel’s accusation of “one-sidedness,” it should in no way be positioned as either partisan or revolutionary. In fact, its proposed political solution is not the one democratic state hailed by radicals and many progressives in opposition to prevailing opinion (I count myself among this grouping), ³ but the two-state solution condoned by most liberals, many conservatives (at least superficially), and also many progressives. ⁴ Whether Peace supplies a convincing or seamless argument in favor of that solution is a question to which I shall return. However, that question should not be misconstrued as sectarian, factional, or parochial, but instead as part of a necessarily analytical process that I shall describe in the course of explication, after Stephen Bronner in another context, as radical rationalism (Bronner, Reclaiming).

Peace is divided into eight designated parts, an unmarked introductory sequence, and a conclusion, each of which focuses on a particular strategy deployed by the U.S. corporate media to misrepresent the struggle in Palestine/Israel: PR Strategy 01: American Media: Occupied Territory; PR Strategy 02: Hidden Occupation; PR Strategy 03: Invisible Colonization; PR Strategy 04: Violence in a Vacuum; PR Strategy 05: Defining Who Is Newsworthy; PR Strategy 06: Myth of U.S. Neutrality; PR Strategy 07: Myth of the Generous Offer; PR Strategy 08: Marginalized Voices; and Is Peace Possible? This ordering of parts comprises an image-word trajectory that proceeds dialectically. The film elucidates explanatory contexts for the struggle that have regularly been ignored or evaded by the corporate media, and these revealed elisions become the basis for generalizing the phenomenon of misrepresentation to a systematic practice of dissimulation that involves rhetorical and linguistic manipulation of the facts of occupation and its perpetuation by military incursions and illegal settlement-building. Peace argues that these are all tactics meant to garner and maintain U.S. popular support for Israeli policy and disregard for Palestinian claims.

Peace’s dialectical trajectory is supplemented by a montage structure that rehearses and performs cinematically this proposed critical analysis. As I shall detail below, this means that Peace draws from the tradition of cinematic editing usually associated with Sergei Eisenstein and the early Soviet filmmakers, for w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• Introduction: Modalities of Solidarity
• Chapter 1 After Al-Aqsa
• Chapter 2 Revisiting Prior Commitments
• Chapter 3 Distant Neighbors
• Conclusion: A Time for Change
• Backmatter