Distinguished colleagues, dear participants, and guests
Who is the documentary Other? Levinas and the notion of time in documentaries
Yüklə 1,96 Mb.
|
Who is the documentary Other? Levinas and the notion of time in documentaries My paper proposes to look at the question of documentary ethics through a philosophical lens. More specifically I intend to concentrate on the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas and his concept of time. For Levinas, time is grounded in an ethical relation in which the other remains transcendent and is not assimilated by the same. I will make a link between Levinas’s ethical discourse and documentaries, explaining how and why their modes of temporality embody the possibility of engaging with the Other’s radical alterity. On a first look, the interface between Levinas's ethics and cinema is far from obvious. For Levinas, the primacy of ethics seems to preclude the aesthetic realm, and more specifically implies an opposition between what he regards as an ethical form of responsiveness to the Other, and openness to the domain of the visual. Vision, for Levinas, is intentionally structured and thus object-oriented. As such, it cannot qualify as a form of experience that would allow an appearance of alterity. In other words, since Levinasian ethics begins with a radical experience, it seems that ethical experience must be non-visual. Therefore, cinematic viewing, as a vision-based artistic experience, not only cannot be thought of as allowing relations with the other, but could even be viewed as contributing to preventing them. The difficulty presented by this apparent divergence could also account for why it is only in recent years that his thought has been influential for film theory in general and for documentaries in particular. Documentary cinema theorists like Michael Renov, Sarah Cooper or Libby Saxton, while taking into consideration Levinas's problematization of art and the visual, and recognizing the difficulties posed by Levinas's ethics for films, have found different ways to permit consideration of documentaries' potential for allowing the appearance of the Other. While these theorists give particular case studies to show the ability of specific documentaries to cope with the notion of alterity, I would like to make a more general claim, and look into the documentary medium itself in order to find its inherent potential for opening its viewers to an ethical encounter with the Other. I intend to concentrate on Levinas’s concept of diachronic time, grounded as it is in an ethical relation in which the other remains transcendent and is not assimilated by the same. I will look at how Levinas’s project aims to open to an ethics that views time in terms of an unbridgeable difference separating the subject’s temporality from the other’s, an intersubjective lapse between the subject and the other person created through responsiveness to and responsibility for the other. I will examine how Levinas’s discussion of the relationships between time and the Other can be linked to the different modes of appearance of time in documentary cinema, explaining how they make room for new insights relating to ethical concepts such as Otherness, responsibility, and transcendence. This also will be accompanied by concrete examples from documentaries from Israel and elsewhere.
Michael Moore is one of the most influential albeit controversial documentarists in contemporary American cinema and television. His documentaries clearly demonstrate his political commitment to mediate the common people, subaltern communities and the Other's daily hardships in the extremely stratified, materialistic and conservative American society. My presentation focuses on The Sodomobile, an episode of Moore's weekly TV show The Awful Truth (18 April 1999), in which Moore challenges the prevalent homophobia in the U.S., including heterocentric legislation, institutionalized sexual discrimination, hate crimes and bigoted churches (particularly the Pastor Fred Phelps, infamous for his "God Hate Gays" demonstrations during funerals of gay men who died of AIDS). My research objectives focus on critical exposure of the tension between the universal ethical condition of the documentary form and practice and Moore's genuine 'queer ethics' in his Sodomobile episode, and how his queer documentary poeisis is harnessed to subvert discriminatory ideologies. I focus on the significant contribution of queer thinking to Moore's theatrical documentation of sexual minorities and to his radical politicization of homophobia. Dr. Gilad Padva is a scholar and lecturer in film studies, television studies, cultural studies and queer theory. He studied film and television and philosophy (including an M.A degree with distinction in philosophy) at Tel Aviv University, and his Ph.D. thesis is focused on representations of sexual minorities in American and British cinema and television in the 1990s and 2000s. He currently works for Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the Open University of Israel and Beit Berl College. Dr. Padva is the author of Queer Nostalgia in Cinema and Pop Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and he is the co-editor with Dr. Nurit Buchweitz of Sensational Pleasures in Cinema, Literature and Visual Culture: The Phallic Eye (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
Placing the ethics of the active camera under close scrutiny raises different questions: can documentary cinema affect and ameliorate the circumstances of its subjects? Do spectators accede to the ethical positioning of the camera? And is the active camera able to create an ocular space in which the gaze is uncontaminated by the power dynamics of “self” and “other”? This paper focuses on two key Israeli documentaries which utilize an active camera. The first, Precious Life (Shlomi Eldar, 2010) chronicles the struggle to rescue a Palestinian baby who suffers from a genetic disease. The baby is being treated in an Israeli hospital by a Jewish Israeli doctor, while the filmmaker tries to assist in locating a bone-marrow donor to save his life. 52/50 (Uri Bar-On, 2006) documents the immigration police’s encounters with foreign workers and refugees in Tel Aviv in an effort to prevent cases of police brutality. Both filmmakers do not remove themselves from the sphere of depicted action and positively influence the circumstances of their subjects. However, the desire to change the reality of the "other" risks reproducing the existent power hierarchy, now transposed onto the coordinates of rescuer-vs.-rescued, and even taking the shape of a rescue fantasy. Subsequently it can divert the film's focus from its subjects towards the active function of the camera, the filmmaker's goals and the matrix of contexts he or she puts to use in their realization. In this case, a true ethical encounter between the (filmmaker’s) self and the “other” is averted. Yaara Ozery is a film scholar who holds a M.A. from the department of Film and Television, Faculty of the Arts, Tel Aviv University. She teaches film theory and Israeli cinema at Tel Aviv University and Sapir College. Her Master's thesis focuses on the ethics and aesthetics of reenactment in recent Israeli documentary cinema. Contact: yaara.ozery@gmail.com SESSION 3: Wednesday, May 18, 17:00 – 18:30 
Ethics of Documentary Activism and New Perspectives on Activation Ayelet Bechar, documentary filmmaker and journalist Selfie Docs: in search of the ultimate “Like” It’s been 25 years since Bill Nichols established an ethical theory stating that there’s an indexical relationship between the cinematic image and the ethical, political and ideological position generated by the documentary filmmaker . However, today, as cellular self-documentation has become a cultural norm, a new cinematic language has emerged, and with it, a new documentary ethics to be considered. In my presentation, I will explore this new ethical space through the close examination of two Israeli documentaries: Lies in the Closet (2012), directed by Shirley Berkowitz; and One Out of Three, directed by Sivan Ben Ari (2014). Both filmmakers seamlessly enmeshed original footage shot by the filmmakers with selfie footage of the protagonists. In Lies in the Closet, the protagonist, Or, secretly travels to Thailand in order to undergo a gender reassignment surgery, using money he deceitfully extracted from his parents. In Ben Ari’s film, the main character, Ricky, conceives a child with her brother Yakir, using Yakir partner’s sperm. In both films, the protagonists film themselves in their most intimate and dramatic moments, following directions from the filmmakers - who remain absent from the shooting scene. This new documentary position stands in stark contrast to the traditional documentary filmmaking practice of “being there”- epitomized by the actual presence of the filmmaker on the scene. In these films, however, the protagonists, while ostensibly talking to themselves, directly address viewers, through the essential mediation of the absent filmmakers. This cinematic style blends viewpoints and creates an ethical stance, worthy of examination. Undoubtedly, an ideological statement emerges: complex, layered identities should be socially accepted, and self-realization justifies defying prevalent norms and morals. This cinematic language, while glorifying sexual or familial ambiguity and hybridity, simultaneously emits an outcry for normality. By allowing “professional storytellers” to put their self-shot materials in context, they, in effect, yearn for what every selfie signifies: the quest for ethical and ideological approval – the ultimate “Like”. Ayelet Bechar is a documentary filmmaker and journalist. She directed the documentaries Take 3 (2015) and Just Married (2005) and was the content editor of the award winning New Media project Gaza Sderot (2008). She was a 2007 fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, has an MS from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York, and a BFA in Film and Television from Tel Aviv University. Ayelet teaches in Sapir College; Kibbutzim and David Yellin Colleges of Education; and Minshar and Ma’aleh film schools.
Thursday May 19th SESSION 1: Thursday, May 19, 09:00 – 10:30 Ethics of the Real. The reality of ethics Chair: Avishai Kfir. Presentations by; Amir Har-Gil, Macabit Abramson and Shachar Brenner. Dr. Amir Har-Gil, School of Communications at the Netanya Academic College. The Dilemmas of a Documentary Filmmaker: a Filmed Soul-Searching Common wisdom tends to view documentary films as products that reveal reality and present the truth. However, the way in which reality is reflected, presented and "embodied" in the film entails a spate of decisions which demand taking choices that are influenced by different considerations. These considerations stem from various obligations directors have to cope with, obligations that relate to almost all aspects of their filmmaking. In this paper I shall discuss the challenge presented a number of professional dilemmas that emerge from director Micha Livne's fascinating documentary film Closed Story (2015). Furthermore, I will endeavor to describe the price the director paid and is still paying for his choices and how they affect his functioning as a filmmaker and a human being who lives in a certain culture and society. Closed Story deals with Livne, the director's courageous endeavor to look back at the course of events that took place at the battle of Sultan Yaakov in the First Lebanon War (1982) where he served as battalion sergeant, events he suppressed for many years. The conflicts Livne experienced within himself as well as between him and other personages, express the various forces operating behind the scenes to bend and shape the truth in documentary films. From the point by point analysis of the various hats Livne's wore while filming Closed Story conclusions can be drawn about directors' hats in documentary filmmaking in general. The act of choosing between different hats often entails a heavy price for the director. Inevitably, directors manage the whole gamut of their decisions out of a sense of mission to represent a certain reality and express a social and artistic statement. The totality of these decisions leads to the crystallization of a whole and unified "world", the directors' world, embedded in a single filmic creation. Hence viewers of documentary creations have to be aware of the existence of the creators' various hats as factors that influence the shaping of the works' truth. Assuming responsibility on the part of the viewers for identifying the complex truth does not eliminate the directors' ethical responsibility. However, awareness of "both sides" may lead to a productive dialogue in the construction of reality through documentary film presentation. Amir Har-Gil is Senior Lecturer at the Cinema and Culture Program, Master's Degree, Department of Art History at the University of Haifa and at the School of Communications at the Netanya Academic College. In his papers and films, as director and scriptwriter of documentary films, Har-Gil deals mainly with various viewpoints in Israeli society. His films deal, among others, with the different sectors of society, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with poverty, the kibbutzim and the Israeli Defense Forces. Amir's films won awards in Israel and other countries. Recently his film Jerusalem in Line" was nominated best Documentary Film at the UK Film Festival in London; it received honorable mention at the I Filmmakers' Film Festival in Malaga, Spain; at the World Human Rights Film Festival Jerusalem in Line received the Golden Award; furthermore, his film Uri in the Sky? won the Golden Award at the World Documentary Award Festival in Jakarta, Indonesia. Among his films are: Jerusalem in Line, Uri in the Sky, Entangled, The Art of Living, Good Morning, Israel, "Good Morning, Israel – 10 Years After, "Good Morning, Israel – 20 Years After, Eve and Line-up.
In my lecture I propose to study the relationship between 'reality' and the way it is perceived. I will analyze films about people in an extreme life-threatening situation and show the difference between the way they interpret their situation and how they respond to it, compared with the director's approach in documenting it. The central concept I use is the Lacanian 'real', which cannot be expressed in words, according to Dylan Evan's (2005) interpretation, and comprises a degree of discomfort and trauma. I shall use the term 'real' in analyzing the perception of horror by the characters concerned and by the director. This issue will be studied through two documentary films, one foreign and one Israeli: Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005) and War Matador (Avner Faingulernt and Macabit Abramson, 2011). These films depict a confrontation with a 'beast', real or metaphoric, representing the existential threat, and the disruption caused by this confrontation. In these films there is a gap between the directors' position and that of the protagonists, raising the question of how to represent characters independently, in an unprejudiced and non-judgmental way, while at the same time depicting the directors' different personal outlook on them and on the documentary situation in which they find themselves and to which they respond. The answer lies in representing the characters ambivalently. On the one hand, they are shown as mistaken in their outlook on reality, and on the other hand they arouse empathy that enables one to understand their motives and identify with them. Each character is granted a wide personal space allowing it to voice its feelings without the director's intervention. The documented characters thus have a 'free realm', separate from the director's voice and interpretation, and in addition to them. The film creates a complex space comprising conflicting voices, which personifies an ethical statement on the possibility of determining the nature of reality and truth, put to the test in a life-endangering situation. Macabit Abramson is a cinema researcher whose doctoral thesis focused on analyzing representations of the myth of Eros and Psyche in classic and postmodern films as well as proposing a new identity model for a “different femininity.” Abramson is a director, producer, and scriptwriter of documentary, fictional, and experimental films, and also lectures on cinema at Sapir Academic College. Contact: Macabit12@gmail.com SESSION 1: Thursday, May 19, 09:00 – 10:30 
Ethics of the Real. The reality of Ethics Shachar Brenner. PhD student, Tel-Aviv University School of Philosophy. “L'envers du Documentaire”: Analytical Ethics in Documentary Film The analyst’s ethical position in the Lacanian clinic dictates relating to each subject without assuming any previous knowledge on his symptomatology or suffering. It is by abandoning all pre-established ideas and knowledge on the subject that the analyst can try and understand the singularity of each patient in order to help her to invent her own solution that will allow her to find a place in the world where she can live. In this lecture I would like to approach the question of ethics in documentary film in relation to the “discourse of the analyst” as it is presented in Jacques Lacan’s elaboration of the four discourses in Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (2007). The prospect of the utilization of the Lacanian elaboration of the four discourses in documentary film theory has been previously examined by Elizabeth Cowie (2011) and Angieska Piotrowska (2014). Both address this subject through the elaboration of the intersubjective relationship between the documentary text and the spectator. In this lecture, I would like to argue, in opposition to the works published by Cowie and Piotrowska, that the ethical coordinates of documentary film are immanent to the relationship between the film artist and his subject matter alone. Excluding the aesthetical experience of the observer, my hypothesis would be that the ethical position of documentary film is singular and imminent to its manifestation as a work of art. Accordingly, I would like to demonstrate that the ethical position of the analyst, which is clarified through Lacan’s elaboration of the structure of “the discourse of the analyst”, is embodies in this conception of the practice of documentary film. I would like to explore this hypothesis through the examination of a particular documentary film, À Ciel Ouvert (2013). This film portrays the prolonged stay of filmmaker, Mariana Otero, in a unique medical and educational institute for autistic and psychotic children named “Le Courtil”. The film follows the sensitive encounters between the Lacanian- oriented staff and the children, capturing their unorthodox relationship as well as their reciprocation with the silent presence of the observing camera. I will try to portray the way in which this film foregrounds both the strength of the discourse of the analyst in it capacity to alleviate their suffering, and even more strikingly, the ethical propensity of documentary film to incorporate its structure. Shachar Brenner is a PhD student in the Tel-Aviv university school of philosophy. Brenner has graduated Magna Cum Laude his masters degrees in philosophy at TAU. His thesis paper concerned Alain Badiou’s theory of subjectivity. Brenner has received two excellence awards as a junior teacher at TAU (2014) - the university Rector excellence award, and the Deanship excellence award. Currently engaged as a teacher at “The Dov Lautman Unit for Science Oriented Youth” (NPO), and at the department of philosophy. Brenner specialises in the fields of Lacanian psychoanalysis, contemporary French philosophy, and phenomenology. Currently, his dissertation concerns the philosophy of autism and is named “The History of Autism in the Age of Psychosis”. Contact: brenner.tau@gmail.com SESSION 2: Thursday, May 19th, 10:45 – 11:45  
Work in Progress’ Ethics: A conversation with David Fisher Chair: Dr. Dan Geva: Presentations by David Fisher and Ron Omer David Fisher: Director. Ron Omer: Editor. In April 2015, my brother Ronel was taken into police custody on suspicion of bribing police officers. Three months later he was released to house arrest and I began shooting my new film Flying Vertical. The following day, bearing the responsibility that this film might exploit him, I opened up with the question of the legitimacy of creating it. Ronel smiled, looked at me, and said: “When Spielberg won an Oscar he thanked the six million Jews who enabled the making of Schindler’s List. When you go on stage, you will have to thank only me. Stop wasting your time with guilt feelings, it won’t help you get on with life.” Ronel is subject to electronic monitoring, and must be under supervision at all times. The court appointed me to be one of his guarantors. I feel as if I was appointed also by the Fisher family – as well as the Israeli public – to ask him questions, and attempt to understand how he so spectacularly reached the bottom of the barrel. Yet, I avoid asking him what he had done and why. I do not intend to play the role of an objective judge. I am interested in bridging the gap between the brother I knew and the one I am now rediscovering. I am embarking on a journey to examine the universal questions of morals and ethics in modern times, as well as issues of brotherhood and family ties in troubled times. Ronel starred in my two previous very personal and critically acclaimed films: Love Inventory (PBS, ARTE grand-format, 2001) and Six Million and One (ZDF-ARTE, BBC 2012). Flying Vertical is an unpredictable new chapter in the research that I conduct in my films into the essence of family ties and relationships between siblings. David Fisher is director and producer, mentor to up-and-coming filmmakers, Fisher is one of Israel’s leading documentarists. Six Million and One (2011), officially selected for the IDFA Film Festival in Amsterdam, won him the Dok.fest Munich best film award, the Silver Horn for best director at Krakow, and opened USA screenings at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema in NYC. This film completes a family trilogy that started with the critically acclaimed film “Love Inventory” that won the 2000 Israeli Film Academy Award and Mostar Roundtrip where he followed his son on an adventure of studying in the conflict- ridden city in Bosnia. Fisher served on the juries of international festivals such as: HotDocs Toronto, Karlovy Vary, European Film Academy and ITVS int'l panel (San Francisco). As Director General of the New Israeli Foundation for Cinema and TV (1999-2008), he initiated and founded the “Greenhouse” programme, aimed at developing documentary films by Mediterranean filmmakers, and helped bring Israeli documentaries to international recognition. Ron Omer is an award-winning prominent film editor. He graduated in Editing Studies in NYC 1997 and since then he had been editing commercials and features; both fiction and documentaries and TV dramas. Among his most known works are: Sima Va’aknun (2002), Someone to Run With (2005), Lost in Africa (2009), Bananas (2012), Bethlehem (2013), and Mr. Gaga” (2015) for which he won the Israeli Ophir prize, Who’s gonna love me now? (2016) screened at The Panorama , Berlin Festival, and many more. Contacts: fisherdavid@012.net.il ronomereditor@gmail.com SESSION 3: Thursday, May 19th, 12:00 – 13:30 
thics as (a) Medium (in Crisis) Chair: Prof. Gur Elroy: Presentations by; Lisa Gotto, Aner Preminger and Eric Zakim Prof. Lisa Gotto, ifs International Filmschool Cologne, Germany Inside the War: 3D Documentary, Stereoscopic Ethics and Aesthetics From the late nineteenth century to the end of World War One, stereoscopic 3D photographs were a medium of mass entertainment. Millions of images were in circulation: Views of location and landscape, but also of actual events like the Great War. A massive number of over 20,000 historic stereoscopic still photos from France, Germany, Britain, and the USA provide the basis for Inside the War (Nikolai Vialkowitsch, 2014), a historical documentary in 3D that seeks to revive the original material to bridge the gap between past and present and to make the events of World War One intimate and immediate to the viewer. The movie’s juxtaposition of multiple spaces, its recontextualization and self-reflexivity of technological advancement – commenting on, and paying respect to, the emergence of cinema while simultaneously innovating the medium through digital 3D – evolve like a process of breaking a spectrum into its component parts. 3D does not only render space visible, it makes it accessible. It diminishes distance, and it increases involvement. 3D makes it possible to produce filmic space as a perceptive experience as well as a stylistic expression. Thus, the viewer does not merely look at a picture but shares its space. If cinema aims to provide us with an immersive space, one that is perceptually enveloping, then 3D furnishes the medium with an essential condition underlying its appeal to filmmakers and audiences. While there is a wide range of research concentrating on the history of, debates concerning 3D documentary, and more specifically, the ethic aspects being involved, seem to be underrepresented until today. My talk will address the issues of stereoscopic ethics and aesthetics to investigate what new territories the form of 3D documentary film could explore. This will involve the discussion of aesthetic examples from Inside the War, followed by theoretical considerations of 3D cinema as a specific type of sensory experience that points to the ethical dimension of filmic perception and participation. Lisa Gotto is Professor of Film History and Film Analysis at ifs International Filmschool Cologne, Germany. She received her M.A. from the University of Cologne and her Ph.D. from the Bauhaus University Weimar. Since 2001, she has been lecturing at a variety of institutions, including film academies and universities in Munich, Cologne, Vienna, Berkeley, Bloomington, Dallas, Shanghai and Melbourne. Lisa Gotto's major research interests are in film history and film theory, media studies, and digital media culture. She has published books and articles on technological and cultural transitions in film history, on film culture and film aesthetics, and on game studies. Her recent publications include: New Game Plus. Perspektiven der Game Studies. Genres – Künste – Diskurse, co-ed. with Benjamin Beil and Gundolf S. Freyermuth, Bielefeld 2015, Jean Renoir, ed., München 2014, Eisenstein-Reader. Die wichtigsten Schriften zum Film, ed., Leipzig 2011.
Since Cesare Zavattini introduced the term “cinema of encounter” in his quest for ethical cinema, the concept of ethics took on a dominant role in the discourse and practice of filmmaking. According to Zavattini, ethical cinema was a necessary and inevitable consequence of the horrors of World War II. Italian neo-realism and subsequent important influential trends within modern cinema fully transformed cinema's point of departure from the aesthetic to the ethical, while at the same time blurring the boundaries between documentary and fiction, as well as reality and its representation. In the 1970s, these ethical dilemmas led the Polish director Krzystof Kieślowski to abandon documentary cinema altogether in favor of explicitly fictional films. Kieślowski’s cinematic evolution echoes the ethical issues arising from Luchino Visconti’s film Belissima, most notably the implications of filming real people as opposed to professional actors. This presentation examines neo-realistic cinema’s quest for ethics in reference to Zavatini’s essay and his cinematic collaboration with Visconti, which I will set into dialogue with Kieślowski's transition from documentaries to fiction. This historical perspective provides the context against which I consider the role of documentary ethics within cinematic ethics. Paraphrasing Kieślowski’s statement on ethical issues in documentary filmmaking, I ask a broader question, namely, how can cinema without intimacy — and indeed, which essentially negates intimacy — be ethical. An independent filmmaker and a film scholar. Associate Professor, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Sapir Academic College. Director, producer and writer, since 1986. Films tutor - Teaches Cinema studies and Directing workshops. Among his publications: The books: François Truffaut: Cinema as an act of love – An intertextual approach. Enchanted Screen: A chronology of media & language. Additional publications include: Law, Ethics and Reflexivity in Krzysztof Kieslowśki's Decalogue. Ethical Documentary. Preminger’s Filmography includes: Present Continuous (2012); One Eye Wide Open (2009); Moscobia (2001); Ransom of the Father (2000); Last Resort (1999); Learning and Teaching Mathematics (1998); On My Way to Father’s Land (1995); Blind Man's Bluff (1993); Front Window (1990). Contact: anerp@zahav.net.il SESSION 3: Thursday, May 19, 12:00 – 13:30 
Ethics as (a) Medium (in Crisis) Dr. Eric Zakim. University of Maryland, College Park The Ethics of Form: Subject Positions and Discursive Instability in Israeli Documentary Films on War, Violence, and National Security Since at least the 1982 Lebanon War, Israeli documentary filming of violence and the security institutions in the country has generally been concerned with Adorno’s injunction against the aesthetic pleasure inherent in the cinematic image. As David Polonsky, Art Director for Waltz with Bashir has stated: “[M]y main concern was not to get carried away with the aesthetics of war. Because it's really easy to make 'pretty pictures' that are very effective and very dramatic within a film on any war. [I wanted] to avoid pathos [and] not to show beautiful explosions and interesting splashes of blood.” This paper proposes to shift that focus from the pleasure of the image itself to the discursive frames of the image, tying Adorno’s opposition of pleasure/violence, as mediated through representations of the Holocaust, to the debates surrounding Claude Lanzmann and Georges Didi-Huberman on the relation between the image—photographic and cinematic—and the aesthetic-discursive apparatuses that lend meaning to the image. In Israel, the tension between the attempt to present the image as it is (or “despite all,” as Didi-Huberman would say) and a cognizance of the superimpositions of discourse on all presentations of the image (the “all image” in Didi-Huberman’s reading of Lanzmann) comes to haunt much filmmaking that would stake both image and subject position beyond the national discourses that would encompass and enfold aesthetics itself. Can this tension be read as a critical dialectic in documentary encounters of national security apparatuses: in war, in military service, in the affected encounters with perpetrators of violence? Can documentary film avoid collusion with the discursive apparatuses that it would ostensibly represent and “document” within cinema? Within a reading of discursive tension, form becomes unstable for presenting an ethics of the document that would wrest the image from the bonds of the “all image,” from Chris Marker’s early attempt to resolve tension in his presentation of Israel; to Reuven Hecker’s filming of Lebanon in 1982 in Bolito; to Michal Aviad’s cinematic intervention into the male world of reserve duty in Ever Shot Anyone?; to David Ofek’s confrontation with his own prejudices and assumptions as a filmmaker and Israeli citizen in No. 17; to Waltz with Bashir itself. Eric Zakim is Associate Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, and Film at the University of Maryland, College Park. In addition, Zakim currently heads the Department of Middle Eastern Studies in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, and was the founding director of the Gildenhorn Institute for Israel Studies at the University of Maryland. Zakim’s research interests have focused on questions of aesthetic form, ideology, and subjectivity in modernist literature, music, and film. He is the author of To Build and Be Built: Landscape, Literature, and the Construction of Zionist Identity and a co-editor of David Fogel and the Emergence of Hebrew Modernism. He is currently working on a manuscript on Israeli cinema: Learning to See: Israeli Cinema and the History of Zionist Vision.
SESSION 4: Identity: 15:00 – 16:30 Ethics of exclusion, inclusion, nationalism and participation Chair: Dr. Amir Har-Gil: Presentations by; Tamar El-Or, Helena Oikarinen-Jabai , Rebecca Ora and Yael Ben-Zvi Prof. Tamar El-Or, The Hebrew University, Israel. Crisis of Representation: The Case of John Marshall The “crisis of representation” in anthropology is associated with the last two decades of the twentieth century. It is clearly a consequence of the postmodern spirit which has dominated academic discourse at the time, particularly the criticism of Western society’s meta-narratives. More than any discipline in the humanities, anthropology had to find methodological answers to enable it to continue its traditional practice – describing and interpreting other people’s lives. The questions arose during those years were not new: anthropologists have always identified and understood the problem inherent in representing others. The political and ethical urgency of this problem, however, was explicitly formulated only at that time. It is therefore interesting to discover that a pretty negligible branch within anthropology – ethnographic cinema or visual anthropology – had addressed and grappled with representation issues long before. The camera’s presence and the production of a photographed text had made for an urgency and clarity that could be suspended in written works. Starting in the 1950, this branch began offering a variety of methodological solutions for representing and mirroring the problem itself, as well as ways of addressing it. The case of John Marshall and his body of works with Jo/’hoansi (!Kung San Bushmen) in Namibia covers the previous half century, providing a rare historical breadth of fifty years of creative coping with these issues. His film The Hunters (1957) produces the image of the ultimate Other: a naked black body (apart for or what they call skins a leather loincloth), migrating and hunting in the desolate expanses of the African savannah. This is how the image of this Other has been etched, in the Western mind, as the contemporary representation of prehistoric humanity. Marshall has addressed the implications of the success of his trailblazing masterpiece through additional films and projects of concrete intervention in his filmed subjects’ lives. We will view several excerpts from his oeuvre to inform a discussion of questions arising during the representation crisis – questions which have always been there, and which continue to challenge all those interested in the lives of others. Tamar El-Or is a full full professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, at the Hebrew University.Among her many publications are: 1994. Educated and Ignorant: Ultraorthodox Jewish Women and their World. Boulder. Next Year I Will Know More: Identity and Literacy Among Young Orthodox Women in Israel. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Mekomot Shmorim. Tel Aviv: Am Oved. Reserved Seats: Gender, Ethnicity, and Religion in Contemporary Israel. is now available online http://www.tamarelor.com/index.php/books/reserved-seats/. Tamar.Sandals: Anthropology of local style. Tel Aviv. Contact: tamarelor@gmail.com SESSION 4: Identity: 15:00 – 16:30 
Ethics of exclusion, inclusion, nationalism and participation Dr. Helena Oikarinen-Jabai, Helsinki University Challenges of making participatory research documentaries with young people In my presentation I will discuss ethics of documentary making in participatory research setting. As part of my performative participatory research project that explored belonging and identifications of second generation immigrant youth, I produced audio-visual productions with the participants. I will focus on two documentary films: Minun Helsinkini/My Helsinki/Wa Magaaleydi Helsinki and Soo Dhawoow – Come closer. Both documentaries were created with a group of five young Finnish-Somali men. The first one was made in 2010 in the Youth Multicultural Living Room, set up by the Youth Department of the City of Helsinki where photographer Sami Sallinen and I run photography and video workshops. Some other productions, like exhibitions, a radio program and a book were also created based on the material collected during the year. The video documentary Minun Helsinkini/My Helsinki/Wa Magaaleydi Helsinki was copied in 2013 and has been distributed to libraries and different institutions. It has been broadcasted in festivals, seminars and exhibitions. One central idea of the research is that when creating audio visual material and productions together with us other team members the youth are co-researchers and participate in research reporting by describing their belongings and narrating stories about their embodied spaces and realities. In our project, when using performative approaches, the more traditional academic ‘knowing that,’ and ‘knowing about’ was enriched by ‘knowing how,’ and ‘knowing who’. Likewise, the producing of documentaries supported the participants to deal with the transnational psychological spheres of influence that they come across in their life, and play with and ironize the categorizing labels and stereotypes, when ‘talking back’ to the existing categorizing ideas and stereotypical views about national and minority identities. In my presentation I will among other things to discuss the most problematic ethical challenges when creating the documentaries with Finnish-Somali youth, and consider how I could imply the absorbed knowhow to my present project. Helena Oikarinen-Jabai works as a senior researcher, educator and freelancer journalist. She has completed her PhD in Art Education at the University of Art and Design in Helsinki. Her research interests are interdisciplinary, and especially she is interested in how different ways of knowing and artistic practices could be applied in research settings. She has worked with children, youth and women in different cultural settings, both in Finland and abroad. She has completed Licentiate's degree in Philosophy, Master’s Degrees in Psychology (Intercultural Communication), Cultural Anthropology and Education (Gender Studies).
This paper will discuss documentary’s ability to circumscribe “diasporic space” through what Timothy Corrigan calls “The Essay Film,” or what Bill Nichols refers to as Interactive or Performative modes of nonfiction, and by employing Joseph Roach’s theories on surrogation as a means of mapping new geographies through performed territories. I will frame the work of Lynne Sachs in relation to my own recent work; our performances of ethical ambivalence, in simultaneously posing ethicopolitical judgment and cultural desire, map alternative spaces spanning Israel and the United States that both tease out and transcend culturally prescribed alliances among Jewish internationals. In her 2006 States of Unbelonging, Lynne Sachs stages an imagined relationship to her Israeli counterpart: Revital Ohayon, a filmmaker killed in a suicide bombing. Situating herself as the Other to a Jewish Israeli serves as a platform for Sachs’ desire to be (or to have been) this woman, as well as her deep criticism of Ohayon’s life choices and national identity. One of the most salient aspects of this film is Sachs’ insistence upon making it from afar; Sachs’ other Other is her former graduate student, Nir Zatts, who films from Israel as Sachs’ surrogate. The space circumscribed by this film consists of a Second-Intifada Israel and post-9/11 New York as depicted through found footage, old home movies, and rebroadcast television news. In re-walking the footsteps of Ohayon and Zatts, Sachs performs what Joseph Roach’s Cities of the Dead titles “surrogation”: the process by which social actors re-perform one another’s roles as assertions of both continuity as well as interruption. While Roach focuses his theory upon “Circum-Atlantic” performances uniting London and New Orleans as a geographic region, the work I discuss maps a space comprising Israel and America as a fraught territory of ethical panic and identity-loss. Similarly to Sachs, my recent short film The Intifada-ing, uses (ironic) authorial voice and a series of found videos to stage a diasporic identity located in a constellation encompassing Los Angeles and Jerusalem. Here, a video news-clip in which my eighth grade English teacher has surfaced after 20 years as a Temple Mount Activist; a video of middle-schoolers reciting (in poorly accented Hebrew) a UN ambassador’s speech against a green-screen; and an Israeli Eurovision export form an unstable and uncertain diasporic space and identity that connect distant cities and sensibilities. These territories, carved out through ambivalent performances (Sachs’ staged relationship to Revital/Zatts, my ironic relationship to my former teacher and the students who have succeeded me, the students’ own performances of a UN ambassador’s oration and a musical performance of affinity to European pop-culture) supplant the Zionist desires normally presupposed in diasporic Jewry. Rebecca Ora is an artist, filmmaker and scholar with interests in docufiction, performance, and dark comedy. Ora holds an MFA in Social Practice from California College of the Arts and is currently working toward her PhD in Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz. She is founder of the Rebecca Ora Grant for Risk-Taking in the Arts. www.rebeccaora.net Contact: ora.rebecca@gmail.com 
SESSION 5: Thursday, May 19, 16:45-18:15
Afterthoughts on Documentary Ethics: Case in Point: The Israeli Documentarian Chair: Prof. Avenr Feingelerent. Presentations by; Yulie Cohen. Yariv Mozer and Sylvain Biegeleisen Excerpts from My Terrorist, My Land Zion and My Brother will be shown and introduce some the ethical dilemmas I was confronting while making these three documentaries. Each dilemma was solved differently. Today, working on Who Killed Jessica, an animated documentary about trafficking in women and prostitutes, there is a few ethical dilemma which will be presented. Yulie Cohen earned a degree in Sociology & Anthropology from Tel Aviv University (1981), and an MA with distinction in Communication Arts from NYIT (1984). She worked in films in New York and Los Angeles, returning to Israel in 1988 for the birth of the first of her two daughters. Since 1996, Yulie has directed and produced many internationally co-produced documentaries such as the award winning My Terrorist which was translated to over 20 languages and was broadcasted over 25 countries. Later she produced and directed My Land Zion, My Brother and My Israel. In 2005 she received the Art of Film Prize at the Jerusalem Film Festival. Since 2008, she has been teaching at Bezalel Academy of the Arts in Jerusalem. Since 2011 she has been teaching at Ma'aleh School of Television, Films & The Arts, Jerusalem. In 2014, she produced and directed A Minor Shrine For Our Love a documentary for the exhibition 50 Years to Dani Karavn's Public Art in The Negev Museum of Art. Contact: yuliecohen@gmail.com; Excerpts from The Last Card & Twilight of a Life will reveal two different approaches between an ageing mother and myself, her son, the director. The Last Card (2007) was a last opportunity to break silences due to World War II. Until where could I go to discover the truth about the past ? Twilight of a Life (2015) is a Journey in "how to end a Life" and how to deal with old age. What decisions were taken to deal with heavy loaded fearful issues and to transform the "claustrophobia" of the shooting environment (one room, a bed, a chair) into a poetic film full of humor, joy and hope ? Sylvain Biegeleisen - born in Antwerp, Belgium in 1948. Multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, cameraman, sings, writes and created the Lahav NGO (lahavnpa.com) which organizes social film projects with peripheral populations and youth in "danger". Sylvain has developed an original method of cinema-workshops where participants create films that express their feelings and views on important issues (ethnic conflicts, violence, coexistence ...) April 2015 releasing of his International Awarded documentary film "Twilight of a Life. The film is an exceptional cinematographic document that approaches with optimism, humor and hope the theme of ageing. (18 Festivals, 8 Awards) Directed his first feature film The Last Card which was awarded best European documentary at the European Off in Warsaw 2008. Curator and artistic director of the exhibition "Performance - Events" "VESTIGES", at the Manoir of Martigny, Switzerland in May-August 2012. This artistic project concerns major serious issues of today and tomorrow (nuclear threat, violence, migration, global warming, economy. Contact: sylvainbig@gmail.com I would like to speak about the moral conflicts I experienced in the process of making The Invisible Men (2012). For me documenting people is a search after human love. A quest after the inner depth of the human soul. In working on this film I had to interrogate the truth of my protagonists’ story without denigrating their humaneness. This was my ethical challenge and the examples are abundant. I will share the most pivotal moments that shaped not only the narrative of the film but their true fate resulting from my act of documentation Yariv Mozer graduated with distinction from Tel-Aviv University’s Film and Television Department in 2004. Since then he is directing documentary and feature films, among them are Snails in the Rain (Israel-Spain 2013), The Invisible Men (Israel-The Netherlands 2012), and My First War (Israel 2008). Currently, he is completing his new documentary film Ben Gurion Epilogue (Israel-France) which is due to be released this year. Mozer had also served as producer on more than 15 films; among them are "The Heart of Jenin" (Germany 2008) and "Inheritance" (Israel- France-Turkey 2012). Mozer, former head of Entrepreneurial Producing Program at The Jerusalem Sam Spiegel Film School (2007-2010), and former director of The 10th Tel Aviv International Student Film Festival (June 2004). Contact: yarivmozer@gmail.com SESSION 6: Thursday, May 19h. 18:30 
Screening: The Look of Silence/Joshua Oppenheimer/2104 The Look of Silence is Joshua Oppenheimer’s powerful companion piece to the Oscar®-nominated The Act of Killing. Through Oppenheimer’s footage of perpetrators of the 1965 Indonesian genocide, a family of survivors discovers how their son was murdered, as well as the identities of the killers. The documentary focuses on the youngest son, an optometrist named Adi, who decides to break the suffocating spell of submission and terror by doing something unimaginable in a society where the murderers remain in power: he confronts the men who killed his brother and, while testing their eyesight, asks them to accept responsibility for their actions. This unprecedented film initiates and bears witness to the collapse of fifty years of silence. Director's Notes The Act of Killing exposed the consequences for all of us when we build our everyday reality on terror and lies. The Look of Silence explores what it is like to be a survivor in such a reality. Making any film about survivors of genocide is to walk into a minefield of clichés, most of which serve to create a heroic (if not saintly) protagonist with whom we can identify, thereby offering the false reassurance that, in the moral catastrophe of atrocity, we are nothing like perpetrators. But presenting survivors as saintly in order to reassure ourselves that we are good is to use survivors to deceive ourselves. It is an insult to survivors’ experience, and does nothing to help us understand what it means to survive atrocity, what it means to live a life shattered by mass violence, and to be silenced by terror. To navigate this minefield of clichés, we have had to explore silence itself. The result, The Look of Silence, is, I hope, a poem about a silence borne of terror – a poem about the necessity of breaking that silence, but also about the trauma that comes when silence is broken. Maybe the film is a monument to silence – a reminder that although we want to move on, look away and think of other things, nothing will make whole what has been broken. Nothing will wake the dead. We must stop, acknowledge the lives destroyed, strain to listen to the silence that follows. - JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER Text from the official site of “The Look of Silence”: http://thelookofsilence.com/ Chair persons* Prof. Yoni Asher. Head of The Department of Art History, The Faculty of Humanities, Haifa University. 
Prof. Avner Fainguelernt - Head of The Audio And Visual Arts School And Head Of The M.A Program At Sapir College
|
