Documentary Cinema in Israel-Palestine

Documentary Cinema in Israel-Palestine is a major contribution to understanding 21st-century transnational film history. Looking at key documentary films by Arab and Mizrahi filmmakers living within the contested borders of Israel-Palestine, Shirly Bahar develops an argument for the vital place of documentary within contemporary politics and identities. Deeply attuned to the process by which documentary invokes and provokes intimacies across various boundaries-filmmaker, subject, audience; spaces and places; languages; among them-Bahar makes a case for documentary as a philosophical, as much as visual and aural, form. Through close readings of several crucial films from the first decade of this century, Bahar expounds on the ways in which documentary, as witness to damaged bodies in devastated places, makes visible the ravages state violence wreaks on truth, language and landscape. Violence against Israeli and Palestinian Jews and Arabs (and Bahar makes clear that the simplistic dichotomy Israeli Jews/Palestinian Arabs is part of the erasure of history performed on these bodies and places since 1948) finds its way into the films by Arab and Mizrahi filmmakers through lenses focused on reenacting pain and retelling memory. Bahar's insights reveal how occupation and war, on a large scale, and naming, property, even home restoration, on a more personal level, are grasped within the varieties of encounters-at once awkward, hostile and intimate-made possible by documentary cinema. In this profound study, we see how documentary and its critics mediate a uniquely performative and affective politics in Israel-Palestine, but also elsewhere and everywhere. -- Paula Rabinowitz, University of Minnesota, USA