prof. avner fainguelernt - head of the audio and visual …film.haifa.ac.il/images/pro.docx · web...

Dr. Dan Geva (PhD)Conference Founder and OrganizerResearch Fellow, MA Program For Culture and Film University of Haifa, Israel

Head, MA Program For Culture and Film Studies University of Haifa, Israel

Distinguished colleagues, dear participants, and guests,

On behalf of the Faculty of Humanities and the MA Program for Culture and Film Studies at the

University of Haifa, we are honored to host our first annual conference on documentary ethics. We

believe that the study and teaching of documentary ethics are vital to the future of cinema and to the role

it plays in securing our civic, democratic culture. Accordingly, we aim to promote greater awareness of

the ethical state of documentary filmmaking. Through scholarly debates, screenings, theoretical

research, symposia, and popular education in the field of documentary ethics, we are committed to a

profound engagement in a critical reflection on the ethical and moral problems facing documentary

thinkers and practitioners.

We encourage dialogue among theoreticians, documentarians, and diverse audiences and consider that

while it is indisputable that any documentary culture faces its own particular moral quandaries, it is

imperative to study documentary’s ethical qualities qua universal substance. Unsurprisingly, we

inaugurate this meta-ethical revision with a critical focus on the Israeli documentary scene. We locate it

in a temporal context and ask about documentaries past, present, and future in terms of their ethical

dimensions. In the forthcoming conferences, we will engage in a comparative study of the documentary

ethical contentions of other documentary communities. Hence, we understand the ethical condition and

dimension of documentary to be a universal constant—a locus of contention shared by all living in the

21st century, the most visually documented era ever. Accordingly, we invite international collaboration

of any sort.

In the spirit of the great ethical thinkers from Aristotle to Levinas, we trust in cultivating the

documentary ethical discourse. In that vein, only multidisciplinary and international collaboration can

ensure that the universal voice of documentary will continue to toil vigorously in the public sphere and

resonate for the next generations of filmmakers with all its multifaceted potential. In this same

distinctive manner, we comprehend ethics to be a creative rather than a restrictive force.

We thank you for making the trip here to Haifa. Moreover, we thank you for contributing your knowledge, wisdom, experience and good faith to our communal study. Enjoy!

Dr. Yvonne Kozlovsky-Golan (PhD)

PROGRAMMEWednesday May 18, 2016. Aviva and Sammy Ofer Observatory, 30th Floor, Eshkol Tower.

10:00 – 10:30 Registration and Coffee

10:30 – 11:00 Greetings: Dr. Yvonne Kozlovsky-Golan, Head, MA Program

Dr. Johannes Strasser Director of the Austrian Cultural Forum | Austrian Embassy Tel Aviv.

Dr. Harry Sieratzki, London

11:00 - 12:00:

Chair: Dr. Dan Geva, Haifa University.

KEYNOTE: Prof. Brian Winston, Lincoln University, UK: “Analog Shibboleths and Digital Affordances

12:00 – 12:15 Coffee

12:15 – 13:45: SESSION 1: Ethics in/of/as History

Chair: Dr. Yvonne Kozlovsky-Golan. Presentations by; Frank Stern, John Michalczyk and Johannes-Dieter Steinert.

13:45 – 15:15: Lunch

15:15 – 16:45 :SESSION 2: Justice & Alterity: Levinasian thoughts in Documentary Ethics

Chair: Danny Muggia: Presentations by; Ohad Ufaz, Anat Tzom-Ayalon and Orna Raviv.

16:45 – 17:00 Coffee

17:00 – 18:30 SESSION 3: Ethics of Documentary Activism and New Perspectives on Activation

Chair: Prof. Yonny Asher: Presentations by; Gilad Pavda, Yaara Uzeri and Ayelet Bechar

18:45: Complementary Dinner at a downtown German Quarter restaurant. Transportation provided from the University and back to the hotel.

Thursday May 19. Haifa Cinematheque, 142 Sderot Ha’ Nasi, The Auditorium Ground Floor

09:00 – 10:30 :SESSION 1: Ethics of the Real. The reality of Ethics

Chair: Avishai Kfir. Presentations by; Amir Har-Gil, Macabit Abramson and Shachar Brenner.

10:30 – 10:45: Coffee

10:45 – 11:45 :SESSION 2: Work in Progress’ Ethics: A conversation with David Fisher

Chair: Dr. Dan Geva: Presentations by; David Fisher and Ron Omer

11:45 – 12:00 Coffee

12:00 – 13:30 SESSION 3: Ethics as (a) Medium (in Crisis)

Chair: Prof. Gur Elroy: Presentations by; Lisa Gotto, Aner Preminger and Eric Zakim

13:30 – 15:00: lunch

15:00 – 16:30 SESSION 4: Identity: Ethics of Exclusion, Inclusion, nationalism and participation

Chair: Dr. Amir Har-Gil: Presentations by; Tamar El-Or, Helena Oikarinen-Jabai and Rebecca Ora

16:30 – 16:45 Coffee

16:45 – 18:15 SESSION 5: Afterthoughts on Documentary Ethics: Case in Point: The Israeli Documentarian

Chair: Prof. Avner Feingelerent: Presentations by; Yulie Cohen, Yariv Mozer and Sylvain Biegeleisen

18:30 SCREENING: The Look Of Silence/ Joshua Oppneheimer

20:00 Complimentary dinner served at the Druze Restaurant Al-Ch’eir near the conference venue

ABSTRACTSWednesday, May 18. 11:00 - 12:00

Chair: Dr. Dan Geva, Fellow Researcher, Haifa University.

KEYNOTE: Prof. Brian Winston, Lincoln University, UK.

Analog Shibboleths and Digital Affordances

Given that documentary in some sense depends on photography’s claim on the real, digital’s undercutting of the image’s referential integrity is of profound potential significance. In Analog Shibboleths and Digital Affordances, documentary ethics in 20th century will be examined.

The documentary filmmaker has faced (and still faces) two sets of ethical concerns: a duty to the audience and a duty to those filmed. The two are rather different but, nevertheless, difficult to disentangle -- if you will, a yin and yang. The yang is the filmmaker/spectator relationship. For the audience, ethical documentarists, in essence, make as great a claim on the real as they can achieve. How does the digital affect this? Where does it leave such old justifications for less than perfect ethical behaviour -- eg the shibboleths of “the public’s right to know” or the “public interest.”

The yin is the filmer’s relationship to the filmed. This has involved more immediate and direct an obligation: in essence, that “no harm”, as J.S. Mill insisted, shall come to those involved in the production at their hand. Filmmakers, just like every member of society, have always been subject to the constraints of the Millian “harm principle.” None should cause another, in his phrase, any “perceptible hurt,” that is: a damage readily discerned by any third party. But digital affordances allow the people being firmed far greater degrees of control -- even to become themselves filmmakers. How much does this consequence of the digital answer the old ethical questions -- eg the shibboleths of “informed consent” and “giving a voice”? Digital affordances impact on all these shibboleths. Whether for good or ill is the subject of this paper.

Brian Winston has been involved with documentary since 1963, working for Granada TV and the BBC in the UK. In 1985, he won a US prime-time Emmy for documentary scriptwriting (for an episode of WNET’s CIVILIZATION AND JEWS). He has written widely on media technology and free expression and, on documentary, he is the author of CLAIMING THE REAL (second edition, 2008) and LIES, DAMN LIES AND DOCUMENTARIES (2000). Most recently he has edited THE DOCUMENTARY FILM BOOK (2013) for the British Film Institute. THE ACT OF DOCUMENTING: documentary film in the 21ST CENTURY (with Gail Vanstone & Chi Wang) will be published in November. He holds the Lincoln Chair at the University of Lincoln, UK.

Contact: [email protected]

SESSION 1. Wednesday, May 18, 12:15 – 13:45:

mailto:[email protected]

Ethics in/of/as History

Chair: Dr. Yvonne Kozlovsky-Golan. Presentations by Frank Stern, John Michalczyk and Johannes-Dieter Steinert.

Prof. Frank Stern. Chair: Visual and Cultural History Focus Schwerpunkt Visuelle Zeit- und Kulturgeschichte Institute for Contemporary History / Institut für Zeitgeschichte University of Vienna

Mauthausen´s Open and Hidden Visualizations in Photography and Film

Based on visual documentary material, feature films and photographs the paper deals with perpetrators, bystanders, victims and postwar reactions to the realities of the Nazi camps. The visual archive of Mauthausen and its impact will be

scrutinized and specific photos and film sequences analyzed. Among the questions to be tackled are :Which photographs were shot for the SS and were there any possibilities to counter the desired Nazi contents and

aesthetics? By which means was photography used as a means to dehumanize the prisoners and enforce the politics of

psychological death? How did postwar filmmakers and documentarists deal with these problems and the images of

antagonistic memories?

The concentration camp Mauthausen was of immense relevance for the politics of Nazism and characterized by its outstanding public visibility as a murderous castle and bulwark of Austrian and German terror. Due to its impact on postwar recollections be it through the death-marches the complicity of the majority of Austrians, through the immediate documentation of survivors, or through the consequences of many secondary camps all over Austria, Mauthausen, in contrast to the death camps in the East, became part of the public sphere of Austrian society. This had consequences for non-fictional and fictional presentations dealing with the realities and the aftermath of the concentration camp.

Frank Stern is professor for visual culture and contemporary history at Vienna University. He has taught at Tel-Aviv University, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Columbia University in New York, Georgetown University in Washington, Humboldt University in Berlin and Andrassy University in Budapest. From 1997 to 2004 he was Professor of Modern German History and Culture and director of the Center for German Studies and the Austrian-German Studies Program at Ben-Gurion University in Beer-Sheva, Israel, in 2002 Acting Chair at the Department of Film and Television at Sapir College, Sederot, and from 2004 on he has been the Chair of the Visual and Cultural History focus, Institute for Contemporary History at Vienna University. Among his recent publication are a volume on „Feuchtwanger and Exile” (Lang 2011), articles on Jewish culture in the German-speaking lands and visual presentations of the modern Jewish experience. Since 2006 he has been organizing an open-air Shoah related film series each summer at the Mauthausen Memorial, and since 2008 he has been the director of the Jewish Filmclub Vienna, and on the board of the Los Angeles based (USC) International Feuchtwanger Society.

Contact: [email protected] . a

SESSION 1. Wednesday, May 18, 12:15 – 13:45


Prof. John Michalczyk. Assistant Chair. Director, Film Studies ProgramBoston College

Documenting the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen: Interviews and Authenticity

The British documentary Memory of the Camps (1945/1985) brings to light the unfinished work of the producers of the graphic liberation of Bergen-Belsen. This camp first housed prisoners of war but later in 1944 and early 1945, up to 60,000 Jews, Roma, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and political prisoners coming from other camps. To provide authenticity to the film two decisions were made, the first in April 1945, to offer eye-witness testimony to what the British and Canadian liberators experienced. The second came in the editing process of the summer of 1945, the decision to locate the site of the camp for the viewer to recognize the area. In the film, a British soldier and a chaplain testify to the horror of a camp where thousands of corpses filled the mass graves. Accompanying these interviews are images of bulldozers plowing the bodies into their final resting place, a scene shockingly depicted in Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955). The choice to pinpoint and make more identifiable the geographical site of the camp was made by Alfred Hitchcock, coming from America where he was working with producer David O. Selznick. The implication of this decision was to reflect that the camps were located near towns and cities, and to refute those Germans who denied that they knew of their existence. The immediate message of the film as envisioned—a vivid testament to the horrors of the Nazi regime--was lost due to the change in the post-war political climate, but a visual document remains that extends far into our understanding the tragedy of the Shoah. The follow-up film, Night Will Fall (2014), offers further eyewitness testimony to the events and the authentic documenting of them.

After completing his doctoral dissertation at Harvard University on French novelist and filmmaker André Malraux focusing on art, propaganda and the Spanish Civil War, John Michalczyk joined the Boston College faculty in 1974. His lectures and publications have included works on World War II, the Holocaust film. His documentaries, many for national and international television, have focused on history, social justice and conflict resolution. To offer a sequel to his film on Nazi medicine, “In the Shadow of the Reich,” his latest documentary deals with Nazi law and premiered on March 9 at the Cayman Islands Documentary Film Festival dedicated to social justice films.

Contact: [email protected] 1. Wednesday, May 18th 12:15 – 13:45:



Professor Johannes-Dieter Steinert. Modern European History and Migration Studies. Faculty of Social Sciences. University of Wolverhampton, UK.

British and American NGOs in Belsen Concentration Camp, 1945

When British troops entered Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on 15 April 1945 it was obvious that the liberators had no idea about what was to confront them. During the following days and weeks a number of specialised military units as well as the first relief teams provided by the British Red Cross, the Society of Friends, and the American Field Service were called to take care of the 60,000 dying, sick, starving and exhausted people encountered at the camp.

While the role British military units played in providing emergency relief in Belsen has been the focus of intensive research, the contributions of British and American NGOs in early rescue work remains widely unknown.

The paper is based on British, German and American archival documents. Special consideration will be given to:

• The British governmental and non-governmental planning during the war.

• The training of relief workers.

• The cooperation of British military and NGOs in Belsen concentration camp.

Thanks to permission received from the American Field Service archives, about 5 minutes of contemporary film footage will be screened at the end of the presentation.

Johannes-Dieter Steinert is Professor of Modern European History and Migration Studies at the University of Wolverhampton, UK. In 2015, he was a Senior Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies. His research interests focus on German, British and European social and political history, with special emphasis on international migration and minorities, forced migration, forced labour, survivors of Nazi persecution, and international humanitarian assistance. Most recent book publication: Deportation und Zwangsarbeit. Polnische und sowjetische Kinder im nationalsozialitischen Deutschland und im besetzten Osteuropa 1939-1945, Essen: Klartext 2013. Current research project: Jewish child forced labourers in National Socialist Germany and German occupied Eastern Europe, 1938-1945.



SESSION 2: Wednesday, May 18, 15:15 – 16:45

Justice & Alterity: Levinasian thoughts in Documentary Ethics

Chair: Danny Muggia: Presentations by; Ohad Ufaz, Anat Tzom-Ayalon and Orna Raviv.

Ohad Ufaz: PhD Candidate, Department of Communication, the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

A Personal Call for Public Justice: Documentary Testimony through Levinasian Eyes

One of the fundamental problems of documentary filmmaking arises from the act of exposing the personal story of the documentary subject to public eyes. Documentary testimonies of the Holocaust bring this problem to a boiling point, as filmmakers find themselves caught between their personal responsibility to the witness and their obligation to expose the witness’s personal trauma to the public. Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin faced this problem when they brought a personal testimony of the Holocaust to the screen for the first time, in their groundbreaking film Chronicle of a Summer (1961).

In Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, philosopher Emmanuel Levinas employs the concept of “the Third” (person) to bridge the gap between personal proximity to the Other, on the one hand, and public justice, on the other. If the filmmaker's responsibility to the Holocaust witness – the documentary subject – can be described in Levinasian terms as ethical proximity, then, I ask, can the filmmaker’s obligation to share the witness’s testimony with the audience be better understood by engaging with Levinas's concept of the Third?

My presentation explores the problem of the exposition of the subject and the concept of the Third by focusing on two testimonies: Marceline Loridan’s pioneering testimony before Rouch and Morin in Chronicle of a Summer, and the testimony of photographer Henric Ross, a key witness in the Eichmann trial, before David Perlov in Memories of the Eichmann Trial (1979).

Rouch and Morin, and later Perlov, furthering their ethical legacy, maintain their personal responsibility to their witnesses and at the same time fulfill their obligation to the Third – their viewers. My argument is that in doing so, they achieve one of Levinas’s utmost missions: to mediate to the public their love for and proximity to the Other along with the Other’s personal call for justice.

Ohad Ufaz is a filmmaker, a teacher of film at Oranim College, and a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communications at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research contends with the ethical questions raised by the films he loves, teaches, and makes. His films include: The Boys from Lebanon (2008), Open Eye – Open I (2006), The Wandering Samaritan (2004), Going Dutch (2002), and Abud Bypass (1998).


mailto:#%[email protected]



Anat Tzom-Ayalon, Film Editor

The Ethics of Close-Up Filming. A case-study: Alan Berliner’s First Cousin Once Removed (2012) and Netalie Braun’s Metamorphosis (2006)

I discuss here two documentaries definable as ‘essay films’, those focusing on modes of cinematic expression no less than their central theme. Both engage with trauma, death and sickness, and observe the protagonists in close-up. Berliner focuses on an old man with Alzheimer’s, whose consciousness is dwindling, while Braun frames the faces of women who suffered the trauma of incest and rape.

The ideological and political choice to create visibility via close-ups on people excluded and distanced from the public sphere could simultaneously create a ‘spectacle of suffering’. In Metamorphosis, while the close gaze lets us listen attentively to the women, it also penetrates into their intimacy. The frame can be construed as an imprisoning frame presented without a body, no history other than their trauma.

In First Cousin Once Removed the man revealed is completely unaware that he is being filmed. Consequently, an ethical question runs through the film: does the visibility which Berliner creates succeed in presenting him non-exploitatively?

A close-up is immanently composed of the tension generated by contradictions: on one hand it has intimacy and proximity, represents the subject, discloses the hidden interiority. Focusing on the face detached from the concrete temporal and spatial continuum, making it possible to access a philosophical abstract idea. Yet the close-up is also considered an exaggerated, even monstrous enlargement, transforming the subject into an object, the total abstraction might lead to the effacement of the face. Both films engage with silencing, speech, and the inability to speak, in the context of trauma and death. Braun deals with severe violence through women’s testimonies: it encourages a discussion of trauma and testimony and the inability to give evidence. Berliner simultaneously dismantles and reassembles the filmic language and spoken language by using jump-cuts. My argument is that the aesthetic choice of the close-up can create a diegetic space between viewer and screen. It is an encounter charged with significance embodying the complexity of relations with the Other. It is also suggested that the cinematic face can be connected to Emanuel Levinas’ ambiguous concept of ‘the face of the other’ (le visage) His ethics consist of an encounter which acknowledges the other’s existence and difference. Assisted by Levinas and the connection he charts between the revelation of ‘the face’ and the revelation of ‘speech’(le dit), I try to connect the close-up with attentiveness and the awakening of ethical responsibility towards the Other.

Anat Tzom-Ayalon, a film editor, is currently a graduate student at the Department of Film and Television at Tel Aviv University, and at an advanced stage of writing her thesis, under the supervision of Prof. Anat Zanger and Dr. Shmulik Duvdevani. The thesis explores three documentary films from the past decade, whose directors chose the close-up as their primary rhetorical means, and I examine the ethical complexity of presenting the face of the Other.





Dr. Orna Raviv, Tel-Aviv University, Israel

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.

Orna Raviv is a director and producer of fictional and documentary films. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in cinema (1987), an M.A. (cum laude) in philosophy (2007), and a PhD in philosophy (2015), from Tel Aviv University. Her dissertation: “Beyond the Screen: The Ethical Dimension of the Cinematic Experience” deals with the interface between cinematic theory and ethics. She teaches at the Cultural Studies Department at Shenkar Academy of Engineering and Design. She is the co-founder and organizer of the international conference on Israeli documentary cinema in Jerusalem: A Look from the Inside, a Look from the Outside. Her films were screened in international film festivals such as; IDFA, Seattle, Los Angeles, Jerusalem, Oslo Documentary Film Festival, Israeli Film Festival Australia, and more.




Ethics of Documentary Activism and New Perspectives on Activation

Chair: Prof. Yonny Asher: Presentations by; Gilad Padva, Yaara Uzeri and Ayelet Bechar

Dr. Gilad Padva. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the Open University of Israel and Beit Berl College

Queer Ethics and Awful Truths in Michael Moore's Advocacy of the American Gay Community

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).



SESSION 3: Wednesday, May18, 17:00 – 18:30


Yaara Ozery. Tel-Aviv University

Now You See Them, Now You Won't: Ethics and Docu-Activism in 52/50 and Precious Life

In the past decade, Israeli documentary cinema has turned its gaze towards Palestinians and immigrant workers – the "radical" others who live among and around us. The encounter with the "other" in those films usually serves as a fruitful platform for turning the gaze inwards, investigating the filmmakers, the viewers and the society in which the film was made. Of particular interest are films where the camera is not only an observational instrument, but an active means to be used by filmmakers in assisting "social actors". Such documenting action has been named "docu-activism". I would like to examine the way in which the encounter with the "other" constructs the "self" in ethical terms of proximity, sacrifice, and responsibility; particularly in the case of docu-activism.

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.





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.


SESSION 1: Thursday, May 19th, 09:00 – 10:30

Ethics of the Real. The reality of Ethics

Dr. Macabit Abramson. Sapir Academic College

Looking At 'The Beast' – The Documented Character Vs. the Documentary Director - How Does the Gap Between Them Create the Ethical Statement in Determining the Nature of Truth and Reality in the Film?

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.


mailto:[email protected]%3C/BIO


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”.




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: [email protected] [email protected]




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.



Ethics as (a) Medium (in Crisis)

Prof. Aner Preminger, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Sapir Academic College.

Ethical Documentary: A Historical Perspective

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: [email protected] 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.


SESSION 4: Identity: 15:00 – 16:30


http://www.tamarelor.com/index.php/books/reserved-seats/


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).

Contact: [email protected] 4: Identity: 15:00 – 16:30


Rebecca Ora, PhD Candidate, University of Santa Cruz, CA.

Filming Israel From Afar: Ambivalent Diasporic Visions in Performative Non-Fiction

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


SESSION 5: Thursday, May 19, 16:45-18:15

http://www.rebeccaora.net/

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: [email protected];

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.


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).


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

Dan Angelo Muggia. Head of The Film Department of the Faculty of Arts –Hamidrasha,At Bet-Berl College.

Mr. Avishai Kfir. Head of The Haifa Cinematheque

Additional Chairs: Dr. Yvonne Kozlovsky-Golan, Dr. Dan Geva and Dr. Amir Har-Gil

Conference Founders and Organizers

Dr. Yvonne Kozlovsky-Golan, Ph. D. Senior Lecturer, chairs the M.A. Program for Culture and Film Studies, Humanities Faculty, University of Haifa. Dr. Kozlovsky-Golan researches the connection between history Law and film - the cinematic representation of the wars of the 20th Century and the traumatic events of the century. Her research examines the cinema's influence on the viewers' historical knowledge and the cultural and social discussion following the representation of history in cinema. She is a fellow in Yad Vashem, the International Institute for Holocaust Research, and a member of the Israeli Film Academy. She is the author of three books: The Shaping of the Holocaust Visual Image by the Nuremberg Trials – The Impact of the Movie Nazi Concentration Camps, Search and Research: Lectures and Papers No. 9, (Yad Vashem Publications. Jerusalem 2006). “God have mercy on your soul”: The Death Penalty in the USA: History, law ,cinema (Tel Aviv: Resling 2010); The Death Penalty in American Cinema: Criminality and Retribution in Hollywood Film (London/New York: I.B. Tauris, 2014).

Dr. Dan Geva, Ph.D, graduated from the Sam Spiegel Film School in 1994 with distinction. His debut film, Jerusalem: Rhythms of a Distant City (1993) won The Volgin Award and numerous international grand prizes. Since, he has made over 25 full-length documentary films, winning world acclaim in festivals and broadcasts alike. Among the most notable are what I saw in Hebron (1999), Routine (2000), The Key (2001), Think Popcorn (2014) and Noise (2012). Geva is a Research Fellow at Haifa University and a Senior Lecturer at the Beit Berl College Film Department. His 2006 Description of a Memory, homage to Chris Marker’s classic Description of a Struggle (1960), has been celebrated as one of the Ten Best Documentaries of the 2000s and was recently screened at the Marker-Planet World Exposition at the Centre Pompidou. Geva’s dissertation, “The Extended Sign of the Documentarian,” offers a new philosophical framework for the documentary filmmaker. As a Schusterman Grant awardee, Geva has served as a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University and the Maryland Institute of Art (2010). He is the laureate of the 2011 Dan David Prize for Promising Researcher in Cinema and Society and a nominee for the CILECT Teacher Award, 2016.

prof. avner fainguelernt - head of the audio and visual …film.haifa.ac.il/images/pro.docx · web...

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