Separation anxiety
By Uri Klein
Haaretz, December 31, 2004
The strongest scene in Simone Bitton's documentary film "Wall," which will be screened several times this coming week at cinematheques in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa and Nazareth, appears close to the end. In the scene, Palestinian men and women are seen climbing on a section of the separation fence that has been built around Jerusalem. They are trying to get from one group of buildings to another, which are separated by only a few meters. Some of the men and women are young, while others are older. Among the climbers is a father who is carrying a baby. First he passes the baby between the coils of barbed wire on the fence to someone on the other side and then he climbs over. All of the evil, the absurdity, the insanity, the fear and the despair inherent in the erection of separation fence come out in this scene, which Bitton documents with a persistence and patience that characterize the entire film.
"Wall" is a film of strong images. With respect to ideology and information, there is not much new in it, or things to which we have not been previously exposed in other recent documentary films dealing with what is being done now in the territories. However, the way in which Bitton presents what is happening has a cumulative force, primarily because of the accretion of the images of which it is constituted. A beautiful olive tree in the landscape that is ruined by the wall that cuts through it; the sight of an Egged bus full of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men and women (some of them with babies) stopping near the entrance to Rachel's Tomb, and the passengers rushing to alight and enter the site as some soldiers stand with their backs to them, weapons in hand; the sight of a group of Palestinians making their way to Jerusalem in the early morning, a way that has become much longer with the construction of the wall - and, of course, the wall itself, which in Bitton's film serves both as a palpable entity and a symbol.
In one scene, Bitton interviews Amos Yaron, the director general of the Defense Ministry, who sits behind a bare desk between two unfurled Israeli flags. She tells him she is confused by the plethora of names the wall has been given and asks him what to call it: Separation fence? Security fence? Wall? This is not a semantic question. In the film, the wall is a symbol of everything that separates us from them and us from ourselves, separates outside from inside, separates there from here, and above all separates what we think is the image we have of ourselves from what is seen and recorded on the ground. Thus, it is not at random that near the end of the film Bitton chooses to talk with Eyad al-Saraj, a psychiatrist from Gaza. Although he does not add anything significant to the discussion taking place in the film, his very presence signifies that the situation needs profound treatment - and not only from the point of view of security.
Sometimes Bitton presses too hard, repeating what has already been said too many times. There is also no doubt there will be those who will say that her film is too programmatic (even her voice, which is heard on the sound track, changes from gruff to soft when she moves from speaking Hebrew to speaking Arabic). However, as a portrait of what is currently being done in the territories, the film is a work of considerable heft, which is worth watching.
During the course of the film the wall accumulates into a fetishistic entity that represents, both directly and indirectly, Israeli panic and arrogance in their immediate coloration. The scenes in the film that depict the construction of the wall (by mostly Palestinian workers) link up in our consciousness with a number of the most prominent images of construction, the stockade and tower building of pre-state kibbutzim to establish facts on the ground, which accompany our historical memory here - and at the same time distort this memory and present it ironically in its contemporary nakedness.
If "Wall" is of singular importance in one exclusive way, it is in the fact that it is a film that deals with "a dream and its shattering" - and affords this cliche new and additional meaning. The images of concrete walls and barbed wire, fortified buildings and sealed watchtowers (in some of which there will be air conditioning, so that the soldiers inside will have "maximal comfort," as someone in the film explains) - all these gradually add up to a picture of a situation in which history inheres, and sends a depressing message about the future of this place and the two peoples who live here.
