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The Illusion of the One-Way Mirror: Filming the Checkpoint in Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention
Abstract
The Israeli military checkpoint, a space that restricts Palestinian movement within and between the West Bank and Gaza, is a setting that appears frequently in contemporary Palestinian cinema. Scholars have argued that the checkpoint functions as a site for the constriction and fragmentation of Palestinian life in films directed by Elia Suleiman, Hany Abu-Assad, and Rashid Masharawi. They also point to the possibilities, raised by on-screen acts of contestation, of resisting the checkpoint’s restrictions. However, these analyses largely focus on the checkpoint’s role as a metaphor for the hardships of life in Palestine. By contrast, my analysis revolves around the means by which the checkpoint is filmed and the forms of representation this produces. I frame my discussion using notions of surveillance and Panopticism, particularly the work of Eyal Weizman, who theorizes the checkpoint as an architectural space constructed on the basis of visual illusions such as one-way mirrors. I use this framework to focus my discussion not on the checkpoint film but rather on the act of filming the checkpoint. In this presentation, I argue that the checkpoint’s portrayal in Palestinian director Elia Suleiman’s film Divine Intervention (2002) reflexively calls attention to the act of filming the checkpoint. Much like Weizman’s one-way mirror, Suleiman uses the camera in particular ways to reveal the checkpoint’s depiction as a representation constructed through cinematic tricks and illusions. The methods by which the director frames the checkpoint scenes remind viewers of the limits of the camera’s perspective, and by extension that of the viewer. Screens separate the camera from the events at the checkpoint, which calls attention to the screen upon which the film itself is viewed. Finally, I show that the checkpoint functions a stage, site of choreographed set pieces. Through these techniques, the film reveals the constructedness of its depiction of the checkpoint. However, this method also exposes the constructedness of the checkpoint itself. It functions as a site of a scripted drama performed daily in the interactions of soldiers and civilians, a grainy, parodic facsimile of mechanisms of power exercised through visual control. It is from within this filmic act of exposing the artifice of the checkpoint that a new set of possibilities for contesting this disciplinary space emerges.
Discipline
Media Arts
Geographic Area
Israel
Palestine
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries