Just Images:

Ethics and the Cinematic

Edited by

Boaz Hagin, Sandra Meiri, Raz Yosef

and Anat Zanger

Just Images:
Ethics and the Cinematic,
Edited by Boaz Hagin, Sandra Meiri, Raz Yosef and Anat Zanger
This book first published 2011
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright 2011 by Boaz Hagin, Sandra Meiri, Raz Yosef and Anat Zanger and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-2845-9, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-2845-1

CHAPTER NINE
THE EVENT AND THE RESPONSIBILITY
OF THE IMAGE
ANAT ZANGER

The event of expression consists in bearing witness and in guaranteeing

the witness that it bears
Edith Wyschograd1

In the final sequence of Checkpoints (Yoav Shamir, 2003) the camera

tracks figures in total darkness in an isolation area at a checkpoint, waiting
for an answer to arrive by phone.2 Those supervising the movement across
the checkpoint, and those who want to pass through it, are all subject to
the same dark, isolated space. Only the headlights of an army vehicle
partially illuminate the area, allowing us to glimpse shadowy figures. The
blackout becomes complete and fragmented dialogue is all that is heard on
the soundtrack; and then it too dies away. The place is Beit Furiq, but by
the same token it could be any of the sites presented in the film: Huwwara
or Khan Yunis. There is no doubt, nonetheless, regarding the site's
identity: it is a checkpoint, a site that is consistently explored throughout
the film its outlines, its characteristics, and its tones. The final scene
brings no sense of release or consolation. Night falls and the same reality
will prevail tomorrow. Does the blackout that envelops the site and creeps
over the picture express despair? Helplessness? Or does it indicate our
and their common fate? By filming checkpoints in different places
throughout the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, documenting the mundane
stories of soldiers and civilians from different units and villages, the film
trains the spotlight on the ways in which the dramas unfolding in and
1

 Edith Wyschograd, Emmanuel Lvinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics,

vol. 8, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2000), 96.
2
Yoav Shamir (Dir.), Checkpoints, Amithos Films (Production), Israel, 2003.

The Event and the Responsibility of the Image

131

around the checkpoint become routine, and thus creates a story that is
theirs to the same extent that it is ours.
Hundreds of kilometers of borderlines delineate the collective body
that is called Israel. Along its entire length many dozens of positions and
roadblocks guarded and policed by Israeli soldiers oversee and control
entry and departure. The border line is simultaneously a meeting and a
friction point between two territories and two peoples. The beginning of
the second intifada (Elaktsa) in 2000 signaled an escalation of the IsraeliPalestinian conflict, with many casualties on both sides. In an attempt to
control the Palestinians' movements, the IDF built fences, walls, tunnels,
and roadblocks between Israeli and Palestinian areas as well as within
Palestinian areas. While the ever-increasing pervasiveness of the
checkpoints in the Israeli and Palestinian space in the last few years has
been taking place on the margins of the national body and far from the
public eye, the presence of an increasing number of film-makers and
media reporters who have turned their cameras towards these checkpoints
testifies to an urgent need to intervene in the course of events. By turning
its cameras toward checkpoints and roadblocks, the Israeli cinema has
contributed to their public visibility, exposing both the blind spots of the
transition site and our own blind spots.
I discuss here the documentary film Checkpoints by Yoav Shamir,
which documents instances of the daily encounters between Israelis and
Palestinians at various roadblocks over a period of two years, while
focusing on the practices taking place at the checkpoint sites. Through my
reading of the film, I examine the dialectic between the boundaries of the
checkpoint and that of the cinematic frame; in other words, between one
perspective and another: that of the checkpoint and that of the camera. My
main interest lies in the space produced between the photographic act
and the ethics; that is, in how the camera is used to document and record
the checkpoints themselves. In other words: who owns the checkpoint in
the film Checkpoints?

Transference Sites
Transference sites are documented in cinematic and television films
through a regime of double framing that of the checkpoint itself, and
that of the cinematic view of the checkpoint. On the one hand, the
checkpoints function as regulators of control and rule, in which the
mechanisms of surveillance and control operate by spatial, ideological
and linguistic means, which include a ritual of such repetitive acts as
identification, obedience, reward, and punishment. On the other hand,

132




the checkpoints also function as objects for cinematic framing. The filmmaker, by choosing to focus on a particular object within the space, and
by using specific rhetorical means to frame it in a desired way, turns the
photographed space into an intentional act of seeing, to use Edmond
Husserl's term.3
The foremost characteristic of transitional sites airports, frontier
posts, military camps, roadblocks and the role they play in space
indicates their uniqueness: these spaces do not function as a place in
the traditional meaning of the word. Transitional sites, like the nonplaces described by Marc Aug, are not a part of the topographical web
but are artificially separated from it.4 This placelessness is represented
in the film first and foremost through the very selection of the locations:
Checkpoints documents instances of the daily contact between Israelis
and Palestinians at various roadblocks and checkpoints. While the
locations of these crossings vary, the procedures at each place are
consistent and similar.
By appropriating the topographical system, the checkpoint constructs
the relations between those entering the site and those leaving it: the
human bodies are controlled by predetermined routes encumbered by
railings, barbed wire, electronic fencing, boulders, stone and canvas
walls, escalators, and one-way passages. While the narrative structure
characteristic of the sub-genre of road movies is the journey from
point A to point B, in Checkpoints the journey does not lead to any
place, and a state of de-territorialization issuggested instead.5
The cinematic writing of the checkpoint located in Khan Yunis,
within the Gaza Strip area, exemplifies its function. Next to the
roadblock there is a round building with a high, narrow aperture. In front
of this a Palestinian woman is presenting her documents and speaking to
the inspecting authority. Throughout this procedure the cinematic frame
focuses on the inspectors hands and his voice while his face remains
unseen: the height and narrowness of the aperture allow only for the
documents to be handed over, and for permission to be either granted or
3

 Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, translated by Wiliam P. Alston

and George Nakhnikian (The Hague: Martinus Mijhoff, 1964).
4
 Marc Aug, Non Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity
(London & New York: Verso), 1995.
5
 On de-territorialization in accented cinema: Hamid Naficy, An Accented
Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmaking (Princeton NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2001); and in Palestinian films: Nurith Gretz and George Khleifi,
Palestinian Cinema. Landscape, Trauma, and Memory (Bloomington & Indiana:
Indiana University Press, 2008).

The Event and the Responsibility of the Image

133

denied, as if without any human intervention. The spatiality of the

checkpoint site involves power and dominance. Through the camera, this
site is exposed as a heterogeneous meeting point, located in the
indeterminate space between surveillance, prejudices, desires, and fears; a
third space where protocol seems to have replaced human dialogue.6

Figure 9-1: Still picture from Yoav Shamir's Checkpoints, courtesy of the director
and producers: Edna Kowarsky, Elinor Kowarsky, Amit Breuer.

A Protocol and a Face

As a site that is a non-place, the checkpoint creates a human intersubjectivity that is officially dominated by the monotonous adherence to
the protocol. Identity card? Document? Permit? are the words that
begin the protocol at the transition sites. The procedure that takes place
6

Homi K. Bhabha, The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the
Discourse of Colonialism, in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary
Cultures, edited by Russell Ferguson et al (Cambridge, Mass. & New York: The
New Museum of Contemporary Art & MIT Press, 1990), 71-87.

134




repeatedly at the different checkpoints can be identified as a speech act;7

that is, a linguistic utterance that takes place in a given context according
to a pre-determined protocol. The actions and gestures are continually
repeated and occur according to the convention that, as Judith Butler notes
in another context, has already defined previous moments in the past and
will define such moments in the future by means of the ritual dimension.8
Any signs of individual identity within the anonymity of the procedure
threaten the hermetical nature of the act of control and expose its weak
points. Although negotiations are carried out between the two sides of the
control point, in all of them however, the Israeli side is the one that sorts
and controls. Because it is located in an intermediate space, the checkpoint
creates the effect of a meeting between specific identities that it seeks to
simultaneously define and conceal. For both practical and symbolic
purposes, borders and checkpoints delineate the polarity that separates
pure and impure, similarity and difference, and inside and outside. At the
same time, however, that they insist on purity, distinction and difference,
they also facilitate contamination and mixing; always in the process of
change. Whether literal or figurative, borders also function as a site of
multiple contradictions. We can observe, along with Gloria Anzalda,
that:
Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to
distinguish us from them A borderland is a vague and undetermined
place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a
constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its
inhabitants.9

The border is a special space that is neither ours nor theirs but, rather,
a third, in-between space. As observed by Martin Buber (and later by
Bhabha and Soja), the border is an intermediate space, and the site where
an encounter between I and Thou takes place.10 Buber understood this
in-between space not as an empty one, but as a narrow bridge on which
the event itself, an event of a relationship, takes place, in which individual
identities are defined by means of the meeting. Neither the Israelis/the
7

 John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1962).
8
Judith Butler, Excitable Speech - a Politics of the Performative (New York:
Routledge, 1997), 25.
9
 Gloria Anzalda, Borderlands: The New Mestiza/La Frontera (San Francisco:
Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987), 3.
10
Martin Buber, I and Thou, translated by Walter Kaufman (New York: Scribner's,
1970).

The Event and the Responsibility of the Image

135

authorities nor the Palestinians/the subservient transients are referred to by

their names, and we know nothing about their lives a moment before or a
moment after the checkpoint. However, in all these borderlands the camera
of Checkpoints captures and smuggles out human faces, bits of
information, and on-going procedures, to which the checkpoint's
authorities would not necessarily grant an exit permit: not only a
Palestinian woman whose child has been wounded by Israeli bullets, or
another woman with two children who has to go all the way back to her
village in order to ask for a permit to go through another checkpoint; but
also the faces of Israeli soldiers who need to maneuver between orders and
the everyday reality. Following the noted French philosopher, Emmanuel
Lvinas, we can identify the face of the Other, that element of the Other
that constitutes the ground of interpersonal contact and proximity. The
face, as considered by Lvinas, does not refer only to the plasticity of a
visual form, but also to the inner essence of the face that speaks to us.
Lvinas observes that: The face puts into question the sufficiency of my
identity as an I, it compels me to an infinite responsibility.11
It is within this context that we may ask whether the camera's presence
at the checkpoint operates as a third party; and if so, in what way can the
camera itself be defined as a checkpoint? In his Introduction to
Documentary, Bill Nichols observes that documentaries stand for or
represent the interest of the others. Ethical issues, he adds, often arise
in relation to the question of how should we treat the people we film?12
His answer reveals a three-way interaction: between the filmmaker, the
subjects or social actors as he called actors in non-fiction films, and the
audience or viewers. In films that depict conflict situations, like
Checkpoints, we may add that the interrelations occurring between the
social actors themselves also have a unique role as we have two sides
involved (and at least two points of view). Interestingly, the filmmaker and
cameramen in Checkpoints have used the camera as a device to create a
combined discourse of monologues, in other words, to speak through the
camera both their social actors' points of view and their own. They thereby
no longer function as passive witnesses but as social subjects in
11

 Emmanuel Lvinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philipe Nemo,

translated by Richard Cohen, (Pittsburgh: Duquense University Press, 1985), 133.
In contrast to Buber's formal concept of dialogic reciprocity, Lvinas's ethics are
asymmetrical and non-reciprocal: my obligation to the other is gratuitous
[gratuity] (In Michel Eskin, A Survivor's Ethics - Lvina's Challenge to
Philosophy, Dialectical Anthropology 24, no. 3-4 [1999]: 412).
12
 Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2001), 13.

136




themselves. Moreover, the agony of the Other which is usually perceived

as distant suffering, is brought closer to the viewer.13

The Responsibility of the Image

Hiding behind anonymous orders allows the Israeli authorities at the
checkpoints to discharge their orders while the responsibility for doing so is
removed from them. The various sequences focus on the indirectly
transmitted and sometimes contradictory instructions which are written on a
piece of paper, sent by telephone or short-wave radio, or spoken through a
narrow slit through which a permit either does or does not appear. While the
source of the instructions remains disembodied and outside the camera's view
(and often outside the field of action), like Michel Chion's acousmtre,14 the
representative present in the area repeatedly explains that These are the
instructions or We have to wait for the permit, and the Israeli soldier in
charge of the barrier at the roadblocks will rhetorically ask the film's director,
Do you think that I'm the one who decides here?
The roadblock serves as the threshold of an opportunity for contact
between the two sides: the I, in military garb, with megaphone and
weapon, and carrying out orders; and the you, who requests, insists, and
surrenders. In this situation, the photographing I serves as the mirror that
reflects the eye of the Israeli or of the Palestinian you facing the camera.
Photograph us! Photograph this! Let everyone see what they are doing to
us, says an older Palestinian man to the camera near the roadblock where
hundreds of people are being detained. At another checkpoint, an Israeli
soldier refuses to let a young Palestinian man pass through because of the
orders he has received; the young man is eventually allowed through only
after a laborious negotiation. Now the Israeli soldier addresses the
cameraman and requests, Don't make me come out looking mean in this
story; make me look good. How can I? asks the cameraman. Pass it on
to the higher-ups, the soldier suggests.

13

 See Luc Boltansky's discussion on the politics of pity and the viewers
response to the suffering of distant subjects:
Luc Boltansky, Distant Suffering-Morality, Media and Politics, translated by
Graham Burchell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 [1993]).
14
 Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, translated by Claudia Gorbman (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1999).

The Event and the Responsibility of the Image

137

Figure 9-2: Still picture from Yoav Shamir's Checkpoints, courtesy of the director
and producers: Edna Kowarsky, Elinor Kowarsky, Amit Breuer.

At such moments the camera becomes a visual and verbal tool and
serves as an ennonciation, a performative speech act that takes place in the
intermediate space between the I and the you. It allows for behavior
that ignores the protocol and creates an opportunity for a dialogue, one in
which I, the photographer turns the faceless Other standing before the
checkpoint into an identifiable individual, though only for a brief moment.
What responsibility do filmmakers have for the effect of their acts on the
lives of those filmed? asks Bill Nichols.15 Shamir's camera seems to offer
several possibilities, when it takes sides and affects, even if minimally, the
course of events by its very presence. Emmanuel Lvinas noted that the
word responsibility contains within it a pair of words response and
ability and the ability to respond is what defines an event as an ethical
one.16 A new subjectivity is born, indicating that my Self, as a subject, is a
primary projection towards the Other as a move of responsibility. The
15

Nichols, 6.
Emmanuel Lvinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, translated by
Alphonso Lingis (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1981).

16

138




proximity of the Other demands a response; thus, Lvinas claims that

proximity is responsibility, or the ability to respond. The ethical event,
Lvinas adds, is not something that I do (or choose to do), but something
that I must do at the moment that the other touches me by his very
presence by means of his/her otherness.17 In this sense, the camera, as a
tool of visual and verbal documentation, supervises the supervision. It is
an utterance act, a discourse that takes place in the in-between space that
links the I and the you, and it is therefore an act that takes an ethical
position.

Where Were You?

The contemporary Israeli cinema has turned its focus upon the checkpoint
as an object. To Shamir's film we can add earlier works, such as Michal
Rovner's video-art Border (1996), which takes place on the Lebanese
Israeli border line; Gil Levenberg and Tzachi Grad's fictional film Ben
Gurion (1997), which follows several stories that all take place during one
night at Israel's national airport; Ram Loevy's film Close, Closed, Closure
(2002), located at the roadblock between Gaza Strip and Israel, and
follows both sides across the borderline; and Avi Mograbis short work
Detail (2003), which documents one attempt to pass through the roadblock
near Nablus.18 Whereas human encounters on both sides of the roadblock
were revealed in these earlier films, in Checkpoints the narrative line is
gradually abandoned and the camera focuses on the arbitrary nature of the
border and the capricious tyranny of the process. The hesitant probing and
the fantasy of a relationship between the I and the you that
characterized the earlier films become impossible when the protocol seeks
to conceal the changed nature of these relations. By gradually abandoning
17

Lvinas, 20.
 Michal Rovner (Dir.), Border, Michal Rovner and Pace Wildenstein NY
(Production), Israel & United States, 1997; Gil Levenberg (Dir.) and Tzachi Grad
(Writer), Ben Gurion, Al Ahava TV & Film (Production), Israel, 1997; Ram
Loevy, Close, Closed, Closure [Seger], Israel & France, 2002; Avi Mograbi (Dir.),
Detail, Avi Mograbi Films and Les Films d'Ici (Production), Israel & France,
2003.
Subsequent texts can be added to this list. For example: Chic Point, a video
work by Palestinian Sharif Waked (Israel, 2003). Later texts, such as Avenge but
One of My Two Eyes [Nekam Achat Mishtye Eynay] (Avi Mograbi, Les Films d'Ici,
Israel & France, 2005) and To See If I'm Smiling [Lir'ot Im Ani Mechyecht] (Tamar
Yarom, First Hand Films, Israel, 2007) deal in addition, with the issue of the
Israelis' distress as conquerors in various locations, not only checkpoints.
18

The Event and the Responsibility of the Image

139

the fictionality of the film and its narrative structure as well the film
forgoes the attempt to tell a story with an ending: in other words, there is
no denouement. Checkpoints focuses on the encounters at the roadblock
itself. The human side of the situation seems to arouse empathy and
identification with those trapped at the roadblocks. However, the repetition
of arbitrary and purposeless procedures does not allow for the purifying
catharsis.19 All that is left are clusters of human bodies moving
mechanically at the checkpoint according to the rules. The camera focuses
on the faces of the soldiers or those of the Palestinians, as if trying to study
them and the procedures through which they turn into an amorphous and
faceless human mass.
In conclusion, I return to the closing sequence of the film Checkpoints,
in which the camera follows two groups of figures. They are in an isolated
valley near Bet Furik, and it is late in the evening and quite dark. Partially
hidden by a wall, a group of detainees is sitting on the ground, while the
figures of soldiers seen above them observe them closely and await a
telephone call. All are together in a space that is both exposed and
isolated, illuminated only partially by the headlights of a military vehicle,
so that only their silhouettes can be discerned.
The confined space, the wall that encloses it, the limited visibility, the
shadowy figures, and the soldiers' resonating voices, echo Platos
metaphor of the cave scene in the seventh book of The Republic, in
describing the limits of human understanding and vision. Plato describes a
cave in which the way that a group of prisoners are sitting allows them to
see no more than shadows cast onto the cave wall by a fire, and since even
this is limited and partial, they cannot form a true assessment of their
situation.
In this sequence in Checkpoints the space of the sites of transference
and the writing of the cinematic frame link it to texts such as Plato's
Parable of the Cave and Jos Saramago's Blindness, emphasizing the
arbitrariness of the situation, the imperceptibility, and the complete lack of
power of the cinematic camera.20 The film that writes the space of the

19

It introduces, instead, the checkpoint as yet another kind of institution (in the
Foucauldian sense; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
Prison, translated by A.M. Sheridan-Smith [New York: Pantheon, 1979] in the
same way that American film director Fredric Weisman investigated other
institutions such as hospitals and prisons. This observation was made by Gertrud
Koch [pers. comm., Tel-Aviv 2004]).
20
Plato, The Republic, translated by Tom Griffith, Edited by G.R.F. Ferrari
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

140




transition site by means of the camera, records thereby not only the
appearance of the place but also, following Benjamin, its optical
subconsciousness.21 It presents a portrait of a society that has lost its
human face, and a dialectic created between the I and the you that is
above and beyond the other side of the checkpoint: it presents a situation
of subjugation that can be better understood in terms of dialectic of master
and slave. These films, by their very existence, function as checkpoints
that contribute to the public visibility, and thus do not allow us any longer
to say that we didn't know.

Jose Saramago, Blindness, translated by Giovanni Pontiero (London: Harvill Press,

1997).
21
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, translated by Harry Zohn, edited by Hannah
Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968 [1936]), 217-252.