5 Broken Cameras: Landscape, Trauma and Witnessing

Saeedeh Asadipour BA Architecture, Shahid Bahonar University, 2013

A thesis submitted to the History Faculty of the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for Master of in Art History

Committee Members Morgan Thomas, Ph.D. (chair) Nnamdi Elleh, Ph.D. Ethan Katz, Ph.D.

March 2016

Abstract

In the last quarter century, Palestinian cinema has appeared as a major artistic force on the global scene. Deeply rooted in the historic struggles for national self-identification and self- narration, this cinema is among the most important artistic expression of a suffering people.

Despite the increasing significance of Palestinian cinema in the global scene, most of these films are from the perspective of refugees outside of the conflict zone and there is no significant film from the heart of the conflict. , while as a covers conflict occurrences in the village of Bil’in (the village on the border of and ) gives a first- handed perspective of a citizen’s family life involved in the conflict. The thesis has been shaped in three chapters. The first chapter examines representation of the landscape as a sublime object

(land as the lost object and the Israeli city-landscape as astonishing and horrifying complexes that symbolize the civilization and leave the out of its territory.) In the second chapter, the subjectivity of the Palestinian bodies in the cinema is studied and it is argued that the trauma is the main constitutive of the Palestinian visual and cinematic narration. The third chapter focuses on the film as an independent subject that carries significant testimonial weight.

It argues that amateur film with blurred images and original raw sound because of a hyper- mobilized camera work creates a sense of muteness and paralysis around the trauma. The third chapter proposes that 5 Broken Cameras as an example of citizen camera witnessing is a form of alter-narration of the Palestinian national history and it strongly affects the top-down organization of media system. Finally, in all the three chapters, this thesis argues that

“speechlessness,” passivity and dysfunctionality constitutes a very important part of the film’s representation of the situation, whether in the director’s attempt to represent the “lost” land, the psychical “wounds” and the “blurred” images and also by naming the film 5 Broken Cameras.

ii

This thesis argues that this “silence” brings another kind of subjectivity that has moral power in the eyes of the global audiences.

iii

© Saeedeh Asadipour All Rights Reserved

iv

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii Introduction ...... 1 Chapter 1: Background as Foreground ...... 11 Figures of Chapter 1 ...... 24 Chapter 2: Cinematic Subjectivity ...... 27 Figures of Chapter 2 ...... 39 Chapter 3: Citizen Camera-Witnessing: Reclamation of History ...... 41 Figures of Chapter 3 ...... 49 Conclusion ...... 51 Bibliography ...... 55

v

Table of Figures

Figure 1. Villagers gathered around the constructing machine ...... 24 Figure 2. Burnets Father is seeding the land...... 24 Figure 3. Children accompanying adults in protest...... 25 Figure 4. Israeli’s residential complex on the hills...... 25 Figure 5. A scene after breaking the first camera...... 26 Figure 6. Youngest son of the Burnat watches the conflict from top of the roof...... 39 Figure 7. A Palestinian youth throwing stone...... 39 Figure 8. Burnat’s youngest son watches the conflict from a close distance...... 40 Figure 9. Burnat with his five broken cameras...... 49 Figure 10. Protesters escaping the shooting quarrel...... 49 Figure 11. Bassem Abu Rahman got shot dead in the eyes of camera...... 50

vi

“Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.” , and Imperialism1

Introduction

Palestinian cinema is one of the most promising emerging national cinemas, and its

motifs have been transformed into a global event as they are tied to political issues and social

upheavals. The very existence of this cinema, however, is paradoxical, and it is through this

paradox that it needs to be theorized and contextualized. The apparent paradox in general can be

perceived when we talk about the generated by a stateless nation.2 The very

presupposition of a sufficient basis on which to create a Palestinian cinema after 1948 points to a collective memory of war, displacement and dispossession, as Palestinians continue to hold a strong sense of nationhood. Although the origin of Palestinian cinema pre-dates the dispossession of their historical homeland, it has flourished in recent years and received high critical acclaim from around the world. This cinema retains a strong connection to the Israeli occupation, however, for as , in his book Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian

Cinema, writes, “The central trauma of Palestine, the , is the defining moment of

Palestinian cinema.”3 Thus, in this study, the term “Palestinian cinema” refers to films made after 1948 by Palestinian directors inside or outside of Palestine’s borders.

1 Edward said, Culture and Imperialism,(New York, Vintage Books, 1994.), p. 8. 2 Hamid Dabashi, Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema, (New York, Verso book, 2006.), pp. 3-4. 3 Ibid.

Postcolonial scholar and theorist Edward Said is perhaps best able to illuminate the

strong relationship between Palestinian cinema and their lost land. In his keynote speech on the opening night of “Our Dreams of a Nation: Palestinian ,” in January 2003, Said argues that the significance of Palestinian cinema is related to the general problem of the historical, the political, and the aesthetics of visibility. So, the relationship of Palestinians to the visible and the visual was deeply problematic. Said reminded the audience of a slogan from an early mobilizing phrase of Zionism: “We are a people without a land going to a land without people,” a phrase which pronounces the emptiness of the land and the non-existence of people.

Said then suggests that Palestinian cinema must be understood in this context, as first and foremost a cinema which aims to resist against invisibility and tries to give an alternative visual articulation of the Palestinian existence to the world.4 Drawing its cue from this brief mention of the significance of the land, the first chapter of this study aims to undertake a closer reading of the Palestinian cinema with particular focus on the crucial role of landscape in it.

Another key context for understanding Palestinian cinema may be found in the long- lasting and controversial discussion about the reasons of the absence of visual narrative(especially cinematic narration) in Palestinian society. Palestinian cinema specifically in

Gaza Strip and can be considered as phenomenon which seek to compensate for such a lack of narrative. Palestinian films come from different geographical areas, for instance the

West Bank, , Israel, US and , to recollect and gather together what has been lost since 1948. The absence of strong visual narrative, scholars believe, has been caused mainly because of two reasons, firstly, segregation and the lack of a cultural center and, secondly and

4 Hamid Dabashi, Dreams of a Nation, (New York: Verso Books, 2006). p. 9.

2

most significantly for the present study, the effects of trauma that hinder the process of making a

robust narration.5 Since much of the absence of Palestinian visual and cinematic narration has

been attributed to dispersal and the exilic condition manifested in life, therefore Palestinian films that attempt to fill this gap normally focus on concepts related to the nation’s dispersal, one of which is the lost land and the other one is the life long experience of horror.

This study focuses on the cinematic narration of the conflict only from the point of view

(perspective) of an involved Palestinian citizen, therefore it does not try to give a multi-angle view of the Israel-Palestine conflict. This research has been driven by a strong passion about the issue of Palestine and I aim to contribute towards creating a visual and artistic narration of the national history, hitherto a lacuna in Palestinian studies. Although there are numerous examples out of the Palestinian borders, among which are globally known names like Mona Hatoum and

Emily Jacir, the perspective of the inside of the borders are less visible. As more than 60% of the Palestinian population has been depopulated and the Israeli government has prevented the return of Palestinian refugees who have either been expelled or displaced, the Palestinian visual culture and cinema is deeply affected by the experience of exile. Conversely, have been far fewer cultural products from the inside of the Palestine and especially from the heated borders. From this point of view 5 Broken Cameras is a unique film that reveals a less seen narration about the

Palestinian experience.

5 and George Khleifi, Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma, and Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), pp. 2-5.

3

Literature Review and Methodology

This thesis in its three chapter develops a psychological approach to postcolonial politics

in 5 Broken Cameras as a representative of Palestinian documentary film. This study will focus

on the literal and metaphorical unspeakability of the victims and unrepresentability of the

traumatic experiences. The silence of the agents, I will argue, becomes a narrative strategy to

deconstruct their oppression and appropriation by the dominant colonizer and anthropocentric

culture. Other methodological approaches are theories of perception and theory of witnessing.

There is a sizable compilation of written materials about the visual and textual

expressions and narratives motivated by collective trauma and they are categorized in many

themes such as therapy and diagnose, family trauma, fictional testimony and ethical testimony,

post-modern narratives, etc. compilation of materials are varied geographically among Eastern

Europe, Ireland, Algeria, Africa, Latin America and finally the , which according to

Žižek is the “heart of darkness” in the contemporary world6. Most of these materials have been

built on the psychological insights and theorizing of the fathers of trauma studies (Freud,

Ferenczi) in order to examine the narrative strategies, structural experimentations and the ways

by which they deal with unrepresentability of trauma by performing rather than narrating.

Examining the ways, mostly psychological, by which such narratives give testimony and the

influences of the given testimony on both narrators and their society. Other texts that provided

support in the field of psychoanalysis and the concept of trauma and its representation. The

second chapter which mostly addresses some issues of body and its psychical wound and its

represresentaion through the media got its support from the Allen Meek’s book: Trauma and

6 Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008), p. 12.

4

media and the insightful book of Dominick LaCapra named History in transit: Experience,

identity, critical theory.

Most of the materials related to the trauma and testimony have been written about

holocaust, among which the book of the Testimony after Catastrophe: Narrating the Trauma of

Political Violence by Steven Weine7 and The Future of Testimony by Antony Rowland, Jane

Kilby made bigger contribution to this study8. These books are committed to the proposition that

efforts to use testimony to address the consequences of political violence can be strengthened, if

they are based on a fuller acknowledgment of the personal and ethical elements embodied in the

narrative essence of testimony. These elements are what Testimony after Catastrophe and The

Future of Testimony seek to reveal and what most of the testimonial documentaries pursue.

Judith Butler, the well-known philosopher, in her book, Precarious Life, discusses about

collective trauma and the issues and difficulties in dealing with them by taking the Holocaust and

Jews community as her case study.

As this research is about film, two books of Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 19 and Cinema 210,

provide material of philosophical thinking about the film. Another book by Deleuze that has

been written in collaboration with Felix Guatari is the One Thousand Plateau11, in which they write of political suppressing aspects of geography and landscape.”Deterritorialization” is term

7 Steven Weine, Testimony after Catastrophe: Narrating the Trauma of Political Violence (Evanston: Northwestern University Press: 2006). 8 Antony Rowland and Jane Kilby, eds, The Future of Testimony, (, Routledge, 2014). 9 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013). 10 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013). 11 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, One Thousand Plateau: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003)

5

that has been applied in the first chapter of this study and has been borrowed from Deleuze and

Guattari’s another book named Nomadology: The War Machine12.

One of the key resource for this study was the book of Art, Chaos, and Territory by

Elizabeth Grostz13. This book explains the intense psychic influences of framing on mind and

she argues that wall divides the inhabitable from nature, legalized from illegalize and at last

geography and territory versus the landscape. In this book, Grosz discusses the intensities and

violence imbedded in construction and architecture. She argues how art animal affiliations

ensure that art is intensely political and charged with the creation of new worlds and new forms

of living. According to Grosz, art is the way in which life experiments with materiality, or

nature, in order to bring about change. Another key resource is the article of “Art and

14 Trauma”13F .Probably the most important article that has been written in this issue and the most cited one. This article provides the general understanding of art as a mean of self-expressing,

evidence to give testimony and more importantly as a therapeutic tool that coined with the

coinage of treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Since this study is about a testimonial amateur film of a political conflict, its

contextualization in the ground of media witnessing seems necessary. Witnessing is a contested

issue that deals a lot with the question of agency. Media Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of

Mass Communication, a very insightful book edited by Frosh and Pinchevski provided the best

support for grounding 5 Broken Cameras in the field of Media Witnessing.15 In this book. In this

12 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Nomadology and the War Machine (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986). 13 Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New York: Press, 2012). 14 Dori Laub and Daniel Podell, “Art and Trauma,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 76, no. 5, Oct 1995: pp. 991-1005. 15 Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski, eds. Media witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)

6

book leading scholars explore key questions concerning the truth status and broader implications

of 'media witnessing'. Other resources with the similar topic that helped me to write about the

power of the performance of camera-witnessing was an article named “Burning Witness,

Journalism and Moral Responsibility” by Sue Tait.16

Although, Psychoanalysis is one of the determinative factors in trauma studies, post

colonialism, especially in the case of Middle East is at the center of the discussion. The scholarly

exploration of post colonialism is in great debt of Edward Said and his arguments about Palestine

in two of his books named The Question of Palestine17 and After the Last Sky18. Finally, it must

has been considered that writing about a documentary film which is narrating the conflict over

the land, must provide the historical context of the Israel-Palestine conflict, as well as the history of the Zionism, establishment of Israel, Intifada, etc. Two book by Rashid Khalidi, the

Palestinian-American historian, provide all those aforementioned historical knowledge requirement for this study. Palestinian Identity19 and Under the Siege20 are two of Khalidi’s

books that concretely discuss the conflict history.

From the Nakba day (meaning "Day of the Catastrophe". Generally commemorated on 15

May, the day after the Gregorian calendar date for Israeli Independence Day) throughout the

years of occupation, this omnipresent element, the landscape, has been represented as an image

of vanishing space, from a possible site to a distant sight that represents all these policies and

16 Sue Tait. "Bearing witness, journalism and moral responsibility." Media, Culture & Society 33, no. 8 (2011): 1220-1235. 17 Said, Edward W. The question of Palestine.(New York: Vintage, 2015) 18 Said, Edward W. After the last sky: Palestinian lives. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) 19 Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 20 Rashid Khalidi, Under Siege: PLO Decisionmaking During the 1982 War, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

7

structures of separation and oppression. This depiction has raised numerous contradictory

viewpoints amongst viewers of Palestinian cinema, to the point of heated debate. While

supporters defend the repetition of this motif and see it as a means by which to illustrate

Palestinian concerns to the world, opponents of this mode of depiction are concerned that it

transforms this space into mere scenery. They argue that the reduction of Palestine into the status

of a landscape alienates Palestinians from the actual land by increasing their identification with an idealized landscape. This controversy is indicative of the significance of the portrayal of landscape in Palestinian national art and . Having provided a brief introduction to

Palestinian cinema, its concerns, and its significance, this study will primarily concern itself with a subtle reading of the presence of the landscape image since that element aside from its political connotation bears significant psychological potency. Thereafter, corporeal representation and agency of camera-witnessing in 5 Broken Cameras will be discussed.

Here I discuss the role of the landscape and corporeal motif in Palestinian cinema, the

2011 Palestinian documentary film 5 Broken Cameras has been selected as the case study for its focus on the separation wall built on the filmmaker’s farmland. The first-ever Palestinian film to

be nominated for a Best Documentary Feature Academy Award, the critically acclaimed 5

Broken Cameras is a deeply personal, first-hand account of life and resistance in Bil’in, a West

Bank village surrounded by Israeli settlements.21 The documentary was shot almost entirely by

Palestinian farmer , who bought his first camera in 2005 to record the birth of his

21 Bil'in is located 4 kilometres (2 miles) east of the . Israel's West Bank barrier split the village in two, separating it from 60 percent of its farmland. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, Bil'in has a population of 1,800, mostly Muslims. After the Six-Day War in 1967, Bil'in was occupied by Israeli forces. Since the signing of the Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1995, it has been administered by the Palestinian National Authority. It is internationally known for protests against the Israeli occupation.

8 youngest son. In 2009 Israeli co-director Guy Davidi joined the project. The film is structured in chapters around the destruction of each of Burnat’s cameras, a structure which also follows a family’s evolution over five years of village upheaval.

The most pivotal imagery in 5 Broken Cameras is the landscape and all the roles that it plays in the film whether giving testimony, recalling a lost mode of life, resisting colonialism, psychological violence, or psychological defense have done by landscape in various ways. Many scholars have examined the reasons behind of representation of the landscape. The landscape should not be considered as a merely a physical given, an aesthetic form, or even a physical place in that its borders are politically and identically crucial, but should also be considered a medium to convey cultural and ideological expressions and, more importantly, to convey emotions or what could be described as unconscious defenses in the case of Palestinians. While there might be numerous ways by which this obsession in depicting landscape in 5 Broken

Cameras can be theorized, this study focuses on a less examined approach in the realm of psychoanalysis, namely the human relationship to the land.

The film’s approach toward the land makes 5 Broken Cameras a unique film and shows a unique face of the contemporary world to the global audience in a world shaped by globalism and diaspora, where the of regions or homelands are being changed and even destroyed by an array of postcolonial simulacra. In today’s world, remaining in one’s ancestral place seems meaningless, and as a result of postcolonialism and its attendant problematization of the relationship between place and identity the connection between the place and culture seems broken.22 From this point of view, by insisting on the importance and exigency of the land 5

22 Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997) p. 6. 9

Broken Cameras challenges postcolonial politics, the importance of which in contemporary life

has often been concealed. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson in “Beyond Culture: Space, Identity,

and the Politics of Difference,” argue that such blurring creates the global market of workers,

rendered mobile by dislocation.23 In this context, 5 Broken Cameras demonstrates resistance on behalf of not only the colonialized nation but for world citizens, in its addressing of shared concerns and common meanings.

23 Ibid. 10

Chapter 1: Background as Foreground

“For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and

foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread, and above all, dignity.”24

Frantz Fanon

The film starts with corrupted and confusing images. The sound of shooting, ambulance alarms, uproars – aural chaos abounds. The camera films the ground while Emad Burnat is running, probably escaping the quarrel. Burnat himself narrates: “I’ve lived through so many experiences. They burn in my head like a hot flame…pain and joy, fears and hope…all mixed together. I am losing track. The old wounds don’t have time to heal, new wounds will cover them up.” These opening moments of the film are images of the village’s landscape with Israeli bulldozers working on the hills. When Burnat shows footage of the bulldozers that have come to clear the land, the images are especially wrenching; in one shot, a deer bounds away, presumably scared by the commotion of machinery, foreshadowing the greater displacement that will follow.

[fig.1] But the bulldozers are not an entirely new phenomenon. As Burnat states, Israeli

settlements have been built as far back as Burnat's own birth.

24 Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre. The Wretched of the Earth. (New York: Grove Atlantic Inc. 1963), p. 40.

11

Landscape as a Fragile Absolute

From the start of the film, Burnat articulates the intimate relationship between his own

personal life and the land. He says: “I was born and lived all my life in Bil’in. Just inside the

occupied territories of the West Bank. I am a peasant like all my entire family. As a boy, I used

to work the land with my father. We picked olives. Now the land draws us inward.” Then we see

his old father working in the land, then green landscape. [fig.2] Everything looks calm and

natural until the camera shows a bulldozer on the vast green hill. “Israeli surveyors come to take measurement,” Burnat informs us. Burnat bought his first camera in order to document the birth of his fourth son, Gibreel, who was born in February 2005, the same month that the Israeli cabinet approved a final, revised route of the West Bank Barrier, the wall that now separates

Palestinians in the West Bank from the Israelis. Nearly 50,000 Palestinians resided on the

occupied land on the newly claimed Israeli side of the barrier as of February 2005, dispersed

throughout 38 towns and villages. The final route of the wall divided one of the most fertile

regions in the West Bank, separating many Palestinian villages (Bil'in included) from their farms

and places of work. Therefore, Gibreel, Burnat's main subject, grew up alongside a wall of

separation, intimately experiencing the effects of the wall on Bil'in and on the Palestinian people.

Initially, the film was intended only as a personal family video, but Burnat quickly

realized the importance of capturing the footage of Palestinian responses to Israeli occupation

and the creation of the barrier wall. Still, Burnat and his family are one of the primary focuses of

the story. Burnat's recordings intersperse his intimately portrayed family life and his

community's interactions with the planning and construction of the wall. He persistently records

all the villagers’ demonstrations against the fence and Israeli settlements which occupy what was

12

formerly their land. [fig.3] Since the “land” provides a starting point for both the film and the

wider political conflict, it shapes the film both visually and narratively. As Burnat narrates,

“since I was a child I have watched how the landscape is being transformed and destroyed. Each

of my four sons remember the village different from the others. I want them to remember.

Gibreel never knew the village without the soldiers and the fence.” Burnat also personalizes his

narration of the lands’ changes over time:

Each boy experienced a different childhood. Mohammad was born in 1995, in the time of the Oslo peace accords, when he was child the land was more open, we could go to the sea every summer. Yasin, the second son, was born 3years later, in the time of uncertainty, these days Intifada began in 2000, his childhood shaped by the long siege the West bank was under. In 2005, Gibreel was born. From my childhood to Gibreel childhood the settlement were built closer and closer, taking up more and more cultivated land.

Representing the Sublime

The opening scenes of 5 Broken Cameras showed the construction of the separation wall

over the farm land and the vast Israeli constructions on the other side of the wall. Here, I argue

that aside from the taking the farmland by Israel, constructing the separating wall and a new

landscape on the Israeli side of it has a traumatic effect on the people, not only because of the concrete consequences of the wall and the construction, in particular nation segregation and

immigration because of the confiscation of natural resources, but also because of the indirect psychological effects of construction and architecture on the Bil’in dwellers in this film specifically as well as Palestinian in general.

To understand these effects, the meaning of architecture and its functions and the function of the landscape must first be explained. The concept of architecture firstly signifies the

emergence of the "frame" by which to establish territory out of the chaos of the earth. Without a

13

frame there can be no territory and without territory there can be no objects or things that can

intensify and transform the living bodies. Framing and deframing are both modes of

territorialization, with deterritorialization signifying upheaval and transformation.25 Even in its

most convoluted contemporary forms, architecture is the creation of the frames that separate

bodies that can affect and can be affected by other bodies. This cutting of the space of the earth

through the fabrication is the very gesture that composes both house and territory, inside and

outside, interior and landscape, habitable and inhabitable. This aspect of architecture, as a cut on

the land, is why most elementary aspect of the frame, the partition, whether wall or screen, is

initial way of making territory. Although Palestinian villages like Bil’in had houses and

therefore territories, their handmade clay walls, their short roofs, became haunted by the vast

construction of concrete complex building and by monster-like metal machines.

It must be considered that although the wall primarily divides, it also provides new

connections as it reconstitutes political and social relationships amongst those cut off from their

former land. While its most direct function is to separate or divide, the wall also selects and

brings in and what is left outside is the landscape. Framing is the raw condition under which

sensations are created, metabolized, and released into the world, intensifying bodies.26

Philosophers Giles Deleuze and Felíx Guattari argue that territory is established once properties

come to resonance with their own distinct construction, and that is how ‘geography’ is shaped

against ‘landscape’, ‘culture’ against the ‘nature’, and ‘habitable’ against ‘inhabitable’.27 The

25 Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), p. 32. 26 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 140-146. 27 Grosz, Elizabeth A. Chaos, territory, art: Deleuze and the framing of the earth. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). pp. 73-77.

14 formation of a territory therefore provides proprietary identity for the occupants and limits the native’s agency and history. Therefore it is at this stage that the native people are aimed to be viewed as being almost the same as the landscape or a part of the natural scenery by an occupying force.

Emad Burnat’s insistence on recording images of upheaval and construction may be psychoanalytically interpreted as an unconscious effort to represent the process in which the villagers’ agency has been limited. The film sets up an encountering with both the sublime object

(the technological landscape) and the traumatic experience of occupation. Many others have written on the topic of unrepresentable experience. However, here I discuss an aesthetic approach, specific to Palestine, through which a sense of the ‘unpresentable’ may be exposed within camera-based representations of the constructional landscape. I also aim to discuss how, through an interrogation of art and literature, proposing ways in which experiences problematic to representation – such as the sublime and the traumatic – help create a national discourse around such experiences. Now, I will discuss the sublimity of constructional landscape, followed by an exploration of the crucial role of sublime in individual’s self-consciousness and self- recognition and third, a consideration of the unrepresentabilty of such extreme experience that has shaped an important current in contemporary Palestinian cinema.

First, it is important to mention that the notion of the unpresentable is approached within the context of this study as an aesthetic category embracing a number of concepts that share a problematic relationship with artistic representation. Addressing the notion that certain objects, situations or events cannot be represented, the philosopher Jacques Ranciere suggests that “it is impossible to make the essential character of the [sublime] thing in question present … nor can a

15

representative commensurate with it be found.”28 Both technological landscape from the Israeli

side of the wall (as environmental historian David Nye argues) and the experience of trauma

because of occupation of the land.29 The history (as intellectual historian Dominique Lacapra

discusses), which are the two main issues in the film that are pictured as ‘sublime’.30 To further the discussion, a brief history of the concept of sublime, by Kant and Burke, is necessary, which proceeds to trace some philosophical and aesthetic approaches to sublime representation, its status as a subjective experience, and its presence within technological landscape. The purpose here is to provide background and to demonstrate the continuing relevance of the term in understanding present day responses to certain objects and experiences.

In many philosophical frameworks the concept of the sublime has been linked to some intensive emotions like pain, fear or pleasure. From this point of view, the audience of the sublime thing feels somehow overwhelmed or overpowered by it, a reaction which can be explained from epistemic or psychological perspectives. The sublime is connected to the representation of boundlessness and is not graspable by the sensuous experience.31 The unpleasant moment of the experience of sublime is therefore rooted in the inevitable failure of the senses. Nevertheless, the human subject is for Kant the ultimate winner of this conflict, because the sublime shows at the same time the supersensible dimension of our Reason. In this

28 Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), p. 6. 29 Nye asserts that “technological majesty” had found a place alongside the “starry heavens above and the moral law within to form a peculiarly modern trinity of the Sublime.” He suggests that technology’s cultural ascendancy was abetted by a decidedly non-utilitarian aspect of awe and wonder bordering on religious reverence. 30 Dominick LaCapra's book Writing History, Writing Trauma provides a broad-ranging, critical inquiry into the problem of trauma, notably with respect to major historical events. He argues that trauma is a sublime experience, and its often symptomatic aftermath poses acute problems for historical representation and understanding. 31 Edmund Burke, On the Sublime and Beautiful (New York: Collier, 1909), p. 63. 16 regard, Kant differs from thinkers like Edmund Burke, whose empirical approach prevents him from attributing any positive side to the failure of human understanding when encountering the sublime. In this study, the concept of the sublime is closer to that described by Burke. Burke explicitly assumes that terror is the ruling principle in all cases of sublime.32For 20th century

French philosopher Francois Lyotard the sublime is a matter of aesthetics. It is defined by representation because of its resistance to representation. Representing the sublime will always remain a challenge for one who wishes to represent it, like for a Palestinian who must represent it to feel it as a real experience, but not as something that they only lived through.33

In 5 Broken Cameras, the technological landscape is shown as an environment arouses sublime feeling which motivated Burnat to “record instinctively,” as he himself confesses it. To lay down the basic elements for representing the sublime landscape, David Nye’s book provides the theoretical support for considering the technology, industry, machine and more importantly the architecture as the sublime. “Technological sublime,” is a phrase first used by the historian

Perry Miller, in his book, The Life of The Mind in America, is later elaborated by Nye. In his book The American Technological Sublime, he notes that the “sublime taps on the fundamental hope and fear. It is not a social residue, created by economic and political forces, though both can inflect its meaning. Rather it is an essentially a religious feeling with horror aroused by confrontation with impressive object.”34 In The American Technological Sublime, Nye notes that

“Burke took it for granted that two basic categories of the sublime, namely difficulty and magnificence, particularly applied to architecture,” suggesting that following the industrial

32 Immanuel Kant, Critique Of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Hackett Publishing Company Inc., 1987), pp. 23-32. 33 See Viljoen, “Representing the Unrepresentable,” pp. 66-80. 34 David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2012), pp. 8-12.

17

revolution “cities were filled with structures that were not meant to be beautiful or picturesque,

but rather astonishing, vast, powerful, and obscure, striking terror into the observer.”35 While the sublime might mostly seem reminiscent of worship and reverence, in the case of 5 Broken

Cameras, it is tied to terror, which is the other face of the sublime. As Burke writes “whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime.”36

My aim is not implying that since the technological landscape “essentially” has sublime

notions, the filmmaker from Bil’in is not exceptional in his appreciation of this horror. There is

also another reason that intensifies the function of such landscapes. Edward Said, in his article

“Geography, Memory and Invention,” writes that in order to go beyond the media’s reductive

analysis from the conflict, we must pay more attention to the subtle conflict which is the mix of

geography in general and the landscape in particular in historical memory.37 Said warns of

domination and conquest by the means of landscape. In some various scenes Burnat narrates his fear of forgetting and he insists that this camera protect him from danger of forgetting. He films his old father working on his farm backgrounded with occupied hills by Israelis construction machines and numerous huge complex waiting for settlers. “I instinctively aim to film everything... I like to record this land, but I need a strong camera not a fragile one” – Burnat narrates these sentences on the scenes of unfinished huge concrete complex and several construction machines up on the hills.

35 Ibid. 36 Burke, On the Sublime, pp. 21-25. 37 Mitchell, WJ Thomas. Landscape and Power. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.) pp. 170- 210. 18

In this film, there are several scenes which portray the landscape of the other side of the wall from the roof of Burnat’s house. For example, his youngest son, Gibreel, is eating snacks and watching the protest or when Burnat’s wife is hanging the clothes. Additionally, the natural landscape before the occupation is shown only in the opening minutes of the film, though the other landscape representations in the film are from the Israeli side we see: a grey complex up on the hill with some monster-like metal machines working among them. [fig.4] Burnat for several

times mentions that he aims to film this land because he cannot resist filming them and he has an

enormous archive of footage of the village landscape and the ongoing construction on it. This

irresistible will of filming that Burnat talks about it constantly, can be explained in two ways:

first Burnat’s encountering with sublime object (if we accept that sublimity is an objective

experience as Nye argues). Second is his will of representing his extreme trauma that he

witnessed as a result of witnessing of a dominant violent power which left him outside of cultural

territory. In both cases, Burnat’s insistence on representing the landscape has notions of his

interaction with sublime, whether with sublime object or sublime experience, or a mixture of

both.

As I discussed above, while the sublime object creates an obsessive compulsion in

viewers to view it and speak of their encounter, it also renders the viewer speechless.38 On the

other hand, and key to the discussion of 5 Broken Cameras, the protagonist is traumatized by

both experiencing occupation, illegal constructions and its psychological effects, as has been

discussed, and because of his inability to speak of his experiences and failure in representing the

sublime object. Here I aim to explain why representation is an exigency for Burnat, the

38 John Fletcher, Freud and the Scene of Trauma, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). P. 42.

19

protagonist and the filmmaker. Psychological texts suggest that in order to experience, Burnat

needs to remember or represent himself taking part in the event and relating to it in the present,

not just living through it in the past. Burnat, based on his narration and based on his obsessional

filming of the landscape, uses representation as a psychological defense to bring up his

experiences from the unconscious to the conscious level.39 He says on numerous occasions that

he has lived through so many experiences but his memories are escaping and “burning like a

flame” in his mind, but he insists on remembering everything and that is why that he compiled

up the footages from the landscape changes and from the protests. He even uses the verb of

“witnessing” for his cameras when he says that “the first camera witnessed from the winter to the summer of 2015.” [fig.5]

Thus, the representation of the experience that causes trauma is an exigency for the

victim. In 5 Broken Cameras, Burnat insists on representing the sublime object and sublime

experience. As we have seen, theoretically the sublime (whether the sublime object which is

technological landscape, or the sublime experience, which is trauma caused by occupation and

construction) is unrepresentable. A distinctive mark of sublimity is that it escapes representation,

even invalidates communication, and by some accounts eviscerates the capacity of discourse to

function. However, I argue that this unrepresentability or failure in representation and experience

can be addressed by “Mass representations.”40 Mass representation of the sublime can be used as

a mode of addressing the challenges on the way of representation by normalizes a moment of

expected failure of discourse. Regardless of whether a viewer experiences “sublimity,” mass

39 Ibid. 40 Nathan Stormer, “Addressing the Sublime: Space, Mass Representation, and the Unpresentable Critical Studies in Media Communication,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21, No. 3 (September 2004): 212–240.

20

representations of what is supposedly beyond discourse by aestheticizing conditions of

impossibility for discourse, embodying the expected limits of communication, and thereby

constitutes a space wherein the humanist subject may become a recognizable self in a public

sense.

Kant defines the sublime as that which surrounds our existence and as an object which

evokes an awareness of our being on the outer fringe of our existence. The fringe here refers to

limit to the knowable, the possible, and the meaningful. Therefore, the representation of the

sublime is a narration from self to self. On this basis, we can assume that Burnat’s insistence of

filming the Israeli technological landscapes and construction machines on his previous farmland,

is firstly an attempt to redefine a “self” which is being put outside of the history of civilization,

and secondly to memorialize that land from which its biological resources are being taken. From

this point of view, one of the most repetitive features of Palestinian cinema (especially the

documentary film), which is representing landscapes, can be explained. Palestinians cannot resist

representing the landscape, whether the sublime technological landscape or the natural landscape

in mode of nostalgia, but each time they fail to represent it, so they repeat representation again and again.

However, even with considering all Palestinian cinema a great help for making a discourse around the ‘land’ problem, there is still a risk in representing the landscape for

Palestinians. The whole act of making a landscape of Palestine, which is ‘outside’ the urban space, of making it a timeless continuation of the imagined biblical landscape, has been part of the Zionist process for colonizing the land and replacing its native inhabitants. This process has two goals. First, is making the native inhabitants part of the scenery and part of the landscape, in order to lend the image authentic aesthetics. Second, by inverting that very process, and looking

21

at them as underdeveloped characters who fail to understand the value of this landscape, Zionists

claim that the land should be taken away from them in order to turn the desert into a blooming

developed country. In summary, this process implies that Palestinians are there to produce the

scenery and then to disappear. This reduction of Palestine into the ‘status of a landscape’,

alienates Palestinians from the land, but ironically, not from the image representing the

landscape. Now, the question here would be do all the films which, like 5 Broken Cameras,

focus on the landscape fall in this trap? Does the failure to represent the landscape results in an

alienated image from the Palestinians?

American writer and filmmaker, Susan Sontag says that the photograph cannot by itself

provide an interpretation. We need captions and written analysis to supplement the discrete and

punctual image, which can only affect our interpretation and never offer a full understanding of

what we see.41 Walter Benjamin argues that for photography to be transformed from being an instrument of economical consumption into a tool of political change, another barrier that chains the production of the intellectual must be removed, namely the barrier between writing and image. “What we require of the creator is the ability to give his picture a caption that wrenches it from modish commerce and gives it a revolutionary use value.”42 Therefore, Burnat’s narration

of the landscape scenes work against the landscape image as being commonplace and passive.

He does this by bringing the process of filmmaking to the fore of his work, creating alienation from the image, and making his images distinct from the images his audience already know about this landscape and the image itself, in order to prevent the viewers from losing

41 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, (New York: Picador, 2004.), pp. 43-48. 42 Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (New York: Verso, 1998), pp. 23-41.

22

themselves passively to the act of looking and lead them to become a consciously critical

observer.

Burnat talks about pains and pleasures that mix with each other to the point where he can no longer distinguish them. While he constantly shows the landscape, he talks of the “land” from the days of his childhood and he express his anxiety about how his sons will remember the land in future. Jean-Luc Godard, the French film director and film critic, used to say ironically that fiction is for the Israelis and documentary is for the Palestinians, for the oppressed are not allowed to create fiction.43 Burnat is there to document the oppressor while he is planning the

space, rearranging it, using his vision and visual technologies to create a landscape out of the

oppressed space. However, 5 Broken Cameras, while being a documentary film by a Palestinian

about the loss of his peoples land, does not follow the Godard’s assumption. Burnat’s narration

give the landscape images a spatial feature and by doing so he reclaims the dignity of fiction.

43 Richard Brody, Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008), pp. 35-37.

23

Figures of Chapter 1

Figure 1. Villagers gathered up around the constructing machine

Figure 2. Burnets Father is seeding the land.

24

Figure 3. Children accompanying adults in protest.

Figure 4. Israeli’s residential complex on the hills.

25

Figure 5. A scene after breaking the first camera.

26

Chapter 2: Cinematic Subjectivity

Wars are about killing and injuring people. Official war cultures typically deny this fact

and seed the conflict normalization. In the first chapter, land was introduced as the foreground

of the conflict, however, even in a conflict initiated because of the land, land would not be the

only target of affection, change and wound, but rather the bodies are the most important part

of each conflict. In 5 Broken Cameras land constitutes objective half of involved part in the

Palestine-Israel conflict and bodies are the other half: the subjective one. Even though, violence

in today’s world is increasing, coverage of violence on “body” is being dismissed and instead

media focus more on other losses during the war by some rhetorical terms like territory,

natural resources, international relationship, economic upheavals, etc. rather than the physical

destruction of human life or both physical and psychical humans’ wounds.44

Despite of some official rendition of war which try to normalize the conflict, there are a

few alternatives in literature, cinema and visual art which try to change the common and the

dominant perspective of war and give more personal account of it, namely, the 5 Broken

Cameras as an example of resistance has a special focus on personal and

individual narrative about corporeal suffering in their rendition of war.

This chapter aims to decode and analyze corporeal representation in 5 Broken Cameras

as this documentary film had a significant merits in running successful dialogue about bodies

under the siege. As Petra Rau in the book Conflict, Nationhood and Corporeality in Modern

44 P. U. Rau, Conflict, nationhood and corporeality in modern literature: bodies-at-war (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Pp. 16-19.

27

Literature argues: “The conceptual gap between the body as an empirical, biological reality and

the way it is made to mean in culture has narrowed most noticeably when scholars have

brought these two in dialogue in relation to body at war.”45 The main concern in this chapter

would be the experience of individuals about war, and the methods by which the director

represent corporeal suffering in micro scales (about one single body and from the one person’s

view point). It seems that all the firsthand war documentaries including 5 Broken Cameras have

a high potentiality to fill the gap between official/ main stream mass representations and

alternative individual’s narrative by unveiling body suffering from metaphorization and

omission, and by avoiding canonical and hegemonic representation war (like repetition of war

representation in the political landscape of Western democracy.) Therefore, studying bodies suffering under the siege will contribute to the process of situating personal experiences in terms of both cultural experiences and scholarly discourse.

When we talk about bodies, especially bodies within a political conflict, our running discourse would be somehow emblematic of subjectivity, so the predilection of this study toward the “subjectivity” must first be clarified. Deleuze’s theories about subjects and more specifically human subjects in cinema are very useful for analyzing this film. In his books,

Cinema 1: the Movement Image and Cinema 2: the Time Image, he exemplifies the changes in our understanding of representation as they trace the transition from a cinema dominated by movement-image to the modern cinema of the time-image. In the regime of movement-image,

time is subordinated to movement, when things, humans and occurrences determined

45 Ibid 28

psychological duration. In that regime subjectivity was evaluated by making movement.46

However, his theory of the time image doesn’t get rid of subjectivity, but it reforms it and finds it somewhere else. Deleuze for reforming the idea of subject firstly changes the idea of object; he says object’s original nature is “being” rather than object of knowledge.47 By this novel definition of object, Deleuze’s idea of subject must become even more subjective. Therefore, in

Deleuzian term, subject is not only important because of its movement but also even because of its mental images of the objects. With the same arguments, we will see that the trauma and

dispossession constitutes the figures’ subjectivity. It is through this subjectivity that they affect

the audiences and that they are able to narrate their history.

The bodies have two different functions in the film. Firstly, the movie is about narrating

the bodies’ stories and fate, but the narrative alone is insufficient for conveying their stories,

rather the bodies attempt to affect the audiences not only by their stories but by their

presence. The question here would be how the film as a testimony and the characters in it can

affect the audiences who are drowned in violent images and news? Here I discuss three ways of

rendering corporeal representation affective in 5 Broken Camera which constitutes the three section of this chapter. Firstly, focusing on a child as the witness, secondly, usage of close ups as an affection image, and finally, by the exploring the demonstrative bodies’ behavioral and verbal post trauma symptoms.

46 Gilles Deluze, "Cinema 2: The time-image," trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). pp. 41-43. 47 Affection in Deleuzian words share its characteristic with sensitive nerve and micro-movements on an immobilized plate of nerve. When most of the body’s organ sacrifice to create micro-movements in only one single organ, then the moving body lost its movement to create an expression in one organ. Deleuze writes:” it is this combination of a reflecting immobile unity and of intensive expressive movements which constitutes the affect.”

29

The Figure of the Child

One of the most specific elements of the film are the children, for example One of the

most repetitive close ups in 5 Broken Cameras is the close up of Gibreel, the youngest son of

Burnat, whose birth became the Burnat’s initiator of buying amateur camera. Gibreel’s face in

the seven years during the film recording was the most repetitive close-ups in the film; while he

is watching the dwellers’ protest and the armed conflict and even shooting. [fig.6] This

recurring image raises an interesting question: what meaning could repetitive image of a

watching child convey?

Children are the locus of attention in all of the wars, as they are highly receptive and

expressive. Palestinian children play a crucial role in Palestine-Israeli conflict, not because

Palestinian children and their schools are mostly the target of Israeli attacks, but because their

young ages didn’t stop them from being actively involved in the conflict. Presence of child in 5

Broken Cameras Children are symbolic of notion of resistance and of transferring inherited

wrath from one generation to the other. Palestinian children are also the symbol of home, and

the hope of returning to home by resistance and fighting, even though some of the children has

never seen home. Therefore, the pivotal focus on the children in the film can be seen as an

attempt for linking the film to the iconography of Palestinian resistance.

Presence of children, especially young boys, has another facet; as they don’t know how

to fight with weapons, they mostly throw rocks toward the enemy’s military cars. [fig.7] It is a tactic with both a symbolic and military dimension when used against heavily armed occupier forces. The majority of Palestinian youths engaged in the practice appear to regard it as

30

symbolic and non-violent, given the disparity in power and equipment between the Israeli

forces and the Palestinian stone-throwers, however, this act is being considered as lethal by

Israelis and each year a number of Palestinian youths being arrested because of it. In 5 Broken

Cameras, children are shown engaged in the act of stone throwing toward the military car and construction vehicles. Afterward, we see that Israeli soldiers enter to all of the houses in the village forcefully to arrest all the young boys while the mothers were trying to stop the soldiers.

Therefore, children evoke the fight disproportion in Palestine-Israel conflict and they symbolize

Palestinian as being inactive and receptor whose situation usually dominates their will and their actions.

In essay “The Burning babe; Children, Film Narrative and the Historical Witness,” Tyrus

Miller argues that presence of children protagonist or children as the focus of films on war, revolution, fascism and political repression, became a formal innovation in filmmaker’s narrative treatment of historical events and testimony and the status of truth. There are many postwar films that took the children as their protagonist or narrator, namely and probably the most famous one is the Bicycle Thief by Vittorio De Sica made in 1948. Miller then beautifully write about the affection of the films which placed their main focuses on children. He writes:

“It is easy to see how readily child characters fulfill the conditions for the role of “seer” dispossessed of the possibility of action and for the imaginative confusion of objective and subjective aspects of the witnessed scenes”

In the case of 5 Broken Cameras, it seems that film attempts to reflect three critical issues by the pivotal presence of Gibreel. Firstly, the film by setting the child and their inabilities of action against the intense and violent situation, highlights or can be said dramatizes the

31

depth of violence of that historical situation of occupation. Secondly, as children’s perceptions

of the world and occurrences within it like wars, are still naïve, children in the war films can

defamiliarize the routineness of intense and harsh situations that our eyes and our perceptions

used to them. Thirdly, children always demonstrate innocence subjects that implicitly refer to

future, thereafter the hope of change and openness in the future. The third critical point is

probably the most applicable one on almost all of Palestinian resistance cinema: usage of the

child character. Aside from the key and olive branch, children are the most iconic element in

the visual resistance , since children refer to hope, future and to powerless

subjects who are unable to act, therefore they arise more empathy. The most famous example

of the children’s presence in the visual culture that became the symbol of liberation movement

of not only Palestine but also the other Middle Eastern countries like Iran, and Tunisia is

the character of Handalah In the work of Naji-al Ali (1938-1987), the cartoonist who became

assassinated.

Bodies and Faces

Besides of presenting many of children’s close ups, adult’s close ups are also very repetitive. During the film, there are so many close-ups of the farmers, protesters, housewives

and children. But, what is the function of the close up? In CinemaII:Time Image, a book by

Deleuze that was discussed earlier in this chapter, Deluze discusses the subjectivity of bodies,

he talks of the situations when it is all about the figure’s embodiment not about their actions

and choices and he names it “affection-image.”48He says, “the affection-image is the close up,

48 Deleuze, Gilles. "Cinema 2: The time-image, trans." Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 87.

32

and the close up is the face…” He continues “the close-up is not merely one type of image

among others, but gave an affective reading of the whole film.” In 5 Broken Cameras, the characters, mostly farmers and children, try to take back their lands from the occupier forces by bare hands; they throw stones, they lay down on the construction zone to stop the bulldozers.

The film is the story of all these endeavors that didn’t succeed. Deleuze writes that that face is an organ that expresses, but there is still a question, what is the things that face try to reveal?49

Deleuze argues that face is able to reveal two different things, depending on the

situation, firstly it can communicate about the person’s thought and secondly, it can expresses

sufferance.50 Close up carries out a specific quality and it can reflect the things that usually

leave the subject speechless and it does this by such a unity as all the organs. The film starts by

showing a close up of a new born baby and his siblings around him, then we see Burnet’s face,

blurred because of the use of zoom with a low quality camera. He also takes close ups of his

father and the other village dwellers during the conflict when they look frustrated. The

repetition of those inactive sunburned wrathful faces is intended to provide a narrative of

suffering, even more so than the narrating of their stories by Burnet.

Body, Memory, Trauma

Besides of focusing on the characters’ close ups and the children as the pivotal element

in the film, trauma symptoms are something that truly affects the audiences while giving the

film a testimonial weight. Such researches are characterized by a marked focus on the body,

49 Ibid. 101. 50 Ibid p.108. 33 which implies the need to develop a new bodily ontology, one that is highly pertinent to the body’s precariousness and vulnerability.51 Also, Trauma is important in relation to bodies and their subjectivities because trauma is capable of showing the depth of the violence (something that exists and something that affects and not a matter of knowledge), and also because bodies carry significant epistemological power, especially in post-trauma cinema and literature.

Such a claim can be explained in two levels. From the historical point of view, when we try to reconstruct or narrate the traumatic event, focusing on the bodies of involved persons could provide us rich information regarding what has been happened. As the remaining scar of violent occurrences like death, injuries or wounds, trauma can reveal and reconstruct the depth of the violence as a form of subjective testimony. On the other hand, concentration on the bodies affected by traumatic experience could enable us to discover how the mechanism of perception and understanding of these humans has been influenced by the constant or sudden dominance of the traumatic experience. Obviously, understanding the change process of the subject’s perception would be invaluable for writing the cultural history of the bodies. 5 Broken

Cameras is replete with representations of trauma symptoms. For instance, in one scene a

Palestinian man hugs an olive tree in an unusual, psychical way. Although this may be interpreted as an intentionally symbolic message, from the epistemological point of view, it is the influence of the constant traumatic atmosphere on the passions and understanding of the subject that gives the tree (which soon would be uprooted for the city construction) a different meaning. This and many other scenes of the movie demonstrate that that subject’s perception

51 Raya Morag, Waltzing with Bashir: perpetrator trauma and cinema. IB Tauris 11 (2013): p.7. 34 doesn’t accomplish in a vacuum rather it is strongly interconnected with the experiential atmosphere. So concentrating on the subjects’ bodies, their wounds, and their physical behaviors as well as the verbal narration can be a good way to gain more comprehensive knowledge about traumatic events and their influence on humans. Finally, tracing trauma in documentaries and placing it in the discussion loop of each violent conflict and its consequences would aid us to gather history fragments of the marginal bodies and to bring in their testimonies into the privileged notion of historical truth. 52

Various psychological researches like the research done by American Psychiatric

Association in 1980 have explored how the experience of physical harm or life-threatening situations can cause people to suffer from memory disorders over even long period of time; they introduced the concept of “trauma” as a key to understanding the scientific basis and clinical expression of PTSD. One of the clearest examples of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorders) that was clear in 5 Broken Cameras was the disruptions in Burnat’s narration of his memories of the conflict over the occupation. In the film, we don’t see Burnat, as he was recording behind the camera, but we hear his sound when he is introducing his villages and its dwellers. During his narrations, he mentions, for several times, that he is not sure of what exactly happened and he also said that he does not trust on his memory anymore as memories seem to fly away from his mind.

Some of other trauma studies scholars like Dominique Lacapra say that our culture and visual culture is deeply affected by trauma in which “extremity and survival” are privileged

52 Allen Meek, Trauma and media: Theories, histories, and images. Routledge, 2011. p.6. 35 markers of identity and notions of subjectivity. 53 It must be considered that Burnat’s subjectivity does not end in carrying cameras and recording some blurred images to demonstrate them worldwide. Rather, his subjectivity must be traced in his precarious voice when he tries to remember what has happened to the village. Contemporary trauma studies, for instance Trauma culture, a book by Ann Kaplan in which she explores the relationship between the impacts of trauma on individuals and on entire cultures and nations, addresses specific communities that are created through the collective experience of, or collective relation to, traumatic events. So, speaking of traumatic events despite of all disruptions and non-linear narrations has very valuable influences in understanding and studying those communities marked by trauma, especially in this age that Lacapra rightly named as trauma’s age. Lacapra in his book History in Transition warns about mystification and sacralization of trauma and he suggests of more focus on testimonial narration in visual media to shape contemporary forms of history and memory in a right way.54 In 5 Brocken Cameras, Burnat by his shaky voice talks about escapable memories while situation during the film is however more problematic, as he was still in a traumatic situation and each day might experience something else.

Film theorist E. Ann Kaplan, proposes that “trauma produces new subjects; because it produces new forms of political identification based on different experiences of victimhood, shared suffering and witnessing.”55 These new constructed subjects affected by trauma and

53 Dominick LaCapra, History in transit: Experience, identity, critical theory (Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 122. 54 Ibid, p. 18. 55 E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma culture: The politics of terror and loss in media and literature. Rutgers University Press, 2005. p. 23.

36

their testimonies are highly potential as they serve for rewriting the history and the process of

their change can be followed in the testimonies of the witnesses. He, while is in the heart of

conflict, is worried of proposing testimonies; for example, while his brother was getting

arrested and his old parents tried to stop the soldiers, Burnat stayed behind the camera. He said: “I am pretty sure that I have to record for myself to remember and also because I am sure that this footages will rescue us one day.” Such an unexpected decision in that situation is a significant sign of a changing subject. We also see other subjects in the film who do not react fatalistically, but rather extend a promise of the potential for a normal life. For instance, there is a scene in which Gibreel, a five-year-old boy in a relaxed mood is in the car eating snacks and waiting for his father, while within ten meters of the car sounds of shooting can clearly be heard. [fig.8] Psychologists believe that being in the state of war can change the metabolism and the mental behaviors in a way that subjects can endure high levels of stress.56

Summary

Subjectivity is one of the central issues of the 20th century philosophy, art, cinema and

literature. Modernist thought as used by Deleuze proposed a kind of subjectivity that is neither

subject-centered nor Occidentalist. Further, it avoids a pessimistic negation of the potential

capacities and resources of average humans (normal citizens or people dealing with war) with

respect to the external world and the subject’s perception of it. Rather, they define subjectivity

in even perceiving the world and becoming wounded by it, which one can relates to the

romantic idealistic aesthetics. Although, this film as a firsthand war documentary film depicts

56 Peter A. Levine, Trauma and Memory: Brain and Body in a Search for the Living Past: a Practical Guide for Understanding and Working with Traumatic Memory. North Atlantic Books, 2015. pp. 31-32.

37 subjects dominated by the situation whose attempt to change usually do not come to fruit because of the power disproportion, but the film as an independent subject defines its subjectivity in sharing the inactive bodies experiences to rise empathy is a catalyzer of political transformation.

38

Figures of Chapter 2

Figure 6. Youngest son of the Burnat watches the conflict from top of the roof.

Figure 7. A Palestinian youth throwing stone.

39

Figure 8. Burnat’s youngest son watches the conflict from a close distance.

40

Chapter 3: Citizen Camera-Witnessing: Reclamation of History

This chapter interrogates the performative rite of the bearing witness of an average citizens with amateur cameras in an intense conflict zone in the age of fundamentally image mediated mass self-publication by looking toward 5 Broken Cameras. Emad Burnet the director of the film, records all the village’s upheavals and violent occurrences like vast arrestments, fatal shooting, farm destruction and also the village dweller’s peaceful protests with five handy cameras; each of the cameras was broken by the Israeli soldiers in the conflicts. [fig.9]

In today’s world, some of the most critical news images that arouse controversy and sympathy in the pubic thought have been created by average citizens and other non-conventional actors.57 Citizens in the contemporary Middle East seems very familiar with the opportunity of digital media technologies and networking power they have never enjoyed before. For example, citizens during Arab uprising, Iranian protests after the election fraud and Palestinians who record moments of the conflict that they deal with in their everyday life. However, 5 Broken

Cameras has been recorded before the camera phone became widely available, their function is the same; taking camera as the extension of the self (or the body) and put the body on the forehead of the conflict to record the injustice and the oppression with a subtle hope of affect the global audiences.

Testimonial Documentary as a Political Action

Gunter Thomas in the book of Media Witnessing; Testimony in the Age of Mass

Communication, argues that witnessing is a cultural form of communication and every act of

57 Kari Andén-Papadopoulos, Amateur Images and Global News (Intellect Books, 2011).p.23.

41

witnessing relates to the ‘conflicting realities: contested interpretations of what is real and what

truly occurred.’58 Therefore the witnessing inevitably carries significant notions of

‘transformation’.59 Burnet by his act of witnessing searches for transformation not in visual

representation but as a performance of power to make visible the reality and give reality to

visible.’60Therefore the line between witnessing and giving testimony and political action is

blurred.

In 2005, Burnet bought a camera for recording the birth of his youngest son, an event

which coincided with the intensifying of the Palestine-Israel conflict, the increasing occupation

of Palestinian villages by Israeli forces and settlers, and the building of a border wall. Burnet

decided to record everything, although he does not directly introduce his hope of justice as his

motivation, the film got a great attention and placed itself among the top examples of individual

eyewitness imagery that disrupts the official perspectives provided by the mainstream news

media. The film has been shown worldwide and even advanced as evidence for following up a

shooting case in the court.61 The roots of such imagery’s ability to affect audiences and to be

seen as a representation of truth lie in a longer history of martyrdom in Palestinian culture.

58 Frosh, Paul, and Amit Pinchevski, eds. Media Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. pp 89-111.

59 Ibid. p 96. 60 Ibid. pp 89-111. 61 Bassem Abu Rahmeh, , 29years old , was killed on 17th April 2009, after being struck in the chest by a teargas canister fired by Israeli forces during a protest in Bil'in. His death is depicted in the 2011 film 5 Broken Cameras. B'tselem has stated that three separate videos of the protest in which he was killed show he had neither been acting violently, nor endangering Israeli soldiers' lives, when he was killed. Israel's military prosecutor general closed the investigation in September 2013 stating that there was a lack of evidence. The decision to close the case was appealed by two attorneys, Emily Schaeffer Omer-Man and Michael Sfard, on behalf of the family, who accused the authorities of foot-dragging.

42

Reactivation of Martyrdom Idea

The high potency of what is called ‘citizen-camera witnessing’, partly derives from the carrying the idea of martyrdom: people who put their lives in danger to take an action for the interest of the others. [fig.10] Reactivation the idea of martyrdom subtly bonds the eyewitness’s

situations to the distinct claim of truth. Clearly, in the global audience’s eyes there is a big

difference between people who record the routineness of daily life with the ones that their

filming as a way of resistance bring them a fatal risk. The difference can be explained with

explaining the conflation of “bearing witness” and “eyewitnessing”; Sue Tait argues that while

none of these concepts have a clear boundaries, but the distinction can be made by considering

that bearing witness is politically active and full of ethics of responsibility.62 Interestingly, 5

Broken Cameras engages with both of these categories and consists of both Burnat’s family

doing house work and Israeli soldiers shooting directly at his camera. Based on Burnat’s

narrations, it can be conceived that his act of filming mundane activities, parts of life that still

have not been changed because of the conflict, comes from his fear of forgetting. While he films

his sons going to school, his wife doing housework and his father working on the farm, he

probably does not aim to communicate about those moments, rather to remember and to remind

the days that Bil’in was safe and calm, memories laced with nostalgia.

Citizen Camera-witnessing as a Response to the “Crisis of Witnessing”

The other reason that gave rise to the witness imageries such as 5 Broken Cameras and

make it to be credible is a crisis named “the crisis of witnessing.” Frosh by arguing that speaking

62 Sue Tait, "Bearing Witness, Journalism and Moral Responsibility." Media, Culture & Society 33, no. 8 (2011): 1220-1235 . 43

of witnessing in this day and age inevitably invokes the discourse of the Holocaust witness,

writes:

At the core of this paradigm is the impossibility of bearing witness: the traumatic event

that has left its survivors speechless, not because they did not witness it, but rather

because they did so all too overwhelmingly. When words fail or are unavailable, trauma

itself bears witness to the black hole of experience through displaced repetitions and the

acting out of unconscious conflicts.63

Thereafter, based on this credible and well-cited theory, bearing witness with filming and photographing has to be considered the only possible giving testimony of traumatic events.

Moreover, in the presentation of the traumatic occurrence through imagery, the suffering of the body seems more irrefutable than the verbal narration of the same event, and in the event that a case is heard in court its materiality enables it to serve as evidence. For example, Forensic

Architecture group, founded and directed by Eyal Weizman, proposed the case of the Basem

Abu Rahman’s death by getting 5 Broken Cameras footages as the documents and by measuring and analyzing the angle of the gun in the image, they finally won the case and asked for justice.

[fig.11]

Camera-witnessing as a psychological Defense

Filming in the situation of trauma to bearing witness has another angle. Mariane Hirsch,

argues that filming the traumatic events is a way that empower the witness to look to an

unspeakable occurrence. She writes: “to photograph is to look without understanding.”64

63 Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski. "Introduction." In Media Witnessing, pp. 1-19. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2009. p. 7. 64 Maria Hirsh, “I Took Pictures: September 2011 and Beyond,” in Trauma at Home: After 9/11, ed. Judith Greenberg (Lincoln: U of Nebraska Press, 2003), P. 69.

44

However, the accessories like cameras psychologically makes the holder to feel protected and

distanced, they also encourage the holder to make an action rather than merely taking the

position of spectator. Burnat, for several times mentions that whenever a conflict intensifies, he

cannot bear not filming it; “the camera protects me,” Burnat says and ironically his third camera

worked as his shield, while a bullet mistakenly got through the camera, instead of Burnat’s body.

Participatory Witnessing

Ashuri and Pinchevski, while tried to propose witnessing as a ‘field’ with its specific

borderlines, argue that the ontology of witnessing is political practice and comprised of various

agents, interests, position and resources, therefore it inevitably invoke the concept of ‘truth’ and

‘trust’, and the idea of judgment afterward.65 It can be said that witnessing is a participatory field

that invite the people who encounter with the wintness’s testimony to take an action. Here I want

to argue that carrying testimony through the image because of its nature, leads to gather up more

people for participation. Peter concedes that witnessing is an act that its nature would transcend

time and space specificities, as it enables being present and active at distance.66 With the same

argument, we can think of imagery witnessing (film and photography) that produces more

witnesses who are absent in the time but present in the place; a kind of witnessing that enables

participation across time. If we see witnessing as field with hierarchy, as Peter does, the presence

in place and absence in time stands above the absence in both time and space, like listening to

the witness’s speech. The hierarchy of witnessing shapes around each witnessing’s ability to

65 Ashuri, Tamar, and Amit Pinchevski. "Witnessing as a field." In Media Witnessing, pp. 133-157. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2009. P. 140. 66 John Durham Peters, “Witnessing”, Media Culture Society. 2001 23: 707. pp. 707-725. 45

convince and to affect the audiences and to make them react. As Peter in Witnessing, Media,

Culture and Society and Ashuri and Pinchevski in “Witnessing as a Field,” argue, imagery

witnessing puts the audiences into a moral witnessing place, not merely because the fact of

making them to be there, but also because of the fact of being in harm’s way.67 In the film

Burnat narrates that after sending some of the footages of the conflict on the Internet with the

help of his Israeli friend, too many activists and journalists who affected by those images, came

to their village to take part in their protest and to report the conflict news.

It is an irrefutable fact that images have always played a pivotal role in the conduct of

war and peace, social relationship, inequality and in shaping public thought and memories about

the critical event. The zone of representation has much to do with the production and

contestation of geopolitical power. Too many images and films released by citizens in the

Middle East had a tremendous impact in the political upheavals directions or at least they result

in a wave of empathy in the country or even in the world. However, 5 Broken Cameras’s

bearing testimony did not end up in representation of the occurrences by filming them, but rather

the tool of the representation, the cameras, are in themselves witness and are able to carry

testimony.

In order to pursue this line of thought, on agency of the nonhumans in bearing witness,

we have to be able to think of agency as a process but not as entities. Based on Kirsh’s theories, agency is a process unfolding in given situations or activity frameworks.68 Cloke and Jones

argue that some capacities of humans like creativity, which is a basic definition of agency should

67 Ashuri, Tamar, and Amit Pinchevski. "Witnessing as a field." In Media Witnessing, pp. 133-157. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2009. P 151. 68 David Kirsh, "The intelligent Use of Space." Artificial Intelligence 73, no. 1 (1995): 31-68. p. 45 46

not lead us to the view that humans are the only force in the world equipped with agency.69 On

the basis of this realization, a range of approaches are now reopening the question of non-human

agency and the agency of materiality. Nonhuman agencies not only affect the context of our

lives but they also can have direct role and influence. The cameras that recorded seven years of

the upheavals in the village and the violent collision, faced with violent actions because of

filming; each of them get replaced with the other one after getting broken. The five cameras are

protected in a museum of , Palestine. Those five broken cameras are not being

exhibited in the museum because they filmed the upheavals of a geopolitically important place in

a crucial historical period, rather because the objects are a complete and understandable

witnesses that are well able to communicate of their own history.

The broken cameras in the museum without even referring to a specific context, give

testimony because of their lack of functionality and because of being damaged. There is a

similarity between the cameras and those objects of the victims of Auschwitz in the Auschwitz

museum in terms of the way of giving testimony and the affect they probably make; both the

broken cameras and the worn shoes or the torn luggage are referring to a loss and absence.

Although their testimony is more symbolic, rather than legitimate, they have their own lives after

their affiliated subjects. A broader definition of subjectivity by Deleuze was discussed in the

second chapter; subject is no more required to act and to change.70 The broken cameras in this

definition are independent subjects because they raise questions about the cause of damage in the

minds of the audience and because they invoke a historical event.

69 Jones, Owain, and Paul Cloke. "Non-human agencies: trees in place and time." In Material Agency, pp. 79-96. 70 Gilles Deluze, "Cinema 2: The time-image,” trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp 77-82.

47

Summary

5 Broken Cameras is primarily a testimonial film made by an ordinary citizen, which

bearing witness mostly about the violence: violence to the land, to the bodies and native people

and as the film’s name states to the cameras. While representing traumatic events may seem

problematic and challenging, in this film blurred images and original raw sound because of a

hyper-mobalized camera work (when one of the main characters got shot and died) creates a

sense of muteness and paralysis around the trauma. The desultory images accompanied with

unarranged sound increases the effect of realness by sharing the subjectivized perspectives which

in today’s world has a high influence on the audiences around the globe. As Anden-

Papadopoulous, a media and communication scholar writes: “Citizen camera-witnessing has an

extraordinary moral and political purchase on publics, deriving precisely from its unassailable

status as testimony not to fact, but to an intensely subjective experience”71 5 Broken Cameras,

conveys its influence and moral effects by the individuals who willingly endanger their body and

stand before the world to affirm the truth; similar to martyrs’ bodies which are as depiction of

pain and convict conscious of the observer.72 This film is one of the thousand examples of real

affecting images that was a response to the top-down organization of media systems and as a

radical and alternative voice could not only propose a documentary form of alter-narration of its nation’s history, but also could transform the audiences’ expectation to engage with media across the boundaries about the issue of Palestine.

71 Kari Andén-Papadopoulos and Mervi Pantii, Amateur images and global news. (Chicago: Intellect Books, 2011), pp. 65-78. 72 John Durham Peters, "Witnessing." In Media witnessing, pp. 23-48. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2009. P. 31.

48

Figures of Chapter 3

Figure 9. Burnat with his five broken cameras.

Figure 10. Protesters escaping the shooting quarrel.

49

Figure 11. Bassem Abu Rahman got shot dead in the eyes of camera.

50

Conclusion

The history of the Palestinian body, whether located in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, in

Israel, in refugee camps, or in the US, necessitates being collected and read deeply. While the media seems saturated by news about Palestinian bodies and conflict over Palestinian lands, the lens of scrutiny often focuses on bodies as simply a biological given and on lands (and certain changes on it such as building security gates and walls to demarcate spatial boundaries). Such coverage lacks an understanding of the Palestinians as individuals within communities and thus of the individual and local effects of the conflict, both physical and psychological. Most news reports and studies reduce the plight of the Palestinian people to numeric values: numbers of refugees, statistics on deaths and injuries, numbers of schools and shelters. There is a lack of understanding of cultural history of the Palestinian body and its environment. These Western tendencies are in some ways reinforced by the cultural production of the Palestinians themselves, for while there has been much written in the form of poetry and novels about the Palestinian plight, in terms of visual culture, the relative paucity of subjectivized perspectives on and by individuals is disappointing. Visuality and visibility are, perhaps, the most needful and desirable form of representation for Palestinians. Therefore, focusing on documentary imagery is crucial to a development of a new ontology of the Palestinian body under siege.

By recording the intensification of the conflict between Palestine and Israel though the construction of a border wall on the Bil’in’s farmland, 5 Broken Cameras, a film that developed from the desire to capture precious family memories and the pleasures of mundane existence, served the purpose of activism. With the assistance of Guy Davidi, his Israeli colleague, Burnat’s footage was introduced as evidence in an Israeli court in 2009 to prove that an Israeli soldier had intentionally shot and killed a Palestinian leading the protest against constructing the Bil’in wall.

51

It was also posted on YouTube to spread awareness of the injustices of the

policy and the growing Palestinian liberation movement. Guy Davidi also screened the film for

Israeli youths, which arouse too many critic among Israelis. As media interest in Bil’in grew,

Burnat's footage gained international recognition and was used by local and international news

agencies. He started working as a freelance photographer for Reuters and provided footage

documenting the villagers' fight to professional filmmakers. This footage was used in such

notable documentaries as Shai Carmeli Pollac’s 2006 Bil’in Habibti and Guy Davidi’s and

Alesandre Goetschmann’s 2010 Interrupted Streams.

While it is rare that a film recorded by an amateur filmmaker with amateur cameras is

nominated for any significant awards, 5 Broken Cameras earned nominations in such prestigious

festivals as the Oscars, the Emmys, and the Sundance Film Festival. These nominations placed 5

Broken Cameras at the forefront of another activist cause, namely the need to recognize the work

of amateur documentary filmmakers, especially those whose work puts them regularly in harms

way. As connoted in the very appellation, amateur films are primarily being pejoratively defined

against professional films and documentaries with high budgets, formally trained cameramen and

writers, and in some cases more access to seats of power. This distinction therefore implicitly

questions the quality and seriousness of amateur films, regardless of to what degree they

compensate a lack of polish and rounded presentations of multiple perspectives, including those

of the oppressors, with a powerfully raw presentation of on-the-ground realities. However, while amateur war documentaries and citizen camera-witnessing films are rarely given the publicity necessary to reach a wider public by the film industry, with the advent of the internet war documentaries made by ordinary citizens and activists have become increasingly available to audiences around the globe who see film as being not merely a vehicle for spectacle and

52 spectatorship. War documentaries made by ordinary people experiencing the conflict firsthand, which signals a return to the true meaning of the word amateur, the Latin root of which translates to “for love of things rather than the economic reasons,” for these documentaries are produced from a position of marginality rather than of avarice and serve to reassert their creators’ agency and humanize their strife.

Aside from gathering the fragments of cultural history of the bodies, citizen camera- witnessing films are becoming a very prevalent means of resistance in the Middle East and play a pivotal role in forcing mainstream media outlets such as newspapers and TV reports to provide more in-depth coverage of Middle Eastern conflicts. A very famous example is the scenes of murdering protester Neda Agha Soltan during the 2009 Iranian protest against perceived election fraud. Other examples can be found in films from Bil’in (like 5 Broken Cameras), which featured a strongly activist and partisan bent that placed them in the circuits of both official and unofficial media. Since January 2005, the year that Burnat started filming 5 Broken Cameras, the village of Bil’in has been organizing weekly protests against the construction of the West Bank

Barrier. This protest has now lasted for at least 11 years in a small village whose name was all but unknown before the spirited and determined protests regularly draw international activists who come to support the Palestinian resistance movement, protests which continue to this day.

These international activists, however, would not have come to Bil’in had they not learned of its plight through media outlets. Visual testimonies such as films and photographs were essential to attracting media attention and the participation of international organizations as well as left-wing groups such as Gush Shalom, Anarchists against the Wall and the International Solidarity

Movement. Without such testimony, the protests would have been as ephemeral as the dozens, perhaps hundreds of equivalent protests which have faded, kept alive only in the testimonial

53 archive of those who experienced the protests, an archive in urgent need of being accessed and recorded.

5 Broken Cameras demonstrates that citizen camera-witnessing films are potentially a powerful, egalitarian tool capable of producing new meanings and discourses and challenging grand narratives. Their power to mobilize people, to catalyze social and political transformations, and to challenge dominant analyses of the bodies’ history has yet to receive adequate scholarly attention. Still, the psychical link between the film and the audience, as well as the link between the witness behind the camera and the scene being witnessed is a promising area of research. A particularly fruitful line of inquiry would be to ground camera witnessing films in the concept of parrhesia (or to consider war documentary films as a form of parrahesic speech), which could open an insightful discussion on the future of war documentary scholarly works. 73

73 Parrhesia is a concept that has been proposed by Michel Foucault, who devoted his last American seminar in 1983 to parrhesia sums up this ancient Greek concept, as ‘fearless speaking’ of the truth.

54

Bibliography

Al-Ali, Naji. A Child in Palestine: The Cartoons of Naji al-Ali. London & : Verso, 2009. Andén-Papadopoulos, Kari and Mervi Pantti, Amateur Images and Global News. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Ashuri, Tamar, and Amit Pinchevski. "Witnessing as a field." In Media Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Pp. 133-157. Benjamin, Walter. “The Author as Producer.” in Understanding Brecht. Translated by Anna Bostock. New York: Verso, 1998. Burke, Edmund, and D. Womersley. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful And Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Burke, Edmund. On the Sublime and Beautiful. New York: Collier, 1909. Chatty, Dawn, and Gillian Lewando Hundt. Children of Palestine: Experiencing Forced Migration in the Middle East. Vol. 16. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005. Dabashi, Hamid. Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema. New York: Verso Book, 2006. Deleuze, Gilles. "Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans." Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Deleuze, Gilles. "Cinema 2: The Time-Image." Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Fletcher, John. Freud and the Scene of Trauma. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. Frosh, Paul, and Amit Pinchevski. "Introduction." In Media Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Frosh, Paul, and Amit Pinchevski, eds. Media Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Gertz, Nurith and George Khleifi. Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma, and Memory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Grosz, Elizabeth. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.

55

Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson. Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Hirsh, Maria. “I took Pictures: September 2011 and Beyond.” In Trauma at Home: After 9/11. Ed. Judith Greenberg. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Pp. 69-85. Jones, Owain and Paul Cloke. "Non-Human Agencies: Trees in Place and Time." In Material Agency. New York City: Springer, 2008. Pp. 79-97. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. New York: Hackett Publishing Company Inc., 1987. Kaplan, E. Ann. Trauma Culture: The politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Khalidi, Rashid. Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Kirsh, David. "The intelligent Use of Space." Artificial Intelligence 73, no. 1-2, (1995): pp. 31– 68. LaCapra, Dominick. History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2004. LaCapra, Dominique. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Levine, Peter A. Trauma and Memory: Brain and Body in a Search for the Living Past: A Practical Guide for Understanding and Working with Traumatic Memory. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, 2015. Meek, Allen. Trauma and Media: Theories, Histories, and Images. New York: Routledge, 2011. Miller, Tyrus. "The Burning Babe: Children, Film Narrative, and the Figures of Historical Witness." In Witness and Memory: The Discourse of Trauma. Edited by Ana Douglass and Thomas A. Vogler. New York & London: Routledge, 2003. Mitchell, W.J.T. Landscape and Power. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994. Morag, Raya. Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema. Vol. 11. London & New York: IB Tauris, 2013. Moulton, Joshua S. “Progress, Perspective, and the Sublime Spectacle: Landscape in the Discourse of Art and Technology, 1825-1975.” PhD dissertation, University of Maine, 2012. Nye, David E. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012. Peters, John Durham. "Witnessing." In Media Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Pp. 23-48.

56

Peters, John Durham. “Witnessing. Media Culture Society, no 23 (2001): Pp. 707-725. Rau, P. U. Conflict, Nationhood and Corporeality in Modern Literature: Bodies-at-War. London: Palgrave Macmillan: 2010. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2004. Stormer, Nathan. “Addressing the Sublime: Space, Mass Representation, and the Unpresentable Critical Studies in Media Communication,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21, No. 3 (September 2004): 212–240. Tait, Sue. "Bearing Witness, Journalism and Moral Responsibility." Media, Culture & Society 33, no. 8 (2011): 1220-1235. Viljoen, Jeanne-Marie. “Representing the Unrepresentable: The Unpredictable Life of Memory and Experience in Waltz with Bashir.” Scrutiny 2 (2013): Pp. 66-80.

57