Waltzing with Bashir by Raya Morag

Author:Raya Morag [Morag, Raya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, History, General, Middle East, Islamic Studies, Jewish Studies, LGBTQ+ Studies, Lesbian Studies, Gender Studies, Performing Arts, Film
ISBN: 9780857734365
Google: I9LsDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-09-25T05:11:43+00:00

Mask-to-Mask: guilt transference in Avi Mograbi’s Z32

(Courtesy of Avi Mograbi)

The third confessor is the director, Avi Mograbi, who – mainly through the postmodern post-Brechtian songs he writes – intervenes to advance the revelation of truth while simultaneously performing-confessing his complicity in what he defines as “giving a cinematic shelter to a murderer instead of turning him over to the courts.” The gap between contradictory forms of intervention (identification with, criticism of, and complicity with the protagonist; and self-denouncement over both identification and complicity), on one hand, and the combination of confessional acting out and performance of confession, on the other, exacerbate the crises of narrativization and audience. Beginning with the first scenes, in which Mograbi is shown near his desk struggling to breathe through a black hood, the director succumbs to a postmodern ironic playfulness and takes on various roles: imaginary detainee; disclosed perpetrator; investigator; military policeman who locates the crime zone; and the (post)Brechtian narrator.25 Self-positioned in front of his camera, he is both protagonist and docuauteur; like the other vicarious confessor, the girlfriend, he crosses the boundaries between participant and listener, there-ness and hereness. In this sense, Z32 renders a perverse reflection on Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (UK, 1966), in which, as is well known, the director’s camera reveals what the protagonist, who witnessed a murder but cannot find the body when he returns to the crime scene, fails to reveal. In other words, Z32 is simultaneously a cinematic indictment and a cinematic cover, a work that tracks the ambivalence of complicity while the docu-activist’s confession ironically celebrates the epistemic impasses of his complicitous act.26

The crisis of disclosure continues throughout the entire film. The mask chosen by the ex-soldier to hide his identity (and prevent the threat of being arrested abroad) connects him in a ghostly way to his victim – the innocent Palestinian who was chosen arbitrarily and whose name he does not know. Like him, the perpetrator becomes anonymous. In Israeli visual Intifada culture, the mask symbolically functions as the hood, frequently used in torture of detainees or prisoners. As the confession reveals, in the case of Deir as-Sudan taking prisoners (of war) was never an option. Does the missing hood turned digital mask attest to its absence in the narrative of revenge? Is this also a kind of self-projection into the preferred pre-revenge status of the absent victim, that is, the prisoner? Or is it an imaginary hood in the hands of the cinematic executioner – the director? The imaginary torture that the veteran did not suffer and of which he is afraid turns into a self-tormenting procedure symbolized by the mask. In this, the crisis of disclosure is strongly linked to the crisis of narrativization.

Paradoxically, the digital mask does not provide relief. During face-to-face, or rather, mask-to-mask, encounters, the mask increases the veteran’s anxiety since – in acting out different strategies of denial and concealment – he is afraid of losing face in front of his girlfriend. Moreover, the mask seals off the body and prevents sentience in the Levinasian sense.

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