The documentary as a 'third space' for others : a close reading of six documentaries of Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel from the 1990s

Abstract

This study presents a close reading of six documentary films, which were created by Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel in the last decade. The documentaries are perceived as social and historical documents that reflect the worlds of their creators and the historical and social reality in which they are produced and to which they refer. This study examines the contribution of the documentaries to the Israeli hegemonic discourse in the representation of the Palestinian people and of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The three focal concepts for the analysis are identity, the Other and historical memory. These concepts were analyzed in all levels of the cinematic text (the sociology of the film, narrative, image, sound) and were addressed through a comparison between three genres: the self-representation of Palestinians, the representation of the Palestinians by Jewish-Israeli filmmakers and the Autoethnographic films. The discursive objective of the study was to trace the voices, images and themes of the Israelis Other the Palestinian that might offer a humanistic basis for identification and common ground against the ethnic and national divides. The long-term objective would be to offer the films as facilitators of dialogue, empathy, acknowledgment, and understanding and as providers of knowledge, which is usually excluded from the official narrative and from the educational system.