Jury Duty Again (Patreon)

I am a few posts behind at this point, mostly owing to domestic endeavors. Our AC has given up the ghost, which is pretty serious in Houston in June. So we are having a new unit put in all day tomorrow. (Hooray for credit!) In a few days I will write up some of the really strong experimental films I've seen recently (by Manuela de Laborde, Zachary Epcar, and Vika Kirchenbauer).

But I also had to watch a collection of "experimental" films for the Tel Aviv International Student Film Festival. Keep in mind, I committed to this gig before the recent bloody incursion into Gaza. However, as I've said before, I am rather ambivalent regarding BDS and cultural boycotts of Israel, mostly because they inevitably harm artists who are almost invariably on the left, and are usually doing their part to secure justice for Palestine.

Having said that, I was not particularly impressed with this group of Israeli shorts. First of all, they were mediocre in aesthetic terms, mostly rehashing old ideas. But more concerningly, these films, every last one of them, was almost defiantly apolitical. They focused on modern dance, alien life forms, tourism, the destruction of machines.... pretty much anything to avoid examining the precarious situation in which they live and work.

I am guessing that this is an ingrained act of pseudo-resistance. That is, artists in Israel feel a pressure to make work commenting on the Israeli / Palestinian conflict, and then resent the implication that that is what they should be doing. So they overcorrect, making work that is virtually a parody of empty "European" formalism. It screams not only of privilege, but of a kind of Freudian scotoma, an active unseeing of that which is simply too damning to countenance. 

As I've said before: Amos Gitai is boring as hell, but at least he's awake.