WOMEN, BORDER, AND CAMERA

Israeli feminine framing of war

Anat Zanger

A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an

unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are
its inhabitants. (Gloria Anzaldua 1987, p. 3)

Introduction
What happens when a woman with a camera enters military territory? How does a
woman record her encounter with what is usually a forbidden space, especially for women?
In this article, I discuss unique instances in which Israeli women film directors enter border
areas, spaces that are extraterritorial for civilians, record with their cameras the power
relations there, while all the while their very presence effects these power relations.
In general, militarism dominates the public and the private spheres in Israel and
functions through socio-ideological practices of interpellation, dominance, and surveillance.1 In a way similar to the structure of a myth, Israeli militarism contains a sacred area
(Thomas Pavels term 1981) that defines its inner core and facilitates the transmission of the
desired meaning. Crucial conditions for the existence of this process are the priorities
ascribed by elites and political groups to military and security issues, on the one hand; and,
the exclusion of women from the centers of power of national discourse about such
matters, on the other.
In Three Guineas ([1938] 1966), Virginia Woolf argued that men and women are
different in that men are drawn more to bellicosity. In Jacklyn Cocks (1991, p. 77)
interpretation of Woolf, she claimed that such differences are ground in social relations that
exclude women from power and its resources, as well as, male-dominated institutions and
values.2 The case of Israel exemplifies the complexity of the views of both Woolf and Cock.
Despite the fact that military service is obligatory in Israel for both women and men above
the age of eighteen, their service differs in both duration and duties: women usually have
only a very short basic military training and rarely do they serve in crucial or combat
positions (see Sigal Ben-Porath 2000; Daphna Israeli 1997). Furthermore, unlike demobilized
male soldiers who are called to reserve duty for a couple of weeks every year, women are
seldom required to do so, and even then, such reserve duty is limited by age, family status,
and role. In other words, while during her adult life an Israeli woman may choose to
continue to participate in the maintenance of war (see Cynthia Enole 1983), she is no
longer a soldier.
Dafna Lemish and Inbal Barzel made a pertinent observation regarding this context
and the representation of women in the Israel media: [a] central mechanism reflecting and
legitimizing the gendered separation between the public sphere of the open, rational
political world and that of the private sphere of the closed, emotional, private world is the
Feminist Media Studies, Vol. 5, No. 3, 2005
ISSN 1468-0777 print/ISSN 1471-5902 online/05/030341-357
q 2005 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14680770500271586

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medias portrayal of social life (2000, p. 150).3 This gendered separation/tension is

inscribed in the presence of women in Israeli films dealing with war and militarism, both as
characters and as film-makers. Thus, in war films, women traditionally function as wives,
sisters, mothers, or girlfriends, who wait at home for their soldier to return. If they are shown
at the front-line, they are cast in secondary roles, such as nurses or telegraph operators.4
While Israeli documentary films made by women have become more common in the
last two decades, the military territory generally hasand remainsout of bounds for
them, both as civilians and as women.5 Thus, the films and video art work discussed here
are exceptional in that women have penetrated military territory, exploring and assessing it
with their cameras. Indeed, Michal Aviads Ever Shot Anyone? (1995), Michal Rovners Border
(1996), Anat Even and Ada Ushpizs Detained (2001), and Ruth Walks The Settlers (2002)
intrude into the world of Israels military reality and in doing so interfere with the sacred
Israeli discourse.6
Thus, the analysis of the films presented in this article involves an examination of
several unique encounters between women and the military territory as recorded by the
women themselves. This analysis focuses on the relations created between the camera and
the women who, preoccupied with and curious about various aspects of the countrys
military discourse, intrude into, observe, and document the turbulence of military conflict.
This very masculine discourse includes all facets of military lifetraining, the occupation of
Palestine, borders, the battlefield and, naturally, the act of reporting. My aim in this analysis
is to trace the performative positions of women vis-a`-vis the war machine on the axes of
gender, territory, and knowledge.
If cultural memory sutures events, places, and names into a hegemonic national
narrative, while excluding irrelevant ones (Maureen Moynagh 2002; Marita Sturken 1999),
the women directors who examine military territories do so vis-a`-vis such suturing. Armed
with their cameras, they look from a position that is outside the hegemonic regime and in
doing so produce alternative utterances that following Michel de Certeau ([1984] 1988) are
speech acts expressed through human movements in space.7

In Front Of and Behind the Camera

The women directors transgress traditional boundaries and document their activity
within the forbidden spaces in the four films discussed here. In the first two films analyzed,
Detained and The Settlers, the women focus on feminine othersnational and religious. In
the second pair of films, Ever Shot Anyone? and Border, the women directors place
themselves in front of their cameras as protagonists and record the interaction between
themselves and the surrounding male society as it reacts to their intrusion into the military
territory.
In Anat Even and Ada Ushpizs film Detained, three Palestinian women were selected
as the cameras object. As the films and opening sub-text explain, the three women
Najwa, Nawal, and Sihamare Palestinian widows who live with their eleven children in the
same building in Hebron. Since the Israeli withdrawal from Hebron in 1997, this building
has been divided: the front half is under Israeli military control with its roof used by Israeli
soldiers as a watch tower; the back half of the building is under the jurisdiction of the
Palestinian authority.8
Though they were later to leave this house, the film was shot during the time the
women were still living in their homes, when the presence of a familiar structure of control

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can be observed. Thus, according to the logic of the Foucaultian panopticon (Michel
Foucault 1972), as a mirror image of a disciplinary society, the women are located on the
periphery: they are visible but unseeing, while the omni-voyeurs who are at the center are
seen but not always visible. An ideological minority in terms of both nationality and gender,
the women in this film are exposed to a network of constant gazes: the censuring gaze of
other Palestinian women; the colonialist gaze of the Israeli military; and the patriarchal gaze
of Palestinian society. This becomes clear when, for example, Najwa, the youngest of the
three widows is detained at an Israeli barrier on her way to Jerusalem in order to refresh her
spirits and to buy herself some new clothes, leaving her children at home. Upon her return
she is strongly reprimanded by the two other somewhat older widows for her irresponsible
behavior regarding her children. Although no male elders of the community are seen in the
film, the behavior of the three women is closely supervised by their sons, young male
members of their immediate families: Go home, dont let other men see you, says one of
the older of these sons to his mother, just as his father used to say to her.9
However, the national boundaries of inside (i.e. Palestinian society) and outside
(i.e. the Israeli occupation) are far from clear and the three women have to deal with this
ambiguity constantly, on a day-by-day basis: for example, they have to cross this dual
borderline every day, even to enter and exit their own homeswhich are literally occupied
territory. With the gradual takeover of the roof by Israeli soldiers, the domestic space in
which the three women and their children live becomes a holey space (Gilles Deleuze &
Felix Guattari [1980] 1987, p. 415), a sieved space. It is permeated by the constant friction
caused by the presence of anonymous soldiers, who are repeatedly replaced by other
anonymous soldiers, who clamber up and down the shared staircase, while the women try
to obliterate the remains of food, footprints, and other traces they leave. The film ends at
the beginning of the second intifada that began in 2000, when the women decide to move
because of the constant exchanges of gunfire.
By remaining behind the camera, the two Israeli women film-makers affix the
Palestinian women as the object of their gaze and thus appear to be participating in the

Figure 1
Najwa Abu Munshar in Detained (2001) (A film by Anat Even and Ada Ushpiz).

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panopticon regime. At the same time, by using a border area as a place of meeting that
could not have occurred otherwise, the women directors challenge the traditional
distinction between us and them that commonly characterizes a war situation and
replace it with feminine solidarity.10 This temporary coalition across differences, or alloidentification (Eve Sedgwick 1990 cited in Marianne Hirsch & Valerie Smith 2002, p. 9), is
expressed in the cinematic act itself. This act consists of the women directors actual
passage through various military barriers and checkpoints and giving voice to individual
Palestinian women.11 While the relationship between the women photographers and the
photographed women is asymmetrical, nevertheless, a possible alternative step in the
course of history is produced.12
Ruth Walks The Settlers (2002) appears at first sight to be the reverse shot of
Detained, presenting as it does the same strip of land in Hebron, but from the point of view
of the religious Jewish settlers who live there. Walk traces the daily experiences of this small
group that has lived in Tel Rumeida, a small hilltop section of Hebron, for almost twenty
years. Driven by their religious beliefs to form a culture of territorial mysticism and inspired
by their understanding of the Bible, they have decided to build a Jewish enclave in the
midst of a densely populated Palestinian area.
As the narrator explains at the beginning of the film, two major events affected the
relationship between the Palestinians in Hebron and the Jewish settlement at Tel Rumeida.
In February 1994, Baruch Goldstein, a member of the Jewish settlement in Hebron, entered
the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, a site holy to both Moslems and Jews, and massacred
twenty-nine Palestinians who were praying there with an automatic rifle. Four years later,
Rabbi Raanan Shaul, who lived in Tel Rumeida, was murdered in his bed by Palestinians
from Hebron. The films director focused on the women in this enclave who organize and
carry out their daily lives in a hostile environment without most of the amenities of modern
life. The male settlers are seen only in the background in this film, as they study religious
texts and perform the daily rituals of prayer. The women, who are the focus of the film, are
apparently both committed to and constrained by the patriarchal code of their society.
After the shooting of the film, the director of The Settlers added that she had
experienced some difficult moments during its filming due to her ideological opposition to

Figure 2
The Settlers (2002) by Ruth Walk

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what she was recording, but she decided not to interject her own opinions (Doc-Aviv
Festival 2002; Tel Aviv Cinematheque 2002). Yet, her reservations are expressed through
various leading questions, silences, and by editing that emphasizes the gap between the
widely differing points of view. For example, while the voice of Naama, one of the women
settlers, is heard describing the ancient biblical landscape that she can see from her new
home, the camera in the hands of the director shows that same horizon consists today of
Palestinian buildings. In this context, the director asks, But you see more of the Arab
neighbors now, dont you? And, Naama answers, Oh, well, we all see what we want to
see. Step by step, the film brings out the different visions of their surroundings and
dissimilar views of space as they operate one against the other. This palimpsest perception
nourishes the spatial conflict in Hebron and is turned into a visible tableau: the material
experienced space (Henri Lefebvre [1974] 1991) of the harsh concrete reality of the
present, on one hand; and, the imagined messianic space of the past which functions as a
filter through which the Jewish settlers perceive the material space, on the other hand.13
The hermetically sealed space that the settlers try to create through security
barriers and guards, as well as their daily rituals, separate them from their
surroundings. Their religious ceremonies are juxtaposed against the directors gaze as
it traces the penetration of the concrete reality into the settlers lives. The struggle over
appropriation and domination is expressed, for example, when Jewish music is played
at high volume and carries into the streets by the settlers loudspeakers, but fails to
block out the Moslem muezzins call to prayer. It is expressed more violently when a
curfew is imposed on the citys Palestinian residents while a Jewish ceremony of the
dedication of a new house takes place in the middle of Hebron. Towards the end of
the ceremony, the sounds of a Jewish peace song are heard interwoven with gunshots.
The directors of Detained and The Settlers explore unknown territories: the territory of
a national other, that is, Palestinian widows who became refugees, and that of an Israeli
extreme-religious other. Interestingly, both films focus on the opposing sides of the same
territoryoccupiers and occupiedand, thus, are reflexive of the other. In both films, the
directors encourage the women they are filming to speak and in doing so, as it were, to
contract a pact behind the back of their respective male societies. It is through this camera
positioning that irrelevant occurrences and utterances are smuggled into the film, thus
allowing the directors to confront the hegemonic national narrative of us and them. As a
result, both films expose the energy that was invested by the occupiers but failed to create
a distinctive opposition between the two sides of the border. Maintaining the economy of
the films in a dialectic movement between the hermetic space that is constantly
transgressed and the sieved space that replaces it, the directors explore the instability that
the hegemonic narrative, as a strategy of authority (Homi Bhabha 1998), is trying to
conceal.
Unlike the first two films that focus on the Occupation and the place of others vis-a`vis the borders separating them, the next two films discussed, Ever Shot Anyone? and Border,
focus on militarism and hegemony in the Israeli army. In these films the cameras document
not only the unknown territory of the military, but also the experiences of the women
directors as explorers of this territory. By recording the male-female struggle over authority
that takes place in front of the camera, the women directors have introduced an aesthetic
of female curiosityan aesthetic that is, as we shall see, both disturbing and threatening.

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Pandoras Box
Michal Aviads Ever Shot Anyone? (1995) focuses on the experiences of the director as
she joins a group of male soldiers in Unit M for their stint of reserve duty on the IsraeliSyrian border, the armistice line on the Golan Heights.14 Michal Rovners Border (1996) is a
video art work that consists of documentary footage that deals with daily military routine
on the still confrontational Israeli-Lebanese border and presents her attempts to
understand the conceptual world of the army vis-a`-vis the idea of a border.15
Each of these films directors is a civilian who has attempted to document the
experiences of the men in khaki who are guarding border areas. The objects focused on by
Aviad and Rovner are men whose body passports have been stamped by khaki. But the
I of the woman director also becomes an object in the cameras field of vision and in this
way the interaction between the all-male society and the woman with the movie camera
is recorded in the heart of military territory. Thus, the men of Reserve Unit M tell Aviad, You
wouldnt understand, and Commander G tells Rovner that her conceptual world is too
remote from what happens here. The questions of both directors meet with polite but
unremitting resistance by the members of the military present at the scenes. Thus, in these
two films it is a womans curiosity that drives the plot and, as in the ancient myth of
Pandora, it is her curiosity that leads to her punishment. According to Laura Mulvey (1992,
p. 65), curiosity is the desire to see what is being concealed and is comprised of three
elements: an active and inquiring gaze associated with femininity, a topography of
concealment leading to inquiry, and the drive to lay bare the enigma. For Aviad and Rovner,
the enigma is their roles as Israeli women in a militaristic society.
Another necessary element in the Pandora myth is forbidden space. In different
versions of the myth, such space may be a metonymic devicea box in Pandoras
hand, an urn on her head, or a nearby chest (Lodmilla Jordanova [1989] cited in
Mulvey 1992, p. 61). The camera in the hands of the director is used, like Pandoras
box, to document and to decode the forbidden space, which in these two films is an
all-male military territory. Thus, the three coordinates that define the scene of action in
this discussionfemale curiosity, male territory, and the cameras gazeare present in
these films.
Significantly, both Ever Shot Anyone? and Border use formal elements in order to
obscureif not to cancel out entirelythe authority of the camera. What one can observe
on the screen is usually guided by the cameras perspective. The fact that the camera is
there also constrains the viewer to share the same perspective. In fact, the viewer functions
in collaboration with the cameras gaze even before he or she has absorbed and
processed the subject matter. Aviad and Rovner, as we shall see, reject the institutional
modes of representation (Noel Burch 1980 1981) in which the camera is a surrogate for our
desire for order, organization, and unity. The result is an emphasis on areas of nonknowledge and non-understanding that Alice Jardine (1985) associates with the
feminine. In doing so, it signifies those spaces which could be said to conceptualize
the master narratives non-knowledge, that area over which the narrative has lost control
(Jardine 1985, p. 24).

WOMEN, BORDER, AND CAMERA

Textures of Holes
In her detailed account of her experiences while shooting the film Ever Shot Anyone?
(Berman, [2000] (2003)), Aviad explained that she chose the subject because of her then 5year-old sons addiction to toy weaponry. She felt she had to learn more about male culture
and especially about male military culture in Israel. The tension between civilian and
military life, home and national duty, as well as femininity and masculinity, is presented
through a mixture of fiction and documentation divided into chapters, as well as, by a filmwithin-the-film made by the soldiers in the reserve unit themselves.
Aviad tells the story of her encounter with Reserve Unit M in the form of a first-person
narrative, termed by Michael Renov (1996) a videographic confession. The film begins
with the call-up of the reserve unit and ends with their demobilization party. She met with
the men in the unit when they were about to do reserve duty on the Golan Heights:
They all seemed enthusiastic about being part of the film. They told me they had been
doing reserve duty together for twenty years and that a film could be a nice souvenir...
Right after we reached the camp, the timid, humble group that I had met in civilian clothes
during the research phase, now turned into a very closed and sometimes offensive, group.
(Berman [2000] 2003, p. 218)

When Aviad tried to ask them questions early in their first days at the base, the
soldiers immediately turned on her: You keep asking about our wives at home, but in your
case youre doing reserve duty [i.e., as a film director who chose to join the unit] and your
husband is at home. One of the men added that such behavior would be a good reason
for divorce. Aviad was by her very presence the representative of both a woman in a
military territory and a home-bound woman awaiting the return of her warrior (Judd
Neeman 1996). Thus, the notion underlying the retorts made by the men in the platoon is
the ambivalent attitude of the Israeli fighter towards any change in gender performance.
They expect her to prepare coffee, although she is with them, filming, on their patrols and
guard duty; in the washroom after they wake up; as well as in the kitchen (never were so
many pictures taken of us in the kitchen, they complain). In the course of time, as we shall

Figure 3
Michal Aviad with two of the soldiers in Ever Shot Anyone? (Photo Amit Goren)

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see, the men became more amiable, but they continued to resent the fact that they had
become the object of her gaze.
Rovner, in her video art film Border, documents her search for several different
borders: the border between Israel and Lebanon, between femininity and masculinity,
and between the observer and what is observed. The films location, at the Israeli-Lebanese
frontier crossing once known as The Good Fence, has been a site of tension, misery, and
mutual hostility, rather than of assistance and friendly relations; literally an open wound
(in Anzalduas words 1987, p. 3). Dealing with the trauma of the seventeen-year-long Israeli
occupation of Lebanon that ended in 1999, the film opens with a statement of its subtitle
This is not a true story.16 Rovners film struggles to find meaning and clarity in this geopolitical zone of confusion. On one hand, she identifies the border as a site of transition and
surveillance. Thus, her request to join the unit when they go into Lebanon is answered
directlyImpossible. Lebanon is out of the question. On the other hand, as her camera
focuses on electronic barriers and on gates and fences, it continually tries to locate the
borders weak points and, in this way, to cross both its visible and invisible lines.
The film is structured through a series of interrupted and fragmentary dialogues:
between Rovner and the commander of the unit, Giora Inbar, who was, at the time, IDF
Coordinator in the area; between Rovner and the film crew; and between Rovner and some
of the other soldiers and passersby. It begins with the question, How do you think this film
should end? and ends with the same question, still unanswered. Inbar keeps telling Rovner
that she will not understand what she sees, that she will remain confused even if he
explains things to her. These strategies exemplify the impossibility of dialogue within the
military zone and thus suggest various forms of anxious monologue instead. By using her
mobile phone as a medium through which she communicates with the military unit when
they cross the border into Lebanon, Rovner created yet another form of monologue.
Performing the roles of both film director, who seeks answers, and worried woman, who
has been left behind the frontline, she keeps asking about the mens fears, the dangers they
encounter, and the objective of the entire situation. Her repeated but unanswered
questions, while documenting fear itself (Irit Rogoff 2000, p. 142), express the futility of
the military option.

Figure 4
Michal Rovners Road I, from Border (1996)

WOMEN, BORDER, AND CAMERA

The horizontal movements of the camera focus on the border fence at different
distances, while the repetitive vertical movements of the camera focus on a wide empty
road along which lonely figures move, sometimes running opposite one another but never
seeming to converge. Located between barriers, this road conveys the quality of an
intermediate zone where the possible meeting will never occur. Rovners film takes place in
the interstices between gazes and frames. Her gaze is hesitant, deliberating between what
the camera is permitted to see and what will remain outside of the frame. This technique is
described by Parveen Adams (1998) as textures of holes [. . .]: She erases information, the
images are cut into again and again by other images, by a fading, by rapid shifts between
points of view. In this way, viewers are invited to locate themselves in the position of the
director in the narrative: trying to defend themselves from danger, trying to write an ending
for the film or for the military conflict, and trying to understand a border that defies and
denies the possibility of being understood (Rogoff 2000, p. 138).

The Third Space

Roland Barthes ([1977] 1991 cited in Jay, 1994, p. 441) claimed that the gaze can be
understood in terms of information (gazes inform), in terms of possession (by my gaze,
I touch, I attain, and I measure), and in terms of relations (gazes are exchanged). However,
the gaze may also function as a sign of anxiety, always seeking something or someone
(Barthes cited in Jay [1993] 1994, p. 441). In both Ever Shot Anyone? and Border, searching,
worried gazes are always present and are cast and captured through the cameras of the
women observers. Such gazes are often reinforced by cinematic elements such as a blend
of fiction and documentation, the use of claustrophobic interiors and open exteriors, an
intensified use of oral and vocal sound, and voice-over narration. Use is also made of
elements of longing and preoccupation with de-territorialization and non-belongingness.
All of these elements contribute to what Hamid Naficy (2001) identified as exilic discourse.
The conflict takes place in both films in a liminal border space. In Ever Shot Anyone?,
the perceived and the apparent border is a geographical boundary, the armistice line
between Israel and Syria; in Border it is fenced borderline between Israel and Syria (in 1996,
when the film was made). Geographical borders, however, are spatial realities that conceal
underlying sociological and political tensions as well as fears and desires. As Rogoff
observes: [. . .] links are set up between the border as a psychically internalized concept of
boundaries crossed and repressions breached, and the external traces of a containment
which holds one in, which does not allow for that very breach (2000, p. 113). It is no
coincidence, then, that both directors made use of an interpreter; one male among those
present who mediates between the women directors and the masculine-military
environment.
Furthermore, a borderline refers to transitional areas that separate us from them
(John Prescott 1987, p. 13). But border areas are unique in that they belong neither to us nor
to them: they are the third space. This is an in-between place of enunciation, defined by
Homi Bhabha and Victor Burgin ([1992] 1994) as a place that exists not only between two
polar positions, but also as a space in which something new is always taking place. There is
always that moment of surprise and interruption that generates something new and
differenta displacement. This area of in-between, which contains within itself a moment
of surprise or disturbance, is located on the axis of the perceived and the imperceptible
borders between military and civilian, masculinity and femininity. In both films, the moment

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of surprise is the one in which the camera, Pandoras recording and decoding box, passes
into the hands of the filmed objectthe men.
Platoon M is not sure of Aviads opinion of them or how they will appear in her film.
Thus, just to be on the safe side, they create a counter-film: a parody on the film Ever Shot
Anyone? in which they film themselves answering Aviads questions and in which she has
become the object of their camera. Screened at the farewell party toward the end of their
reserve duty, this film reflects the struggle between voices over authority and dominance:
Have you ever shot anyone? they mockingly ask, echoing Aviads uneasy question. As in
her later versions of the Pandora myth, when the closed box becomes a metonym for the
enigma of femininity, here too the men reveal their anxieties and desires in their
conversations with Aviad toward the end of their reserve duty.17 They wonder whether she
will say hello to them in the street after the film is over and if she is worth a fuck, and they
are curious about what kind of film-baby will result from the sperm that they have
contributed. In this way, the men are trying to reclaim their imaginary dominance over the
feminine body that has been lost with Aviads gaze. As Luce Irigaray (1978 cited in Anne
Friedberg 1993, p. 32) noted: the moment the look dominates, the body loses its
materiality.
In Border, Giora Inbar, the commander of the unit, agrees to Rovners request and
suggests his own ending to the film: Truthfully, there is no ending for your film. No one
knows the end of this game, even though its not a game. If it is a game, it is a no-win
game. He agrees to take her camera into the forbidden territory of Lebanon and to film,
from his perspective, a view of Marj-Ayun (a Lebanese town). He also films Rovner with her
own camera, serves as her interpreter with regard to Lebanon and even acts, from time to
time, as her cinematic advisor.18
Observation, when gazing upon a certain object, is an active act. In its passive
sense, observation seeks to focus on the image that is the result of that act. In this
sense, the process of shooting in both of the films discussed above, in which the
woman is both present and absent from the screen, and in which the camera passes
from her hands into his, points to the dualism inherent in the term gaze: the male
subject in the film has reformulated his attitude toward the film by filming the woman
from his perspective.
Through the formal means I have noted above, including the transfer of the camera
into the hands of men, the female directors delineate areas of non-knowledge that are
associated with female curiosity. In this way they relinquish the enjoyment of decoding
the story, enjoyment that serves as part of the solution of the Pandora myth. Instead of
decoding the event, they propose its being there. In place of history, they propose
anamnesis (remembering, from the Greek), which according to Jean-Francois Lyotard (1988)
is the elaboration and processing of the event. Both history and anamnesis, he continues,
preserve the presence of what tends to be forgotten, but history purports to be faithful to
what actually happened whereas anamnesis allows the unknown to emerge and the
unexpected aspects of events to guide it. History reconstructs a lost object that belongs to
the past, whereas anamnesis points to what is here, the enduring traces of the lost object.
Anamnesis is incapable of closure; its aim is to locate, through association, the repetitive
appearance of meaningful signifiers.

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Woman, Camera, and Resistance

The women directors invaded border areas in the four films examined here. Their
speech acts produce a subversive move: they expose the borders weak points and
challenge their impermeability and, simultaneously, function as a mirror reflecting the
deceptiveness of the concept of a border. Tension is built into these films through the
feminine gaze and the dynamic it creates through the cameraa tension that contributes
to the public visibility of this dynamic in border zones and military territories. In Detained,
the Israeli feminine camera produces an alternative narrative of exile and dispersion
beneath the scopic regimes of both Palestinian authority and Israeli authority. By
documenting the figure of a feminine national other it suggests an imagined
community (Benedict Anderson 1983; Chandra Mohanty 1991) of feminine solidarity. In
the case of The Settlers, the female observer retains the silence of religious women who are
the object of her inquiry, but deconstructs their imaginary gaze by confronting it with
flashes from the concrete reality that surrounds them. In Ever Shot Anyone? and Border, on
the other hand, the female directors filming male soldiers in a military environment have to
mollify the men in order to be allowed to document military territory with their own
cameras. In other words, they enable the men to dominate their entry into male territory by
allowing them, at times, to become the omni-voyeurs of the scene.
Working against the political dichotomy of borders (Adriana Kemp 2000), the
feminine presence in these four texts emphasize the fuzzy edges of national identity and
gender identity.19 However, it is in the two films in which the women directors include
themselves in the frame that the analogy between women and borders becomes visible: it
is not only physical lines or fences or checkpoints, but the women themselves who function
as a border according to which the non-legitimate minority is examined and reformulated.
In their attempt to understand the reality of Israeli militarism, these female directors
turn their gaze upon forbidden spaces, invaded/occupied areas, and smuggled their
cameras across borders. By emphasizing the sieved quality of both national and gender
borders, their filming acts were turned into speech acts that work against the apparatus of
the war machine. Thus, it is the feminine camera in these films that reveals the optical
subconscious of the repeated signifierfemale curiosityexposing areas of nonknowledge and non-understanding, and hence functioning as an anxious sign.
But how can we understand the effect of these anxious signs? How is it possible to
interpret the optical unconsciousness written in light and shadow on the feminine camera?
In the films discussed in this article, the directors replace borders with sieved spaces and
history with anamnesis and thus they invite the viewers to write themselves into these
narratives of unknown territorynarratives that have neither closure nor endings.
Women on both sides of the borderIsraeli, Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinianwho
lie in their beds at night while their husbands/sons/brothers/boyfriends train, fight, patrol,
attack, and report, may think similar thoughts as those of Virginia Woolf (1940, p. 243), who
described her feelings, fears, and thoughts in an air raid in 1940: How far can [we] fight for
freedom without firearms? Her answer was: We can fight with the mind. And that is what
these films are trying to do.20 By using their cameras to record the uselessness of military
routine, to call attention to its blind spots, and to embody the fear and anxiety it generates,
these films take actions in the direction of Woolfs Thoughts of Peace in an Air-Raid.
Through these films the women directors act responsibly and expose the great distance
that the gatekeepers of the military territory must still travel.

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Acknowledgements
Partial versions of the paper were presented in 2002 at the 4th International
ConferenceWhy War ? organized by Film & Television Department at Tel-Aviv
University; and at The Second International Conference On New Directions in the
Humanities, Monash University Centre, Prato, 2004. I would like to thank Michal Aviad
for her comments on an earlier version of this paper as well as the anonymous
reviewers of the manuscript for their attentive reading and excellent suggestions.

NOTES
1. See Jacklyn Cocks (1991) observations on militarism as a social institution and Baruch
Kimmerling (1993) on militarism in Israel.
2. Prevention of war in Woolfs argument would require the dismantling of the entire gender
system, the desegregation of male and female spheres, and the depolarization of
masculinity and feminism (Cock 1991, p. 77).
3. And Lemish and Barzel add: Previous research on gender representation in the areas of
news, public affairs and politics suggests that women in Israel are still perceived as
marginal to society. They are generally underrepresented, often associated with their
traditional roles as caregivers, or dependency roles as wife of or daughter of, or as victims
of crime and domestic violence (2000, p. 150).
4. This would be the case in Israeli war films such as: Hill 24 Doesnt Answer (1955), He Walked
Through the Fields (1967), or Every Bastard is a King (1967). On women and war in Israeli
films, see Re`gine-Michal Friedman (1986, 1993), Yosefa Loshitzky (1993, 2001), Anat Zanger
(1999), and Orly Lubin (2001).
5. Critical interpretations of the Israeli militaristic apparatus were presented by male directors
in Israel fictional and non-fictional films, for example, Paratroopers (1978), The House (1980)
and 83 (1983) Kipour (2001); and, over the last decade, a number of women who coproduced with male directors films such as Testimonies (1994), and Borders (2001).
6. All films were screened in Israel, mainly in Israeli cinematheques and on cable television
Channel 8 that serve among other functions as media for contemporary Israeli
documentary films. The films were also screened internationally.
7. De Certeau ([1984] 1988) is using John Longshaw Austins (1962) observation on linguistic
utterances as individual acts of language and relating it to the production of space. Judith
Butler (1993) uses Austins observation in the context of gender and performativity. Both
contexts are relevant to my discussion.
8. The political situation in this area is in constant flux. The facts described here are relevant
for the date of writing. Thus, following the Oslo Agreements, the West Bank was divided
into three areas: Palestinian controlled, Israeli controlled, and jointly controlled. During the
second intifada the Israeli army re-entered the Palestinian controlled areas. Current
negotiations have succeeded in returning some responsibilities in selected areas to the
Palestinian authority.
9. Suad Joseph and Susan Slymovics (2001, p. 3) have observed that Males are thought to
protect and take responsibility for their female kin.
10. This preference for gender solidarity over national solidarity exemplifies the trend in postcolonial womens films to challenge the masculinist contours of the nation in order to
continue a feminist decolonization of Third-Worldist historiography, as much as they

WOMEN, BORDER, AND CAMERA

11.
12.

13.
14.
15.

16.

17.
18.

19.
20.

continue a multi-cultural decolonization of feminist historiography (Ella Shohat 1997 cited

in Alison Butler 2002, p. 100).
This information regarding the directors movement through barriers and checkpoints is
based on photos taken on location.
Fiction films that deal with the Palestinian other and the ambiguous relationship of the
Israeli towards the other have been made by Israeli directors since the 1980s, and
especially after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon (see Nurith Gertz 1993; Yosefa
Loshitzky 2001; Ella Shohat 1989).
Experienced space, perceived space and imagined space are terms introduced by Lefebvre
([1974] 1991). I use these terms here somewhat more freely.
This area is also known as the Syrian Heights.
Following John R. Victor Prescott (1987, p. 5) the term border or boundary relate to the
line of physical contact between states and communities. For a discussion on Israeli
borders see Kimmerling (1989), and Adriana Kemp (2000). According to Kemp, after two
decades of repression, the Oslo Agreements have returned the issue of borders to the
Israeli public discourse. Kemp characterizes Israels national preoccupation with its borders
as a double discourse that expresses the tension between political space and the
imagined symbolic space (2000, p. 36).
In this context it is interesting to mention a group of women peace activists, known as
Arba Imahot (lit. The Four Mothers and referring to the biblical matriarchs Sarah,
Rebecca, Leah, and Rachel) that played a major role in the mobilization of Israeli public
opinion for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from south Lebanon. For analysis of the media
coverage of this group and its framing within the maternal, see Lemish and Barzel (2000).
On the feminine presence generating anxiety in various ways in Israeli cinema see
Friedman (1986), Neeman (1996), and Zanger (1998).
The absence/presence of the women directors in their own films operates in accordance
with the Freudian precept of fort/dathat is, when their absence and their presence
enable the male subjectivity to regain the illusion of dominance. See Sigmund Freud
([1919] 1954, [1932] 1964) and Kaja Silverman (1992).
On the political dichotomy against hybrid cultural conceptualization of borders in Israel
see Kemp (2000, p. 200).
This is not to say that there is no male pacifism; see Ben-Ari Eyal (2000) on this subject. Here
I am referring to female solidarity and pacifism in the same sense that Sara Ruddick (1989)
or Cynthia Enole (1983) call upon women to not participate in maintaining war
situations. Enole notes that war cannot be waged without women. They are indispensable
for ironing uniforms and for sending food parcels to army bases, but they are also the ones
who teach boys to behave like men, who are attracted to macho men, and perform acts
of weakness and demonstrate the need for protection. See also Rela Mazali (2000).

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WOMEN, BORDER, AND CAMERA

Anat Zanger is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Film and Television at Tel Aviv
University with a Ph.D. from the School of Cultural Studies, Tel Aviv University and
Post-doctorate at MIT, Cambridge, Mass., in media studies. Among her subjects of
interest are Israeli cinema, gender, mythology, space and landscape. Her book on the
cinematic remake is forthcoming by Amsterdam University Press. She is currently
completing a book on Israeli space in the Israeli film. E-mail: zanger@post.tau.ac.il.

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