Brief Encounters : Documentary Visits to an Imagined Israel.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Landesman, Ohad.

Series:

SUNY Series, Horizons of Cinema Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Documentary films--History and criticism.

Documentary films.

Israel.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (0 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Albany : State University of New York Press, 2026.

Summary:

Explores how non-Israeli filmmakers have used the essayistic travelogue to capture Israel's complex and contested landscape.Brief Encounters offers the first extended exploration of a distinct and often overlooked corpus of travel documentaries made by foreign filmmakers in Israel and British-Mandate Palestine over the past century.

Contents:

Intro

Contents

List of Illustrations

Figures

Table

Acknowledgments

Introduction

From a Monolithic National Cinema to Transnational Sensibilities

The Essayistic and the Voice

Chapter Breakdown

1 The Travelogue: From the Instructive Tourist Film to the Essayistic Excursion

Conceptualizing Terms and Categories

Reflexive Strategies and Working Through Colonial Dispositions

The Experiential Dimension of the Travelogue

The Utopian Dimension: From a Viewer's Desirous Imaginings to the Traveler's Willful Unknowing

A Space That Exists Elsewhere: The Value of Being Lost and Dislocated

Why Israel? Imaginative Geography and the Dynamics of Space/Place

Travel Literature About the Holy Land: Between Anticipated Wonders and Encountered Realities

Case Study: The Lumières in Palestine

2 Marker, Pasolini, and the Narrative of Disillusionment

"I am writing you from a distant country": Utopian Dreams and a Daunting Awakening in Description of a Struggle

"This land speaks to you in signs": The Semiotic Perspective of a Tourist

"Not having the right to be unjust": Worrying About the Future of Israel

Disowning the Film as an Essayistic Act

"An incredible impression of smallness": Fantasy and Reality in Pasolini's Scouting for Locations in Palestine

Making a Film Toward a Film That Would Never Be Made

"Practical disappointment": Sound Humiliating the Image

A Performed Rhetoric of Disappointment?

Conclusion

3 The Maysles, Dassin, and Sontag: Disaster and Deliverance in Two Wars

A Journey to Jerusalem: Celebratory Moments of Aural Exuberance

Sonic Registers of Hope: Transcending Musical and Spatial Boundaries

The Sounds of Jerusalem: Listening to Fantasies of Resurrection

Survival 1967: Between Essayism and Propaganda.

Narrating the Jewish Nation: A Polyphony of Vocal Perspectives

Dassin's Foreignness: In Between Ethnonationalism and Universalist Socialism

Recording the Pain of Others: Tauma, Fracture, and Experimental Sound in Susan Sontag's Promised Lands

A Jewish Intellectual Abroad: Probing the Limits of Criticism

The Sounds of War: Documenting the Audial Traces of National Trauma

Between Sound and Image: An Essayistic Deconstruction of Death

The Faceless Patient: Observing a Mental Landscape

4 Lanzmann and Akerman: Traveling in a State of Internal Exile

Accented Cinema and Internal Exile

Lanzmann in Israel: An Outsider Looking In (with Empathy)

A Cinematic Journey Through a Trilogy

Pourquoi Israël: One More Time, with Feeling

From the Ashes of the Holocaust: Crafting a Documentary Style

The Dialectics of the Outsider's Voice: A Personal Commitment

Là-bas: Making a Film About the Refusal to Make a Film About Israel

A Promised Land, an Unfulfilled Promise

Not a Travel Diary but an Inner Journey

Afterword

Notes

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

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ISBN:

979-88-558-0667-0

OCLC:

1586552182