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REVIEWS: Simone Bitton’s sad, thoughtful, sometimes disturbingly beautiful
documentary Wall might be categorized as a landscape film—the terrain
in this case being Israel/Palestine, or more specifically the slash inserted
between those
contested place-names. This slash—which is at once symbolic, social
and overwhelmingly physical—runs along Israel’s so-called wall
of separation, which Bitton’s camera tracks in its many forms, from
the Galilee down to Jerusalem, for almost the full length of her film. While you hear these opinions, Bitton is meanwhile showing you the wall itself—showing it in slow, studied shots that function as her own eloquent commentary. In one scene, the lovely view of a distant town is gradually blocked, as cranes lower concrete barriers into place until they occupy the whole frame. Another scene shows the wall as porous: You look down from a hill, as Palestinian workers cross at dawn to get to their jobs in Israel. Judging from the evidence before your eyes, you’d think the permeability was meant to vary. In Jerusalem, there are shots of Palestinians sneaking through, even with infants, as they carry on with their daily tasks. But in Bethlehem, Bitton shows streets that are completely depopulated, except for the religious Jews coming by tour bus to pray under armed guard at Rachel’s Tomb. Of all these views, the one that sticks in my mind as perhaps most characteristic of Bitton is the film’s opening shot, which shows the wall as a work of art. From the window of a car, she records a long, long stretch of concrete that people have decorated with paintings: Matissean dancers, mazelike geometric figures, pastoral images of the sort you might find in an illustrated Bible. This shot strikes me as Bitton’s confession of faith and also her self-critique. She, too, has made a work of art out of the wall. Rather than address it through an exposé or polemic, she has approached it almost as an object of contemplation, in the conviction that art is a refusal of despair. Like the wall’s painters, she imposes human expression on something blank and brutal. And like those painters, she prettifies what she cannot change. I don’t say this as an accusation against Bitton, or as more of an accusation than she has implicitly leveled against herself. She has too alert a conscience, and is too good an artist, not to have questioned her art’s purpose. But I happened to watch Wall just when such doubts deserved to be especially keen: at the moment when an influential segment of Jewish opinion was loudly crying against Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza. The timing of this disengagement could not have been accidental; it came immediately after Tisha b’Av, the day on which observant Jews mourn their nation’s catastrophes and the faithlessness that caused them. No other date for the withdrawal would have so inflamed the religious right. No other schedule could have allowed Ariel Sharon to disembarass himself of Gaza, while redoubling the will of a major constituency never to give back an inch of the real prize, Jerusalem and the West Bank. Not for the first time, I wonder why the other side’s symbolic acts are so powerful and my side’s so often ineffective. I also wonder why religious voices are absent from Wall. From a political standpoint, the film is pretty well balanced. (General Yaron can’t complain that Bitton excluded his ideas; he placed them beyond belief all on his own.) But from a social standpoint, Wall is as lopsided as can be. It’s as if Bitton could create her composed view of the landscape only by ignoring one of its strongest, most slashing forces. I think Wall is a weaker picture for this omission. But I also think it’s a serious and moving work of filmmaking, which asks you to look clearly and closely but without despair. If that’s as much as art can do at the moment, then I will be grateful for it.
THE VILLAGE VOICE: Beyond Borders:Disturbing Doc Tracks
West Bank
Barrier She interviews him via remote hookup, since he's stuck in Gaza; for in this tiny region, nearly insurmountable borders grow like wildflowers. The wall is the boundary to end all boundaries—"the greatest engineering project Israel has ever undertaken," a general in charge of its planning and construction tells us. Bitton focuses much attention on the technical details, the tons of cement and miles of barbed wire, the cameras and alarms, and the trenches and roads that run alongside it. Her camera also captures sheep grazing beside it and (with bitter irony) Palestinian workers helping to build it. Bitton gives short shrift to the security issues the wall is meant to address. (A Jerusalem resident who once came uncomfortably close to a suicide bomber tells her, "When I stand next to a bus, I pray for the light to turn green. What about you?") And her film's stately, dirge-like pacing occasionally becomes tiresome. But the wall itself, an insistent and funereal physical presence, raises still deeper and more troubling questions. Is this the marvel Israel wants to leave future generations—its pyramids, its Eiffel Tower? What shared illness in these two societies created it? And how will anyone ever look beyond it?
New York Theater Wire Wall is a shocking, searing account of the barrier now being built in Israel, an ugly monstrosity that is physically separating Arab from Jew. The government’s hope is that this unwieldy partition will hamper Palestinian suicide bombers from carrying out their assaults. Apparently, it has been working to some degree.
Yet, is its success worth its financial, physical, and emotional costs? Born in Morocco to a Jewish family, Bitton moved to Jerusalem in 1966, did her military service during the 1973 war, became a “pacifist for life,” and then later went to film school in Paris. She labels herself an Arab Jew. Documentaries about the culture and the horrors of the Middle East have been her forte. Her Wall opens with sections of the partition in question beautifully painted over by several artists, not unlike how the Berlin Wall was once adoorned. There are pictures of doves and dancers, lovers, tugs of war, bench-sitters, clowns, and trees. As the camera slowly scans the illustrations, two laughing Israeli children are heard being interviewed. They talk about how they’ll hide behind the wall when the Arabs start shooting. Next we see the new sections of the wall going up, ashen slab after ashen slab, slowly blocking a beautiful vista until it vanishes from sight entirely behind unending grays. Bitton then interviews Arabs who are helping build the wall (what other jobs are available to them?), Arabs who can no longer get to their fields because of the wall, plus Israelis who support its construction and others who think it’s a plain silly waste of money and/or a hindrance to peace. Bitton, in the end, offers no alternative to the wall. She has no suggestions on how peace can be achieved in the Middle East, but then who does? Her film does, however, brilliantly demonstrate how this barricade is a metaphor for all that is wrong in the area. Sadly, it’s a concrete metaphor.
SALON " Wall": Finding hope in a symbol of hopelessness Simone Bitton is a Moroccan-born Jew who spent her teen years in Israel and now lives in Paris. Perhaps this is the perfect background for making a documentary in the Middle East; she crosses borders and melts into populations easily. When someone she approaches in her documentary "Wall" asks, a bit nervously, "Hebrew or Arabic?" she responds, "As you like." Her film about the notorious wall that now separates the Jewish and Arab populations of Israel and the West Bank is an important human and artistic testament -- a calm meditation on something no one can consider calmly. Actually, Bitton has written and spoken about "Wall" in strident political language, which I almost don't want to mention. I suppose a point of view becomes clear if you stick with this patient, contemplative film, or at least we come to understand that it was born out of pain and anger. But information and commentary are minimal in the footage itself; characteristically, Bitton just plants her camera and lets us watch events unfold in real time, in the middle distance. We see, for instance, a parade of Palestinian workers scrambling over a low panel in the wall in the early morning, on their way to jobs inside the Jewish world. We see a bored and irritated Israeli soldier at a checkpoint, dealing with people who lack the right paperwork, who refuse to stay in line, who are trying to enter or leave in the wrong direction. Sometimes the events are barely events: Workers slowly fit two of the wall's cement slabs together as a radio blares an Arab pop hit; a girl misses the bus in front of a section that's been painted to look like trees, sky and scenery. There's also material that more closely resembles journalism. Bitton interviews an Israeli government spokesman, eager to discuss the wall as an engineering achievement. (The cost is close to $2 million per kilometer; the whole thing will cost about a billion dollars.) She talks to an apolitical West Bank suburbanite in designer shades, who offers to host Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas at his house, and a lifelong kibbutznik who sees the wall as an act of Jewish suicidal desperation. Casual bigotry is displayed on both sides, as well as heartbreaking compassion; no solutions are proposed. But the real strength of "Wall" -- winner of several major festival awards, including a special jury prize at Sundance -- is not ideas but images. It demonstrates, more clearly than a thousand magazine articles, how intimately these two groups live side by side, in mutual distrust and terror, on this beautiful and sacred desert landscape. Bitton never expresses an opinion on whether the wall, and the system it embodies, dehumanizes and humiliates Palestinians (as it does) or whether Israelis' fear of deranged zealots is legitimate (as it is). "Issues" of that kind merely complicate the picture, which is, as a psychiatrist in the film puts it, that of a society where extremism and madness have become normal, of a Holy Land conquered by the devil."Wall" opens Aug. 26 in New York and Minneapolis, Sept. 9 in Chicago, and Sept. 23 in Los Angeles, with further engagements to be announced.
NY NEWSDAY WALL
Film Journal — Eric Monder
WALL The personal really is political in Wall, a first-person documentary of a strong and substantial nature. In Wall, filmmaker Simone Bitton records the construction of the wall commissioned by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2002 to separate and isolate the Palestinians from the Jews. Bitton, who is both Arab and Jewish, makes her views clear from the outset: She is against the idea. (The 1973 Israeli war turned the young Bitton into a pacifist for life.) Bitton starts out by showing the building of the concrete sections, but also the use of other materials (including barbed wire), and picks up on her soundtrack conversations and holy chants that emanate nearby. What she ultimately creates is touching and intimate, but not without political power. There is even one long, chilling interview with General Amos Yaron, director general of the Israeli Ministry of Defense, who clearly takes the opposite view from Bitton about the need for the wall, citing a need to stop Palestinian terrorism. Some of the people who live on both sides of the construction are also filmed but not interviewed as much in-depth—their facial expressions say enough without the long exchanges, though these families and individuals are rarely identified as Palestinian or Jew. Bitton’s film becomes as much a documentary as a cinematic essay or poem. The first reel could be something from the avant-garde: a simple long take of the faceless workers putting together three enormous gray concrete slabs next to each other. The slow, meditative approach forces the viewer to think about the division and its significance as much as the filmmaker does. All that is missing is the dark humor of Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention and that 2002 feature’s critique of the harsh Israeli checkpoint system. Many Israelis and conservatives will not appreciate Wall, but there is no denying the heartfelt and professional way Simon Bitton expresses her position while capturing a bit of history in one of the most troubled regions of the world.
The Jewish Week Blurring The Line
What “Wall” is saying may be hard for people on both sides of the eponymous divide to handle. In Bitton’s feature-length documentary, which has its New York theatrical premiere on Aug. 26, she follows the Israeli-built security barrier around its perimeter, talking to inhabitants of the neighborhoods and villages she passes through. The film is a complex, visually rigorous work that is somber and dispiriting in its content but quite powerful in its presentation. Bitton (whose “Citizen Bishara” played in the Human Rights Watch Film Festival three years ago) is a Moroccan-born Israeli Jew, fluent in both Hebrew and Arabic, which gives her an advantage when she is interviewing. “ I was born in Morocco, in a traditional Jewish family,” Bitton recalled. “I went to the French school. My parents spoke Arabic among themselves and French with their children. When the family moved to Jerusalem in 1966, I learned Hebrew very quickly but continued to read in French and sing in Arabic.” Her route into film was a circuitous one, a reflection of her multicultural inclinations. “ I did my military service during the 1973 war: I saw death, and it made me a pacifist for life. At 20, I hitchhiked all over Europe like a hippie, then settled in Paris where I started to watch films. I was lucky to pass the entry exam of IDHEC, the French film school. Since then, I have lived between Paris and Jerusalem. I visit Morocco as often as possible. I have three countries and three cultures. I have always considered this to be a great asset, a rare privilege in a world where millions of people are stateless.” Perhaps it is that mindset that has made her so attuned to the subtleties of landscape and space. Conversely, the centrality of landscape and space are the reason that she envisioned “Wall” as a theatrical film from its very inception. “ The moment I had the idea for the film, it was obvious to me that ‘Wall’ was meant for the cinema,” she explained. “In this film, space is essential: The sky, the earth, the landscapes are full-fledged characters. In order to show the devastation of the landscape, I wanted to have wide-open shots with a real horizon line. If I could have the film in cinemascope, I would have done it! But of course, we had to shoot with portable video equipment, due to the difficulties of moving around in the field.” Bitton has a finely attuned eye for the visual rhythms of the road, and her film is often most compelling when all that is happening is landscape and fencing passing by, which is another reason she felt “Wall” had to be made with movie theaters in mind. “ I wanted to make a film that gives the viewer time to see, and this has become less and less possible on television. I wanted one-shot sequences, traveling shots long enough to be perceived as such, sounds rather than words and silences between the words — all these elements that cinema is generally made of and that television generally rejects.” And it is precisely those elements that are the film’s greatest strength, giving it the rhythmic complexity and intensity of a piece of chamber music. It is a comparison that Bitton finds quite pleasing. “Yes, for me filming a landscape is like listening to music,” she agreed. “It creates an emotion of rhythm, and editing is all about rhythm. The film rhythm is created by editing, but the shots have their own internal rhythm, with their own beginning and end. You cannot create a sequence-shot by editing, it has to be filmed as a sequence-shot, and in this film, most of the shots are sequence-shots. “ I felt this rhythm suits this landscape, very simple, pure and fragile. In this film I wanted to have a last, long and loving glimpse at the landscape, just before it is destroyed by the wall.” Clearly Bitton is deeply resentful of the rapidly growing barrier and its impact on the environment and, more important, the people on both sides. “ More kilometers of walls are being built every day,” she wrote, “putting more Palestinians into cages . . . And bringing more Israelis back to the mentality of [the] ghetto. [Israel] is a very small country, so everybody is affected by the wall, even if they don’t live close to it. The wall [has] become the essence of our lives, physically or emotionally.” She readily admits that she made no effort to seek ideological “balance” in her choice of interview subjects. To some extent, because her itinerary was dictated by the wall itself, the interviews were guided by chance, but she is utterly direct when asked about the points of view expressed. “ There is no balance of any kind,” she wrote. “The only criteria was the beauty of the strength of the sayings. It’s a road movie, a voyage, and when you come back from a trip, you remember the beautiful and the strong images and people you have met. Memory is not balanced, nor is life. I’m not dealing with statistics, I’m dealing with individuals.”
Gay City News review Mountain ranges and bodies of water have often served as natural boundaries between people and nations. A wall, however, is a man-made barrier most unna tural, and that is the message, both spoken and tacit, in the new documentary "Wall." Filmmaker Simone Bitton, an Israeli citizen who is from Morocco and considers herself Arabic, presents people from both sides of the wall, also known as the "security fence," currently being constructed by the Israeli government in its desperation to stop suicide bombings. The government's logic has been that since the Gaza Strip became completely walled in, very few bombers have come from that area. So now, a wall is going up around parts of the West Bank as well.The genius of Bitton's film is that she lets the wall and the country do a lot of the talking for her. She shows the countryside as panel after panel of concrete wall goes up to blot out the scenery. Even when the camera stands far from the wall, showing the entire landscape, the wall is rarely out of view. It is a glaringly intrusive construct in one of the world's most beautiful places.In addition to showing what an eyesore the wall is, Bitton also talks to a variety of people, from Israelis and Palestinians living directly adjacent to the wall to an Israeli military official who defends the wall and how it operates. More than just a wall, this new hardening of the border that puts Jews and Muslims literally on opposite sides also involves an intricate security zone that includes ditches, razor wire, dirt and paved roads, and electronic sensors. Watchtowers punctuate the wall to give soldiers convenient vantage points. And of course, it costs millions of dollars per kilometer of "security."The terrorists and the bureaucrats are far from the heart of this film, though, as Bitton speaks to everyday people affected by the new security measure. She speaks to Palestinians hired to build the wall, who have grabbed on to the only sure employment they have. Israelis acknowledge that Palestinians will be separated from their farms and their jobs on the far side of the wall, making what was once a simple walk to work an ordeal of lengthy waits at checkpoints.The wall even separates friends. An Israeli man who became close to the mayor of the neighboring Palestinian town can no longer host his friend for dinner or go to the movies with him.Some of the Palestinians talk of Israeli plots to steal their land, but most focus more on how the wall makes peace seem even more elusive. People from both sides resent being told, "Israeli Jews on this side, Muslims on this side." And the military man’s talk of electronic sensors and soldiers showing up "within minutes" is undercut by Bitton's footage of Palestinians simply climbing over the wall in more populated areas. Like water, people always seek the most direct route.There are many films that take on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and history, but "Wall" details the problems when negotiation ceases to be a credible means of resolving conflict. The film appeals more to the heart than it does to politics or history, showing in stark, but simple terms the futility of dividing a house that has the potential to stand united, if in fact the people we meet in "Wall" are indicative of a silent majority in the area, too afraid to speak up. Must of the wall Bitton films is painted, with political graffiti or trompe l'oeil murals, reminiscent of another divisive barrier that in the end fell famously.
Film Forward
A government-sponsored 500-km expanse separating and "protecting" the Israelis from the Palestinians, the wall is the film's glaring and robust protagonist - appearing in practically every scene of the documentary, and possessing an alarming and stridently real voice. Bitton's task has not been a simple one: engaging her audience while filming laboriously long shots of this immobile, man-made object. But it is these outwardly lackluster moments (or minutes, rather) that give the viewer time to reflect what a stretch of concrete can symbolize: a step backward for humanity, the physical embodiment of man's dangerous psychological dependence on hate, and his furtive need for alienation. One need not be an expert on Israeli-Palestinian relations to understand just how this governmental project is burdening Jerusalem's inhabitants. The many interwoven interviews with civilians on both sides reveal a surprisingly impartial view of the seething injustice seeping through either side. The documentary does not exaggerate nor does it embellish its purpose in any way: it is about the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, and, in some ways, the possibility of hope that both long to taste. Bitton is quite familiar with her subject matter as some of her past works have been equally identity-driven: The Bombing (1998), a documentary following a suicide bombing in Jerusalem, and Palestine: Story of a Land (1993), recording the history of Palestine with the aid of archival clips. The irony-drenched Wall is, in many ways, essential. It speaks to a current world situation which must be examined and contemplated, if for no other reason so that the Western viewer realizes his fortune in owning a backyard where he need not fear the sudden death of his children because of sectarian violence; where he is allowed to know and love his neighbor, or choose not to. The Moroccan-born, Jewish-Arab documentarian's purpose is clear: to fight contre la guerre camera in arm, rather than revolver. --Parisa Vaziri
TV GUIDE
NY Times
The French filmmaker Simone Bitton takes a measured look at the barrier in her documentary "Wall," a film that considers hard-core political realities alongside agonizing personal truths. A self-described Arab Jew, Ms. Bitton was born in Morocco, educated at a French school and partly brought up in Israel. She has said that she completed her military service during the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and the experience turned her into a lifelong pacifist. She attended a prestigious French film school and now lives in Paris and Jerusalem, returning to Morocco when she can and making documentaries about Middle Eastern subjects. One such film, "The Bombing," traces the effects of a Palestinian suicide bombing in Jerusalem on the families of both the perpetrators and their victims. The very name of her latest film indicates that Ms. Bitton isn't interested in playing the familiar documentary game of feigned impartiality. The Israeli Defense Ministry calls the barrier a security fence (and an antiterrorist fence), but it is usually called a wall by its detractors. Everyone in the world seems to have an opinion: it has also been called an "apartheid wall" (Al Jazeera), "a racial separation wall" (the Arab League) and "unlawful" (Britain's foreign secretary, Jack Straw). As might be expected, given both its impact on the surrounding populations and the history of the Jewish state, discussions about the barrier tend to be contentious, extremely partisan and, on occasion, fraught with ugly undertones, as one 2004 headline in The Guardian made abundantly clear: "Israelis Hasten Land Grab in Shadow of Wall." The barrier fills Ms. Bitton with anguish, but perhaps because she straddles two identities and speaks from both sides of the divide (or perhaps because she studied in France), she tempers her despair with cool intellect and appreciable irony. Laying her cards on the table, she opens the film with a traveling shot of a concrete section of the barrier covered in bright, Matisse-like figures and doves. Initially, the only sounds are laughing children and chirping birds. "What's this?" an unseen woman suddenly says. "The wall," answers a young girl, also off-camera." "What for?" asks the woman. "They shoot Arabs from here," says the girl. "No," says a second girl, "Arabs shoot at us." The woman, whom we will later recognize as Ms. Bitton, then asks, "Who shoots at who?" This last question reverberates throughout the film as Ms. Bitton speaks with Israelis and Palestinians grappling with and occasionally breaching the barrier. All the discussions are eye-opening - the Iraqi who longs to return home because life is easier there; the Israeli who struck up a friendship with a Palestinian, whom, because of the barrier, he has never met. The most startling interviews, however, are those with Amos Yaron, the director general of Israel's Defense Ministry, who makes the government's case for the fence, and with a kibbutz dweller named Shuli Dichter. As he drives inside the West Bank gesturing at the fruit trees and dusty hills, Mr. Dichter speaks of the "mad love" Israelis have for the land and how those who survived the shtetls and ghettos of Lodz settled a country defined by "closure and enclosure." Ms. Bitton does not respond to Mr. Dichter's comments, at least not directly. Instead, in a powerful series of images that close her film, she points her camera at the barrier and waits for it to reveal truths that cannot be measured in kilometers and policy. What she shows us, simply, are people talking with one another through gaps in the barrier and clambering over the concrete and barbed wire, while a (presumably Israeli) helicopter hovers above. Whatever you believe about the barrier, its effectiveness and its meaning, the images of these men and women contravening this costly, ostensibly secure edifice - including the couple who pass their baby from one side to the other - underscore that there are few things in the world stronger than the human will.
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