Once a Wall, or Ripple Remains

Tirtza Even

United States

Synopsis

Once A Wall, or Ripple Remains is a manifold document that questions the stability of any perception, record, or rendering of a series of encounters which took place in the Summer and Fall of 1998 in the Occupied Territory of Palestine. The various iterations of the project, spanning more than ten years and a wide range of media (from single channel video, CD-ROM, website, to written text, 3-D animation, and interactive installation) reflect and undermine each other’s reports, detecting gaps, contradiction and bias in the perception and mediation of the primary encounters that set the trail of records in motion. Together they form a shifting history not only of the experiences themselves, but of each moment’s viewing and of its articulation.

REVIEW

This experimental film, also identified as a documentary, needs all of its 66 minutes as well as the time it takes for the credits to run to establish some coherence. Working backwards from the credits, the audience will understand that this is an Arab + Israeli collaboration, that it is funded by various sources from the University of Michigan, that among the many walls it depicts, the Apartheid Wall is also included, and many other tidbits of information that help clarify the film's point of view. Specifically, it is anti-war, anti-occupation, and ultimately anti-Israel, its imagery carefully connecting all who in the film's view are or have been oppressed, from South Africa to "Palestine." Though independent of the image, the sound strategy works with it, alternating and blending readings and pronouncements in English, Hebrew, and Arabic that generally address the plight of children and the physical destruction wrought by war.

When viewers approach this film (as all but reviewers or students will), only once and from the beginning, they will access the point of view but search in vain for an intellectual argument in defense of that point of view. The visual and aural presentation of filmic material here is not designed to "document" an argument. Moving slowly from image to black to image again, the film does, in fact, submit a dazzling variety of cinematic manipulations for a viewer' consideration: flashes, cut-outs, animation, 3D projections, drawings, and lettering. There are moments when the point of view is manifest, as when the painting or poster of Arafat gazes from the wall or when the word "Palestine" is clearly printed in Roman lettering within many words scrawled in Arabic. Also, the recurring presence of lovely and mysterious folded paper birds is eventually explained by one of the readings. But such moments of appeal to the intellect are occasional. For most of its minutes, the film's appeal is non-verbal and emotional, documenting only how the filmmaker feels, not how or why she believes in the cause. How one feels is unassailable and thus not debatable, but a film that offers no argument is self expression, more "fiction" than "documentary," experimental or not. If categorized as an installation project, it could play continuously in an art gallery or museum, offering often poetic images of walls, both constructed and natural, and in such a space, be very much appreciated for its art and deep convictions.

-Tom Friedmann