Maia Levy is the unexpected subject of Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s The Viewing Booth
THE VIEWING BOOTH (Ra’anan Alexandrowicz, 2020)
Museum of the Moving Image, Bartos Screening Room
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
August 6-15
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
“There’s a lot for me to learn from your viewing,” Israeli filmmaker Ra’anan Alexandrowicz tells Jewish American college student Maia Levy before turning the camera on us in the ingenious documentary The Viewing Booth, running August 6-15 at the Museum of the Moving Image. The seventy-one-minute work developed out of an experiment Alexandrowicz was doing at Temple University in Philadelphia, individually filming a small group of young men and women watching internet video clips of interactions between Israelis and Palestinians in the occupied territories of the Gaza Strip; in previous films such as The Law in These Parts and The Inner Tour — both of which will also be shown at MoMI — the Jerusalem-born Alexandrowicz has made clear his support of the Palestinians in this conflict. But along the way, his focus switched specifically to Levy, whose thoughtful, careful evaluations of the scenes and acknowledgment of her pro-Israel bias are mesmerizing. We end up seeing far more of Levy’s captivating face and exploring eyes than the videos themselves as the film challenges the viewer to rethink how they experience politically charged videos.
The film takes place in a small studio at Temple, where Levy sits in a closed-off room with a large window; Alexandrowicz mans a table with two monitors and editing equipment that he adjusts as Levy observes the videos. The director cuts between shots of Levy’s face, the videos themselves, and him watching Levy on his monitors, occasionally speaking with her. Six months later, he invites Levy back so she can watch herself watching the videos and comment on that as well. It’s absolutely gripping studying Levy as she interprets and reinterprets the videos, some of which were posted by B’Tselem, the Jerusalem-based Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, whose mission is to end the occupation; others are from unidentified sources. Alexandrowicz does not give Levy any additional details about the clips, even though he knows more about some of them, instead letting her navigate the images as if she were home by herself, surfing the internet.
In one scene, a Palestinian boy hugs an Israeli soldier who gives him food. In another, a group of young men throw rocks at someone recording them from an apartment, unclear at first who is who. In a third, an Israeli soldier snatches a young Palestinian boy and a second soldier kicks the child. The majority of the film concentrates on a longer video of a masked Israeli military unit searching the home of a Palestinian family in the middle of the night, forcing the parents to wake up the children as rifles are pointed at them. Levy scrutinizes every detail of the video, wondering if it was staged, considering what was happening just off camera, thinking the boy might be lying when he gives a wrong name that his father quickly corrects.
Levy innately understands that she brings her own personal bias and mistrust of B’Tselem to her interpretation. “I view it from an objective point,” she says. “I don’t really get my information from it. The point is, these things do happen; whether they skew the filming and everything, it still does happen, it’s still there. Yeah, they probably play a lot with it, and there is a lot of bias and things and they don’t show you the whole picture, but, I guess it’s true to some extent. That’s what it seems like.” This questioning of what is real and what isn’t is intriguing to Alexandrowicz, a documentarian whose career has been spent making nonfiction films; Levy even notes that Alexandrowicz makes choices — subjects, edits, camera angles — that impact what people see and don’t see in his work.
In his 2018 essay “50 Years of Documentation: A Brief History of the Documentation of the Israeli Occupation,” Alexandrowicz writes, “After viewing hundreds of news reports, films, and online videos about this subject, I found myself asking: What has all this documentation achieved? What has been the documentation’s role in this tragic piece of history? Visual culture scholars have long argued that images do not merely depict reality; they also perform and create reality. Then what is the relationship between the audiovisual documentation of the Israeli Occupation and the reality it claims to portray? These questions have led me to a wider inquiry about the role that documentation practices play in shaping historical, political, and social issues.” The Viewing Booth might ostensibly be about Israelis and Palestinians, but it also illuminates the great divide in America as political affiliation appears to affect how we evaluate actual footage; it seems impossible to escape from the diametrically opposed analyses of the murder of George Floyd, the BLM protests, the January 6 insurrection, and a Catholic high school student’s interaction with a Native American man at a MAGA rally.
Recognizing that many people won’t even watch videos that they presuppose will contradict their belief system, Levy offers, “I think people are scared, that they don’t watch them because they’re scared that they’re going to change their minds about it. They’re going to be, like, Wow, this is bad, and maybe I’m not so pro-Israel as I thought I would be. I think if you accept reality, then these things don’t really make or break your viewpoints. I don’t think that this can really, like . . . they can be informative to some extent, but you have to be careful.”
Alexandrowicz was inspired to make the film by Virginia Woolf’s book Three Guineas One, which grew out of a letter she was responding to about how to prevent war; she begins by discussing the visual depiction of war in newspapers and magazines. “But besides these pictures of other people’s lives and minds — these biographies and histories — there are also other pictures — pictures of actual facts; photographs. Photographs, of course, are not arguments addressed to the reason; they are simply statements of fact addressed to the eye. But in that very simplicity there may be some help. Let us see then whether when we look at the same photographs we feel the same things.” As we’ve learned over these last few years, we most often see and feel what we want to see and feel despite watching the same exact nonfiction footage.
The Israeli title of The Viewing Booth is The Mirror, a much more apt name, as we put ourselves in Levy’s position, with all our inherent biases and fears, and hopefully look at ourselves to reflect on how we watch such videos, which generally come to us through social media algorithms that keep us in our preferred bubbles or from friends who think as we do, reinforcing our beliefs. “You are the viewer that I’ve been making these films for,” Alexandrowicz tells Levy. In the case of The Viewing Booth, that is not quite true; we are all the viewers he has made this film for.
Alexandrowicz will be at MoMI for a live conversation with film critic Alissa Wilkinson following the 7:00 screening on August 6, and he will be back for the 5:00 screening on August 8 with Levy. The Viewing Booth might not change your belief system, but it will change the way you experience online nonfiction video.