Reverse Shot A different angle on moving images—past, present, and future

Text of Light No. 4

Skyfall
By Jordan Cronk

If one of the primary roles of art is to confront and contextualize the world’s ills, then filmmakers and programmers rose to the occasion in 2024. I don’t recall, for example, a time when so many Palestinian films were presented at festivals worldwide—a sadly timely reminder of how blinkered even the most liberal-minded organizations can be when not directly pressed to respond to current events. No Other Land, a documentary about the destruction of a village in the West Bank and the forced displacement of its populace by Israeli soldiers, is the most high-profile of these works, having won two prizes (in contentious fashion) upon its premiere at the Berlinale before arriving Stateside in the fall to near-universal acclaim, despite not having U.S. distribution. (Rather than continue to wait on gun-shy distributors, the filmmakers decided to book the film in theaters themselves, thus making it eligible for critics’ lists and industry awards; it was ultimately nominated for an Oscar.) With four credited directors, including the film’s two primary subjects and de facto spokesmen, Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham, a Palestinian activist and Israeli journalist, respectively, it’s an urgent and necessary watch—not to mention a rare call to action that, in its very makeup, leads by example.

No Other Land is a film situated at ground level, depicting innocent people literally fighting to protect not only their homes but also their entire way of being. Three other films from last year took a bird’s eye view to similar subject matter. In each of these works—Daniel Mann’s Under a Blue Sun, Kamal Aljafari’s UNDR, and Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s The Diary of a Sky—notions of surveillance and imperialism take shape in the contested airspace that bridges Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon. Seen at steady intervals throughout the year, they were for me a regular reminder for me of cinema’s ability to lend form to the vast and unfathomable, and to concepts as fraught as borders and abstract as divine right. Where the experience of watching No Other Land is almost entirely visceral—and all the more devastating as a result—these films are more unassuming, suggestive, and discursive. Of course, none of these approaches are inherently superior, but I’ve admittedly found myself turning over the abstractions and ambiguities of the latter three more often in the months since first seeing them than I have No Other Land, which hits so hard that it’s difficult to bring oneself to think back on it in anything but abject horror.

In Mann’s pop-historical essay, the Israeli-born, London-based filmmaker parlays the strange production particulars of the 1988 Sylvester Stallone vehicle Rambo III into a personal-political reckoning with Hollywood propaganda and the cinematic representation of war. Set in Afghanistan but shot in Israel’s Negev Desert, the third Rambo film follows Stallone’s titular Vietnam War veteran to Khōst, where his friend, a U.S. military colonel, is being held hostage by the Soviets—which, naturally, Rambo will soon heroically dispatch in a rousing depiction of American exceptionalism.

Mann’s film, which is structured around a series of unanswered emails the filmmaker sent to Stallone about the project’s political messaging, explores the original shooting locations in the present day and offers commentary on the collaboration between Carolco Pictures, the production company behind the Rambo franchise, and the Israeli Defense Forces. As Mann tells it, director Peter MacDonald utilized IDF flyover routines for the movie’s war scenes, which were then tinted blue to disguise the look of the Israeli desert—a suitably symbolic gloss on the film’s colonialist undertones, which are further highlighted by Mann’s encounters with a number of Palestinian locals who worked on the film. None of these contradictions seemed to have occurred to the team behind Rambo III; at one point, a crew member is seen in a behind-the-scenes press clip jokingly referring to the film as “Rambo of Arabia.” Indeed, as Under a Blue Sun demonstrates, even the most mindless action flick can act as an object of distortion, if not outright propaganda.

Misrepresentation is also a key theme in the work of Aljafari, a Palestinian filmmaker whose latest feature, A Fidai Film (2024), reappropriates still and moving images stolen from the Palestinian Research Center during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. UNDR, an 18-minute short that premiered just a few months before A Fidai Film, is similarly accomplished and in some ways even more haunting than its widely lauded successor. Here, the use of archival materials is less an act of reclamation than a means to construct a very specific visual record—namely of Israel’s aerial surveillance of Palestine and its surrounding territories.

As helicopter footage surveys the desert, certain motifs arise: farmers at work, children at play, hillside detonations, and views of various ancient fortresses and fortifications (Masada, Herodium, et al) located in and around the West Bank. Accompanied only by ambient reverberations, the occasional disembodied voice, and recurrent blasts of dynamite (Attila Faravelli deserves special mention here for the striking sound design), the images—which range in quality and appear to come from a combination of amateur, state-sanctioned, and popular media sources from any number of time periods—generate an unnervingly cyclical rhythm that speaks, in Aljafari’s words, to the “calculated incursions” that continue to be carried out in this region from above as frequently as they do from below.

The Diary of a Sky shifts the perspective from surveiller to surveilled. Like Aljafari, Hamdan, a Jordanian artist living in Beirut, looks at the IDF’s violations of Lebanese airspace. Culled from data collected by the UN since 2006, the film pairs text and figures related to the intrusions with cellphone footage shot by locals of the jets, drones, helicopters, and gliders that, during the pandemic, contributed to the country’s unprecedented noise levels—a situation amplified in no small part by the hum of generators needed to make up for the pervasive lack of electricity. What it all amounts to is an aural din that acts as a form of psychological warfare. Or, as one of the amateur cameramen puts it: “Not loud enough to be terrifying but frequent enough to fuel a near constant dread.”

By that same token, the images of jet formations and colorful contrails streaked across the bright blue sky aren’t particularly threatening in and of themselves, and in fact are quite striking when assembled into a montage that situates their variously arcing and oblique configurations into a matrix of accumulating patterns. It’s only with the context provided by the on-screen data and bits of civilian commentary that the implications of these flyover assignments become apparent. Maybe it’s the droning soundscape and snippets of disembodied dialogue, but what it most reminds me of, at least spiritually, is the way the Canadian post-rock band Godspeed You! Black Emperor conveys its politics through a largely instrumental musical attack. If the name of the group’s new album, No Title as of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead—a reference to the death toll in Gaza at the time of the record’s release—is less poetic than that of Hamdan’s film, it performs a function equal, in both power and insight, to the statistics that matter-of-factly introduce each successive sequence.

As I began writing this column, wildfires were running rampant across Los Angeles, the city I’ve called home for 15 years. Over in New Jersey, unidentified drones have been flying above the skyline since the first unexplained sighting. Neither of these situations can be compared to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, but they nonetheless speak to the civic and institutional neglect gripping much of the world—not to mention the growing sense that, not unlike COVID, the biggest threat to humanity may be that which we’re not only unable to plan for but which we can’t immediately comprehend or even perceive, whether that be the lingering airborne toxins in L.A. or the source of the drones in Jersey.

In light of all this, I decided against using this space, as I did last year, to look back at the past 12 months in experimental cinema, which for me was pretty thin on the whole. If these works by Mann, Aljafari, and Hamdan are the ones that have lingered in my mind longest, it’s likely because of their ability to create meaning from—and add context to—otherwise unassuming incidents and events. In the end it matters little that Mann’s film, due to its generally playful if subversive spirit, could reasonably be included as an extra on the next Rambo III home video release, or that Hamdan’s film, despite successfully being screened at numerous festivals, might be better suited to a museum presentation (in the exact opposite way that Aljafari’s short could easily be overlooked if installed in a gallery). As each of these films illustrates, there are plenty of avenues to get your message across and a multitude of ways to frame the historical present. It’s up to the artist to find the proper form, and at the same time stand firm in their convictions, even as forces conspire to silence and suppress the truth.