Here and elsewhere. Palestine-Israel in Essay Films

For seventy years the Middle East conflict has been attracting the attention around the globe. It seems unresolvable, it lets feelings run high, it is a slow-burner on all channels. Moreover, media images of this conflict have been influencing the minds of actors and spectators. The study "`Here and elsewhere` Palestine-Israel and the essay film (1960-2010)" questions how cinema and media images of Israel- Palestine have changed in the last decades and demonstrates how they have become part of the conflict themselves. The author analyzes films by filmmakers who explicitly deal with the relationship between image and politics neither fiction nor documentary films, but fascinating hybrids that film studies have agreed to call "essay films" or "essayistic films". These films do not try to depict or stage the realities of Israel-Palestine, but to reflect on the way we perceive these realities. The filmmakers try "essayer" means "to try" in French to render visible that "reality" is always already shaped by a subjective perspective and by a long chain of media images. The study analyses how the filmmakers manage to "fluidify" conventional images of Israel-Palestine in different ways and to thereby generate new sights, emotions and perspectives for acting. This publication is the first one to extensively highlight the reflection of the Middle East problem within the genre of the film essay. In the first part the author develops his leading questions and methods and discusses the concept of thinking images. The second part presents four explorations of cinematic "fields of forces": It begins with an analysis of Chris Markers "Description of a Struggle" from 1960. For the first time the author reconstructs the complicated history of this film, which could not be seen for decades and compares it with "Description of a Memory" by the young Israeli filmmaker Dan Geva. Secondly, a detailed analysis of the eponymous film "Here and elsewhere" (1976) by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville is given. Combining various sources the author proposes a reconstruction of the unfinished film "Till Victory!" (1969) by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, an aborted film project that became the centerpiece of the later "Here and elswhere". Furthermore, the study focuses on two radical works of contemporary Israeli cinema: "The Angel of History" (2000) by Ariella Azoulay and "Forgiveness (2006) by Udi Aloni. Finally it examines "Jinga48" (2009) by Ula Tabari and "The Time That Remains (2009) by Elia Suleiman, two exceptional key works of contemporary Palestinian cinema. The analysis of these examples demonstrates the aesthetic and political potential of essayistic works of art: These films constitute different politics of the image, they assume that we can only negotiate interpretations of the Real, but not "objective" images of Israel-Palestine. They enable those who watch them filmmakers and spectators to change their ways of seeing and thereby transform themselves.