Beyond the Screen

A film ends. The people whose lives it touches remain. They return to a street, a family, a language, a fear, or a disagreement that the final credits cannot resolve. Some have no home to return to. Others discover that their country, their suffering, or their responsibilities have acquired a public meaning in a screening room far away. Cinema belongs to this distance between lived experience and what another person can understand of it.

In my previous article, Light Had Learned to Remember, the moving image appeared as a passage through time: a gesture could survive its maker, an instant could acquire a future. Yet preservation brought a responsibility: “Cinema created an unprecedented form of evidence while simultaneously requiring us to learn how that evidence should be read.” That question becomes particularly demanding when the people concerned are still living through war, bereavement, and profound disagreement.

The controversy surrounding NAZA, directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, brings this responsibility into focus. Its title, נז״א, abbreviates נזק אגבי, nezek agavi, “collateral damage.” In the military context addressed by the documentary, it concerns anticipated civilian harm accompanying an attack on a military target. The title itself raises a question about language: How does a technical designation convey the human reality it describes?

The film received the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. Its allegations concerning Israeli military operations in Gaza have been rejected by the Israeli military. Testimony, artistic recognition, and political confrontation have consequently entered the same public space, although they remain different things (Davar).

The limits of this reflection should be clear: it is written without having seen the film and makes no claim to authenticate its witnesses, assess its editing, or judge the filmmakers’ intentions. Its subject is the question surrounding its reception: what can a film help us understand, and what must we still investigate beyond the screen?

According to published descriptions, NAZA relies largely on anonymous testimony from Israeli soldiers and intelligence personnel, filmed on Tel Aviv rooftops, with faces and voices digitally altered. It reportedly contains very little graphic imagery from Gaza. Its described form, therefore, places considerable weight on speech and on the viewer’s relationship with a concealed witness (Davar).

Filming an event and filming someone recounting an event produce different records. In the second case, the camera directly records the act of testimony. The events described must be approached through the witness’s knowledge and whatever corroboration can be established. This distinction identifies the questions appropriate to testimony: What was directly observed? What was learned from others, and how far did a particular role provide knowledge of wider decisions?

Anonymity may permit important testimony to emerge while limiting the audience’s capacity to make independent checks. Neither concealment nor apparent sincerity settles the truth of an account. Responsible listening leaves room for attention, uncertainty, and investigation. The force of a statement and the scope of what it establishes require separate consideration.

The earlier cinema article considered the filmed instant as a kind of hapax: something that happened once, whose image can nevertheless be repeated. Recorded testimony adds another complexity. A person speaks at a particular moment, from a particular state of knowledge. The recording persists even if that person later remembers more, corrects a detail, or changes an interpretation. The image preserves a moment of understanding; it cannot guarantee that understanding was complete.

Cinema also learned to cut. Montage brings places and events together without requiring the spectator to travel between them. Such proximity can disclose relationships that ordinary life allows people to overlook. It can also suggest connections requiring further explanation. Sequence carries an argument, even when no narrator states one. Selection is unavoidable, and its effects deserve scrutiny.

These choices continue beyond the original production. A qualification disappears from an excerpt; one sentence travels farther than its explanation. On a smartphone, a passage acquires another context in a news report, another in a social media post, and another in a private message. Each journey can alter what its recipient believes it establishes.

The conditions under which material becomes available deserve equal attention. “Can this place be filmed?” sounds simple until one asks who holds the camera. A resident recording from a window, a local journalist, a visiting crew, and someone accompanying armed forces do not possess identical opportunities or face identical dangers. Recording something does not necessarily mean being able to investigate freely.

Gaza cannot be described as a place from which no images exist. Palestinian journalists and residents have recorded life and destruction there. The further questions concern the circumstances of that work and the possibilities for independent investigation. Likewise, calling Israel, the West Bank, or southern Lebanon “filmable” leaves much unexplained. Access concerns particular people, places, times, and authorities.

Missing footage cannot by itself establish that something did not happen. An existing image cannot answer every question about its circumstances. Danger, exclusion, protection of a person, and artistic decisions can all affect what becomes visible. The screen offers material for inquiry; visibility alone cannot complete it.

Publicity, reviews, prizes, and condemnations surround the work with further interpretations. Many people encounter these before seeing the film. An ovation records a response; a prize records a jury’s decision. Both can direct attention toward testimony deserving examination, but neither performs that examination for everyone else. An official rejection likewise requires consideration of its reasons and supporting evidence.

The relationships behind a production deserve transparency. The Biennale lists NAZA as a United Kingdom production by The Guardian and JW Films, directed by the two Israeli filmmakers. The Guardian thus participates in producing a work it also covers. This is relevant context without constituting a verdict on its testimony. National designations explain only part of how a film is made and travels (La Biennale di Venezia).

The technology travels, while ways of seeing remain culturally particular. The same testimony enters different histories of trust, fear, family memory, and political expectation. Proximity and distance each make certain things visible and leave others insufficiently examined. Therefore, the controversy confronts us with the sometimes unsteady human capacity to understand what exists. Grief, allegiance, and expectation can affect what we are prepared to hear. Awareness of this vulnerability gives inquiry a reason to continue.

For those living in the Land, the relationship between local experience and international interpretation has a particular weight. The image of a century-long laboratory comes to mind: languages, institutions, national aspirations, religious inheritances, and technologies meet, develop, and collide under almost continuous observation. Yet “laboratory” must remain an uneasy metaphor. Nobody’s bereavement exists to prove a theory. No population has volunteered to become material for another society’s moral education.

The inhabitants also think, create, investigate, and disagree. They participate in interpreting their own lives. Filmmakers are responsible for their work; governments for their decisions, and witnesses for what they can substantiate. None automatically speaks for an entire people. Anger makes these distinctions harder to maintain precisely when they become most necessary.

Israel’s turmoil and the suffering across the Middle East cannot be understood through a contest over whose pain may be acknowledged first. Jewish Israelis, Palestinian citizens of Israel, Druze, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, Lebanese families, and other communities have distinct experiences and internal disagreements. Naming them together must preserve differences in circumstance, power, and responsibility.

Acknowledging one community’s suffering need not diminish another’s. This requires neither equal blame nor a declaration that every account has equal validity. It requires attention to particular claims and actions and resistance to turning them into permanent characteristics of whole populations. Precision becomes a form of care when careless language can deepen an existing wound.

For an Orthodox priest and a Talmudist, remaining available to all and to each gives this question a further dimension. Pastoral attention and the patient examination of words, testimony, and interpretation meet here. What has been said? What can be established? What remains unresolved? Such attention reaches people who may be unable to listen to one another. It leaves room for truth, accountability, and the person who cannot yet speak.

The turning of the year gives these questions another horizon. Rosh Hashanah, the Coptic Nayrouz, and the Byzantine ecclesiastical New Year mark distinct beginnings in this season. September 1 (Gregorian cal.)/15 (Julian cal.) in the Orthodox calendar also brings prayer for creation into attention. These observances retain their particular histories and meanings while inviting reflection on the time entrusted to human beings.

Cinema continually acquires new capacities: to record, enlarge, restore, transmit, and transform. These powers ask something of the viewer as well. A sharper image does not necessarily produce a more truthful judgment. Renewal may begin in the willingness to revisit an impression, correct a statement, or hear someone whom an earlier certainty had excluded.

The penitential words give this willingness a language:

סלח לנו, מחל לנו, כפר לנו.

Forgive us, pardon us, and grant us atonement.

Alongside that plea stands the biblical verse included in the Kippur prayer:

ונסלח לכל עדת בני ישראל ולגר הגר בתוכם כי לכל העם בשגגה.

“And the whole congregation of the children of Israel shall be forgiven, and the stranger dwelling among them, for the whole people acted in error” (Numbers 15:26).

The stranger dwelling among them is included in the promise. Byzantine prayer, likewise, asks forgiveness for transgressions “voluntary and involuntary,” committed in knowledge or ignorance (Orthodox prayer before Communion). These prayers do not establish that every wrong was inadvertent or relieve anyone of responsibility. They place the person who judges within the human need for examination, correction, and mercy.

A new year cannot erase what happened. It opens time in which our response may become more truthful. The earlier cinema article spoke of repair: damaged images could be restored, fragments recovered, and neglected traces given another future. Public understanding requires a comparable willingness to return to material. New evidence may deepen, qualify, or overturn an initial reading. Serious attention must remain open to that continuing work.

What can be filmed, what can be testified to, and what a viewer can reasonably conclude are related questions, each with its own limits. A film enters public discussion without containing the whole reality of a land and its peoples. Its capacity to move us can become the beginning of further attention.

Light had learned to remember. Those who watch must continue learning how to understand. Beyond the screen, people still have to bury their dead, care for the living, answer for decisions, and inhabit the coming day. Whatever judgment a film eventually earns, our attention owes something to those continuing lives.