Interview: James Longley ('Gaza Strip') - Page 2

Although you choose what is seen and in what order, the people you interview say what they think and you do not manipulate the viewer’s opinion of them through music or mise-en-scene.

I actually am manipulating the viewer, like any filmmaker. It can't be helped. I did make music and put it in the film — it's everywhere. I took fragments of Bach and Shostakovitch and the sound of people talking, etc — and warped them into ambient sound beds that are strewn everywhere in the film. When an Israeli IDF jeep appears in one scene, for example, we hear a tortured version of a Bach aria that sounds like a cross between Humphrey Bogart barfing black tar and several monkeys being killed at once. But it's all done in such a way that few people actually notice.

The viewer is free to see what you show and come away with their own thoughts.

That's true enough.

Would the inclusion of an Israeli-Jewish point of view (as many critics suggest) actually make your film more propagandist, as it would offer an inaccurate portrayal of the Gaza Strip?

Maybe. But I guess my point in leaving out the Israelis was that the Palestinians are a valid subject for documentary film by themselves, without an opposing Israeli narrative thrown in to contradict them.

As long as you accept that all films are basically subjective constructions, then you are also forced to admit that filmmakers who insist on having "both sides" of an argument are just as subjective in their construction of the argument that they are pretending to document objectively. So why bother? I wanted to make a film about the Palestinians because I knew less about them — so that's what I did. I don't believe any of this nonsense about objectivity in media.

Throughout the film, your camera lingers on faces. However, I noticed that as the film progressed you included fewer shots of smiling faces and more shots of serious, or frightened ones. Was this intentional?

Not really — the film is mostly chronological, and it so happened that the situation grew worse as I was documenting it, so the people became more serious.

Article Author: Akromatika

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