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Reviews
"This
is simple, but strong, journalism, the kind that tells a distressing story. It
is educational reportage, the kind you wish there would be more of on television." "A
documentary to make the stones weep." "A
chilling docu showing everyday life in the Gaza Strip ... a must-see for TVs interested
in informing the public." "As a perspective that is largely excluded from American attention, it deserves the widest possible audience." -- Jane Adas, The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs read the full review "Longley constructs, through the eloquent editing of sound and vision, a riveting particularity so vivid that it transcends its physical borders to illuminate "everyday" life in divided cities, territories, and countries across the globe. " -- Lesley Smith, Pop Matters read the full review "... offering sequences that could rival Bunuel or Fellini ... one of the most important documentaries of recent times." -- Phil Hall, Film Threat (www.filmthreat.com) read the full review "Taking a step away from the back and forth over who has a right to be where that is at the heart of the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict, this important documentary from American filmmaker James Longley looks closely at the toll it has taken on people who are among those most affected by the violence: Palestinian children." -- Ken Fox, TV Guide : MovieGuide (www.tvguide.com) read the full review "In Gaza Strip the camera never blinks ... at once grim, eloquent and searing, a film with a riveting particularity all its own." -- Fawaz Turki, Arab News (www.arabnews.com) read the full review "... well-made and harrowing documentary ... you can understand my desperate desire not to believe what I was seeing." -- Jordan Hiller, www.bangitout.com (linked here) read the full review "... riveting documentary ..." -- Peter S. Scholtes, City Pages read the full review "Every American would do well to see this reality." -- Ali Asadullah, www.islam-online.net read the full review "This documentary is vastly revealing ... and it's bigger than a summer blockbuster, more important than all our movie stars or the academy awards ..." -- StaticMultimedia.com read the full review "Longley's cinema verite film is sometimes harrowing to the point of obscenity ... Gaza Strip is viscerally, nauseatingly effective." -- Michael O'Sullivan, The Washington Post read the full review "Longley has presented convincing evidence that the Israeli occupation has created criminal and dehumanizing conditions for the people of the Gaza Strip. One would hope that this documentary would be broadcast on American television to reach the largest possible audience." -- Pamela Nice, AlJadid -- vol. 8, No. 39, Spring 2002 read the full review "Beautiful, heartbreaking, raw and revealing ..." -- Stephanie Saldana, The Daily Star read the full review Foreign Language Press: Review in Neuer Zurcher Zeitung of documentaries in the Locarno International Film Festival (in German) read the review Review from www.webdo.ch : Locarno International Film Festival 2002 supplement (in French) read the review Review in Al Hayat (in Arabic) -- August 10, 2002. Article begins on Page 1 and continues on Page 6. Spanish language translation of A. O. Scott's review in the August 1, 2002, issue of The New York Times read the review Spanish language article in ESCENARIO, San Juan, Puerto Rico, June 8, 2002. Spanish language review in En Rojo, Puerto Rico, July 11, 2002. Spanish language article in EL NUEVO DIA, Puerto Rico, June 14, 2002. Additional Articles and transcripts: Radio review by Ken Shulman for WBUR Boston on the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. Interview with James Longley conducted by Jane Adas about the making of Gaza Strip in Framework, The Journal of Cinema and Media, Volume 43, No. 2 Fall 2002. read the interview Excerpt of an exhibit constructed by the Boston Committee for Palestinian Rights that includes fragments of James Longley's journals from the Gaza Strip. view the excerpt Report of a meeting of the group Israeli-Palestinian Bereaved Families for Peace in Jerusalem, which included a screening of Gaza Strip followed by a discussion. read the report Alan Gilbert reflects on the past and future of avant-garde film in the London-based avant-gardist journal of poetics research PORES. read the article Critique and response in the Yale Herald following a screening of Gaza Strip at Yale University. read the articles "Gaza Strip Screening Sparks Debate" -- article by Angela Sapp in Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs' publication, Communique, following the screening of a rough cut of Gaza Strip at SIPA. download PDF file Letter to the editor of the Chicago Reader by David Roet, Deputy Consul General of Israel to the Midwest, following a controversial review of Gaza Strip by the Chicago Reader's Ted Shen -- includes Ted Shen's response. read the letter "Gas Attack " -- article by Michael Miner in the Chicago Reader following a controversial review of Gaza Strip by the Chicago Reader's Ted Shen. read the article Letters in response to the "Gas Attack " article by Michael Miner in the Chicago Reader. read the letters "The Israeli Poison Gas Attacks: A Preliminary Investigation" Part 1 of a series by James Brooks that references James Longley's Gaza Strip interview transcripts. external link "The Israeli Poison Gas Attacks: A Preliminary Investigation" Part 2 of a series by James Brooks that references James Longley's Gaza Strip interview transcripts. external link News reports and James Longley's interview transcripts relating to the February 2001 IDF gas attack on the Khan Yunis refugee camp: click here |
J.
Hoberman The Village Voice Gaza Strip, a feature-length video by American filmmaker
James Longley, is a documentary to make the stones weep as shameful as it is
scary. Longley spent three months during the spring of 2001 in Gaza. Ariel Sharon
had just won the Israeli election and the second intifada was now a fact of life.
The location is a chunk of misery: 1.2 million Palestinians penned up in a 28-by-four-mile
slice of nowhere, further diminished by Israeli security installations and six
fortified Jewish settlements. Longley's principal subject is a 13-year-old newsboy,
Mohammed Hejazi, who is the main support of his family and whose main recreation
is playing chicken with Israeli tanksa game at which a number of his friends
have already been killed. More than once, Longley shows hospital ERs filled with
horribly wounded children. No future here: Gaza Strip is even more painful in
the knowledge that current conditions are worse. (Indeed, the tape was press-screened
the morning after Israel liquidated Hamas terrorist Sheik Salah Shehada by dropping
a bomb on his Gaza City apartment, killing another 14 peoplemostly childrenin
an operation that Sharon moronically boasted was "one of our major successes.")
Necessarily up on current events, Mohammed and his fellow newsboys are familiar
with Sharon's particular brutishness. They naturally mock and hate Israeli politicians,
albeit with scarcely more respect for the Palestinian Authority. "Arafat is a
spyhe's taking it up the ass!" Longley keeps his camera close to his subjects,
backing off only to document quotidian atrocities ranging from tanks shelling
helpless civilians to the bulldozing of Arab homes to the Israeli army's sickening
use of an unidentified form of convulsion-causing gas. Made from the perspective
of the Arab on the street, Gaza Strip includes no footage of Jewish settlers or
Israeli soldiers or even Palestinian security forces. (Nor is there any sort of
historical context explaining the Arab responsibility for how Gaza got to be what
it is.) It would be convenient to dismiss this as propaganda. But does it really
matter if someone coached young Mohammed's claim that he wants to be a martyr
or his dispassionate anticipation of his own death? "It would be easier," the
kid says, and after seeing the wretched conditions that the movie documents, who
will argue with him? Anthology Film Archives, which is screening Gaza Strip for
a week, could evoke the full cycle of hatred, futility, and despair by flanking
this nearly unbearable movie with monitors showing the atrocious aftermath of
contemporary Palestinian suicide attacks on Israeli civilians. To watch Gaza Strip
is to watch a ticking time bomb.
The New York Times : August 1, 2002,
Thursday THE ARTS/CULTURAL DESK FILM REVIEW; Hard Life in Gaza, Through 13-Year-Old
Eyes By A. O. SCOTT Like most news reports and television images coming out of
the Middle East these days, ''Gaza Strip,'' an unsparing new documentary by James
Longley, offers little reason for optimism. The film, which opens today at the
Anthology Film Archives in the East Village, was shot in the winter and spring
of 2001, and it provides a grim, upsetting glimpse at the lives of some of the
1.2 million Palestinians who live in the crowded cities and refugee camps of Gaza.
Mr. Longley makes powerful use of the techniques of cinma vrit. The absence
of voice-over narration and talking-head interviews gives his portrait of daily
life under duress a riveting immediacy. Much of ''Gaza Strip'' follows Mohammed
Hejazi, a 13-year-old newspaper vendor. This youth, who left school after the
second grade, spends much of his spare time with other boys throwing rocks at
Israeli soldiers, even though his best friend was killed by the gunfire that is
the inevitable response, and his father, who had spent time in an Israeli prison,
once tied his son up to keep him at home. Mohammed presents a mixture of hardened
cynicism and childish innocence that is both heartbreaking and unnerving. He is
equally contemptuous of Ariel Sharon, whose election as prime minister takes place
early in the film, of Mr. Sharon's predecessor Ehud Barak and of Yasir Arafat,
and he fluctuates between weary sorrow and militaristic bravado. (''We want weapons.
We don't want food.'') A similar mixture of emotions is expressed by the adults
in the film. Sometimes in the same breath, they give voice to longings for peaceful
coexistence with Israel, to the wish to be left alone and to the desire to drive
the Jews not only out of Gaza but out of the region altogether. Mr. Longley's
camera does not have to look far to find the sources of their rage and despair:
Israeli bulldozers demolishing houses and date groves; an absurd traffic jam on
the beach after roads have been closed; emergency rooms full of wounded Palestinians,
many of them children. It is impossible to see these images and remain unmoved,
but the raw intensity of ''Gaza Strip'' is also a limitation, since it is purchased
by the absence of anything (aside from some text at the beginning) that would
provide some historical or political context. Given how polarized discussions
of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have become, this means that audiences will
watch through their own ideological filters. Some will see the film as evidence
of the bottomless cruelty of the Israeli occupation. Others will note the absence
not only of any Israeli perspective, but also of any discussion of the deadlier
forms of Palestinian resistance or the popularity of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in
the desperate neighborhoods of Gaza. Then again, it is not Mr. Longley's intention
to analyze the conflict, and in the best vrit tradition, there are moments in
''Gaza Strip'' that disclose a wrenching human reality deeper and more basic than
any politics. At one point Mohammed muses on death and the afterlife. His words
cut against much of what we have heard lately about the Muslim view of martyrdom
and paradise. He imagines receiving a stern interrogation from God -- ''Why did
you throw those rocks?'' ''Why did you steal?'' -- after which he will be sent
to heaven or hell, he doesn't know which. After some thought, he decides that
he would be happiest in the solitude of purgatory. Such is the aspiration of a
boy in Gaza. GAZA STRIP Produced, directed and edited by James Longley; in Arabic,
with English subtitles; director of photography, Mr. Longley and Abed Shana; music
by Mr. Longley; released by Arab Film Distribution. At the Anthology Film Archives,
32 Second Avenue at Second Street, East Village. Running time: 74 minutes. This
film is not rated. Published: 08 - 01 - 2002 , Late Edition - Final , Section
E , Column 1 , Page 1
Promised land Taking a step away from the back
and forth over who has a right to be where that is at the heart of the ongoing
Palestinian-Israeli conflict, this important documentary from American filmmaker
James Longley looks closely at the toll it has taken on people who are among those
most affected by the violence: Palestinian children. In January 2001, Longley
took his camera to the embattled Gaza Strip to collect materials for what he planned
on being a film about the Palestinian Intifada. Located between Israel and Egypt
and bordering the Mediterranean Sea, this 360 square mile rectangle of desert
was originally intended to be part of the Arab state established by the 1948 partitioning
of Israeli, and has since become home to nearly 1.2 million Palestinian refugees.
Since its seizure by Israeli forces during the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, 30 percent
of the Gaza Strip has become occupied by some 6000 Israeli settlers, and it has
known precious few days of peace. Longley's original plans to leave the region
after two weeks changed when Ariel Sharon was elected Prime Minister of Israeli
and, expecting the worst from the new leadership, cities throughout the Gaza Strip
erupted in further violence. Longley wound up staying three months. From the over
75 hours of video shot, Longley has constructed a remarkably coherent, horrifically
vivid snapshot of those turbulent days, a snapshot centered mostly on a 13-year-old
newspaper boy from Gaza City named Mohammed Hejazi. In a futile attempt to "defend"
their homeland, Mohammed and his friends gather at a spot called the Karni Crossing,
an intersection between Israel and the Israeli settlement of Netzarim. The kids
throw stones at the soldiers; the soldiers fire back with bullets, often with
deadly accuracy. Throughout, Longley's camera never blinks: A visit to a Gaza
hospital finds scores of children seriously wounded by Israeli tanks and booby
traps; Palestinians attempting to circumvent a crippling 3-day Israeli blockade
around Gaza City are seen struggling to cross the sandy beach; the bewildering
destruction of Palestinian homes in the city of Kahn Yunis by Israeli bulldozers
is committed to tape. The film offers no historical context nor any response from
the Israeli side of the conflict. What it does provide is a glimpse into what
living in an occupied territory under the threat of such violence does to its
people, and while such insight can never fully justify further violence, it does
at least make the impulse a little more understandable. Ken Fox, TV Guide
Gaza
Strip Directed by: James Longley (Documentary) The Palestinian children living
in Gaza are not thinking about Harry Potter, video games, Spider Man and Star
Wars, they are contemplating death. In James Longley's heartbreaking documentary
Gaza Strip, it's the kids that play host to the 74 minutes of unrelenting terror
flashing on the screen. These are children with beautiful, blameless faces, and
gloomy eyes that throw insults and stones at fortified militia. In retaliation,
they are sprayed with bullets from automatic weapons, subjected to black mystery
gases that they inhale, and convulse like insects on the ground. Try not to squirm
in your seat as you witness a young boy screaming to God, wanting to scratch his
skin off while next to him an old man, bleeding over one glazed eye, never regains
consciousness - this is life in sunny Gaza, this is life in stinking hell. To
see such blatant destruction, tyranny, and slaughter, shot in living color and
projected on the big screen, is to fight away the tears while placing your partially
eaten popcorn on the floor, nudging it under your seat, feeling uncomfortable
for ever having bought it in the first place. This could be what mainstream Hollywood
wants us to ignore. This might be what our elected politicians shy away from and
the elite media maybe turn their backs on. For everybody's too busy at the moment,
waving flags and chanting slogans to hear the distant call for intervention. We've
got our own crusade to nurture after all. Longley points his camera at events
that have been festering off and on for nearly 35 years and shows us just a glimpse
of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. In doing this he plants the notion that the
bigger picture could be even uglier than this, for time eventually exposes all
the hidden agendas once every player has signed in. So while we're waiting for
that roll call and figuring where to put our asses on the fence, kids are sneaking
off to prove their loyalty to Gaza, and getting blown to pieces. And even though
Longley never gets in the way nor suggests an answer, I just think its time we
do something, before another child has to bury their best friend. This documentary
is vastly revealing, a terrifying through-the-looking-glass inspection at the
men, women, and more importantly, the children over there, who are out-of-site
and out-of-mind, buried beneath the aggressive occupation guised in religious
rectitude. And it's bigger than a summer blockbuster, more important than all
our movie stars or the academy awards, it's a tiny little film playing at Facets
on West Fullerton in Chicago, starring a Palestinian paper boy named Mohammed
Hejazi who thinks that suicide might be paradise compared to Gaza Strip.
Como a maioria das notcias
e imagens de televiso que surgem sobre o Oriente Mdio atualmente, "Gaza Strip",
um novo documentrio sem misericrdia de James Longley, d poucos motivos para
se ter otimismo. O filme foi gravado no inverno e primavera de 2001, e oferece
uma viso amarga e preocupante das vidas de cerca de 1,2 milhes de palestinos
que moram nas cidades e nos campos de refugiados lotados de Gaza. NYT Cena do
filme "Gaza Strip" Longley faz um uso poderoso das tcnicas de cinema-vrit.
A ausncia de narrao e entrevistas d seu retrato da vida diria sob a presso
da falta de opo. A maior parte de "Gaza Strip" segue Mohammed Hejazi, um vendedor
de jornais de 13 anos. Este jovem, que deixou a escola depois da segunda srie,
passa grande parte de seu tempo livre com outros meninos jogando pedras em soldados
israelenses, embora seu melhor amigo tenha sido morto pelos tiros que foram a
reao inevitvel, e seu pai, que passou algum tempo em uma priso israelense,
uma vez amarrou-o para mant-lo em casa. Mohammed apresenta uma mistura de cinismo
insensvel e inocncia infantil que triste e irritante. Ele desdenha igualmente
Ariel Sharon, cuja eleio como primeiro-ministro ocorre no comeo do filme, do
predecessor de Sharon, Ehud Barak, e Yasser Arafat, e ele hesita entre o sofrimento
e a valentia militar. ("Queremos armas. No queremos comida".). Uma mistura similar
de emoes expressada pelos adultos no filme. s vezes de uma s vez, eles do
voz ao desejo de coexistncia pacfica com Israel, vontade de serem deixados
em paz e ao sonho de tirar os judeus no apenas de Gaza, mas de toda a regio.
A cmera de Longley no tem que ir muito longe para ver as fontes de seu dio
e desespero: escavadoras mecnicas israelenses demolindo casas e plantaes de
tamareiras; um trfego absurdo na praia depois de as estradas terem sido fechadas;
salas de emergncia cheias de palestinos feridos, muitos deles crianas. impossvel
ver essas imagens e no se abalar, mas a intensidade crua de "Gaza Strip" tambm
uma limitao, j que ele dominado pela ausncia de qualquer coisa (alm de
algum texto no incio) que ofereceria algum contexto histrico ou poltico. Dada
a forma que as discusses do conflito israelense-palestino se polarizou, isso
significa que as audincias assistiro ao filme atravs de seus prprios filtros
ideolgicos. Alguns vero o filme como uma evidncia da interminvel crueldade
da ocupao israelense. Outros observaro a ausncia no somente da perspectiva
israelense, mas tambm da discusso de uma das formas mais mortais de resistncia
palestina ou da popularidade do Hamas e do Jihad Islmico nos bairros desesperados
de Gaza. Mais uma vez, no a inteno de Longley analisar o conflito, e na melhor
tradio vrit, h momentos em "Gaza Strip" que revelam uma dura realidade humana
mais profunda e mais bsica do que qualquer poltica. Em um momento Mohammed medita
sobre a morte e as vidas futuras. Suas palavras vo contra muito do que ouvimos
recentemente sobre a viso muulmana de martrio e paraso. Ele imagina receber
uma pergunta austera de Deus - "Por que voc jogou essas pedras?", "por que voc
roubou?" - depois da qual ele ser mandado para o cu ou para o inferno, ele no
sabe qual. Depois de pensar um pouco, ele decide que seria mais feliz na solido
do purgatrio. Esta a aspirao de um garoto em Gaza.
At a time when
news organizations have hijacked cinema vrit to bolster editorializing and sanctify
prurient voyeurism, American filmmaker James Longley snatches it back as a compelling
storytelling tool in his 2001 documentary, Gaza Strip. During Ariel Sharon's election,
Longley spent several months filming what Geoffrey Wheatcroft, writing in the
New York Times Book Review (8 September 2002), has called, "the full pathos of
the situation of the Palestinians, a people forgotten by history who found themselves
involuntarily caught up in another people's great drama." The film unfolds in
Gaza city, the refugee camp at Khan Younis, and the southern settlement of Rafah.
In this, Longley offers no pretense of even-handedness. He is partisan to the
Palestinian plight in the most literal sense, and his film demonstrates the symbiotic
bond (a kind of intellectual Stockholm syndrome) that can arise so easily between
empathetic investigator and sympathetic subject. Yet he also brings into the air-conditioned
cinemas of the West the unseen ordinariness of Palestinian aspirations and, perhaps
more importantly, the unimagined difficulties of daily life (like hanging out
washing or crossing the city where one lives). He captures a world where a 13-year-old
can talk world-wearily of school as something he attended "when I was small."
Gaza Strip charts the liminal zones of a divided land where childhood curiosity
and adolescent rebellion can have deadly consequences. Longley constructs, through
the eloquent editing of sound and vision, a riveting particularity so vivid that
it transcends its physical borders to illuminate "everyday" life in divided cities,
territories, and countries across the globe. This careful construction begins
with the story of Mohammed Hijazi, a barely teen-aged newspaper-seller who supports
his family and whose passion is for an independent Palestine. As he does for individuals
throughout the film, Longley tells Mohammed's story in rhythmic pulses. He cuts
back and forth between Mohammed's life on the street, his early morning gatherings
with other politically disillusioned newsboys and his stone-throwing excursions
to Israeli checkpoints. Each scene is narrated via an extended interview that
includes Mohammed's description of his best friend's death from Israeli bullets
and the terror that drove his own father to beat him and tie him up at home to
prevents Mohammed from joining the stone-throwing crowds. Mohammed's cogency,
stripped of glibness, and colored with an adolescent bravura and cynicism, establishes
credibility for the young people whom Longley chooses as his foci in the film.
The degree of suffering Mohammed recounts bleeds authenticity into subsequent
interviews, compelling the viewer to believe that every youthful face hides a
backstory like Mohammed's. And many of them do. These almost-adolescents describe
in sensual detail (first white, then black, with the aroma of sugar and mint)
the experience of the "tear gas" that sent more than two hundred Palestinians
to the hospital in acute neurological crisis. Or they recount from tents the nighttime
bulldozing of the homes on whose rubble they now sit. And between all these takes
of horror these youth also begin to shine as flesh-and-blood inhabitants of a
real world. Longley substantiates their ordinariness (in an extraordinary situation)
through his own courage in hanging out, camera in hand, when Israeli soldiers
and Palestinian teenagers clash. He is able to let viewers see that these teenagers
share the same playfulness, fallibility and frailty as young people anywhere else
in the world, only in a deadly situation. He reveals how checkpoints become social
gathering points at the end of the working day, or on the way home from school,
where youth and patriotism make a deadly mix. Half excited at provoking a response,
and half terrorized by potential consequences, a group of youngsters in the second
half of the film scatters under crackling Israeli fire only to reassemble moments
later. Two of the older teenagers climb casually back onto the wall from which
they evoked the first flurry of bullets. They may be provoking their enemy, but
they are also establishing their cool, an act as recognizable in suburban America
as it is in Khan Younis. The longeurs in this film come only when Longley tries
too hard to plunge his audience into the psychological intensity of life in Gaza
via a discordant arty-ness. He over does his footage of a nighttime attack over
Gaza, falling into MTV clichs, like jump cuts, motion-blur slo-mo images, and
distorted frames. A similar sequence of Israeli bulldozers plowing into Palestinian
buildings, which is more fragmented, more distant and much less processed, is
much more chilling. The same caveat applies to the soundtrack: in most places,
it's an eerie amalgam of street noise, muffled conversation and Mr. Longley's
own compositions, with natural sound used for emphasis, but sometimes it resembles,
in its electronic distortions, a late-Happenings soundtrack rerun from the sixties.
But these visual and sound affects are only missteps, detracting temporarily from
the film's power. That power raises one last, but inevitable, question about this
film. How important is it that Gaza Strip offers only one side, and only partially
at that, of the story? No Palestinian politicians, no security forces, no Hamas
or Islamic Jihad. No Israelis beyond the pixilated newsprint images of Sharon
and Ehud Barak. While the sources of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lie far
back in the disorderly disintegration of first the Ottoman and then the British
Empires, most news coverage never stretches back beyond a brief mention of the
1967 war. More, and more informed, historical and political context is desperately
needed. But necessary, too, are the pen portraits, the focus on the individual
life, and its nights and days of frustration and anxiety, which communicate more
personally. Longley neither pretends to be impartial nor apologizes for his sympathies,
and pays his potential audience the compliment of confidence in their intelligence
and reason. He presumes that we can see and appreciate his portrait of the families
of Gaza as only one contribution to the world's scant knowledge of the human cost
of "the Middle East crisis."