"Countries can rise and fall
Wars continue between brothers and enemies
Homes are destroyed and families fall apart
But the love I have within me is forever
I do know love, no matter what."

​



These words, spoken while focusing on a still photograph of the filmmaker and her two daughters hugging on the background of a chilly landscape, seal director Yulie Cohen-Gerstel's documentary trilogy: My Terrorist (2002), My Land Zion (2004) and My Brother (2007). They also illuminate the courageous personal journey the filmmaker began in the first days of the El-Aqsa Intifadah , when she first conceived of the possibility of going back to the past and forgiving the man who violated her life and killed her colleague, the man she chose to call, "my terrorist," Fahad Mihyi. One who follows the chapters of the trilogy will understand that unconditional love ("love, no matter what") is not given to everyone, the opposite is true. It is the fruit of difficult and energetic work a person does with himself as well as with the people and the spaces surrounding him.  But the viewer will also understand that the journey to this insight, as difficult and demanding as it may be, is worth the price. For this reason the trilogy cannot be separated into the individual films constituting it. This is one unit. One breath, long and liberating, just like the insights formulated in the filmmaker's voice in her last film, My Brother, the sunset in the background, when only the silhouettes are visible on the background of the open space: "A wonderful ancient truth was reveled to me. Peace is within us."

Cohen-Gerstel's insights are formulated slowly and clearly, even though they make way for unanswered questions, half sentences, fragments of memories. These questions are the foundation of the understanding to which the trilogy's three films lead: to open to and accept the world. The journey she goes through from her first film to the last, a journey that begins with a departure from a protected coherent world, the Zionist world in which she was shaped as an Israeli, and ends with a joyful acceptance of values outside the boundaries of nation and nationalism, is not, in the end, a process of rehabilitation but rather her rebirth as a woman and a human being.

In Fact, the filmmaker Yulie Cohen-Gerstel is the real heroine of the trilogy. Like other directors who are now working in the realm of the New Documentary film, which is often characterized by its performative aspect, Cohen-Gerstel is the main participant in her films because she is interested in finding alternative, less restricting, ways of touching what she considers essential. As Stella Bruzzi says in her New Documentary: A Critical Introduction: "The means by which they achieve this are not those conventionally associated with truth-finding post-direct cinema as they entail breaking the illusion of film, thereby interrupting the privileged relationship between the film subjects and the spectator.” (Bruzzi, 2000: 163) 

Throughout the eight years covered by the trilogy, the filmmaker goes over the traumatic events within the State of Israel ─ from the El Aqsa Intifadah to the disengagement  —and outside of it (these are metonymically represented by destruction of the World Trade Center). She, who turns her camera on herself and on the world as one, expresses with her face and her gaze at the camera, the fear and anxiety associated with standing before a world that is changing beyond recognition, a world without compassion. But the feeling of compassion can be found in the voice and the gaze of the filmmaker, a unique voice and gaze that redefine the question of documentary ethics from a feminine point of view.

On Humanism, Motherhood and Femininity and Not Necessarily in that Order

Yulie Cohen-Gerstel's trilogy challenges the conventional definitions of documentary cinema by presenting alternative forms of expression and narratives. These serve her to formulate a statement of opposition to the hegemonic patterns of discourse, a statement about the absence of compassion and of the spirit of reconciliation in the sovereign State of Israel. The filmmaker’s critical point of view of the country is deeply embedded within the Israeli biography, so deeply that it is illuminated from a different angle in each of the trilogy's films. Cohen-Gerstel's great-great grandfather came to Palestine from Algeria one hundred and fifty years ago; her parents fought in the Palmach , and her parents' home was in Tsahala, a Tel Aviv neighborhood that was built for Israeli army officers. Her neighbors were the families of the great people of the nation ─ Yitzhak Rabin, Moshe Dayan and Ariel Sharon ─ and she herself, who dreamt as a girl of being an officer, went through the entire course of Israeli socialization and realized her dream. In the trilogy’s first film, My Terrorist, the director's voice accompanies the famous and less famous photographs of the era. The act of appropriation that her voice performs upon the formative events of the country is not false. Quite the opposite; it is intended to outline the foundation for the rift that will come about between the proud daughter and her country.

My Terrorist reconstructs this rift: the events of August 1978 at the entrance of a hotel in London, at that time a terrorist shoots at the crew of an El Al plane. The director, who was then a stewardess, is wounded. Her colleague finds her death. The ever-so-Israeli song that is chosen to accompany her first letter to "her terrorist" while traveling the streets of her childhood neighborhood, Tsahala, makes the rift palpable: "I do not know what has happened, how the way back was lost."

In retrospect, the scenes of the terror attack and the song’s lyrics connect with the series of photos of the sights Cohen-Gerstel saw in the occupied territories in January 2000, after thirty three years of occupation, when she accompanied a British photography crew. Her editing of the color photographs, in contrast with the black and white photos of the age of innocence, is accompanied by a different sound track. "The poverty, the children, the disgrace," she says and adds, "I had never seen these thing, this is how terrorists are created, I thought to myself". As was pointed out above, this insight sheds light on the rift that began way back in 1978, when she first met with “her terrorist”. The visual images recorded by the camera cause her to question the victim's position and set out on a journey to the impossible: a journey to free her terrorist.

The journey described in the first film of the trilogy has a sisyphic character. The filmmaker wishes to heal and repair the world , not only on a personal level but also on a national one. She wants to be humane as can be seen in her interview on television as well as in her attempt to tell her experience on a podium at the center of a Tel Aviv park, while Palestinian and Israeli flags fly behind her and the hateful voices of those who oppose peace can be heard in front of her; and finally in her intention to travel to meet her terrorist and write a letter supporting his release. Her actions which, to say the least, do not find great favor with the Israeli public, are motivated by the desire to undo the knot tying victim to victimizer ─ a connection that has nurtured for years the narrative of the renewal of the Jewish people in their land. The first film of the trilogy constitutes a declaration of intentions for the following films: a sobering up out of the national romanticism and the effect of the traumas that the country as a whole has experienced. Cohen-Gerstel goes deeper into the regions of darkness that have not yet been openly explored with the intention of bringing a bit of hope to her daughters and loved ones.

The filmmaker's journey entails constant running around on the country's roads and trails, in times that are not times of peace. In her walking and driving she is presented as a mobilized female subject willing to risk the conventions of the documentary medium to get across what she has to say. This is apparent in the unique cinematic form that was chosen: the three films present an autobiographical document bordering on a documentary journal told in the voice of the filmmaker. Documentary cinema researcher Bill Nichols calls this form the "New Documentary."

“Speaking in the first person edges the documentary form toward the diary, essay and aspects of avant-garde or experimental film or video. The emphasis may shift from convincing the audience of a particular point of view or approach to a problem to the representation of a personal, clearly subjective view of things. What makes it a documentary is that this expressiveness remains coupled to the representations of the social, historical world that are addressed to the viewers.”
(Nichols, 1993: 14)

And indeed, the journey Cohen-Gerstel takes in the trilogy's films does not for a moment stop telling about the upheaval visited upon the Israeli place in those fateful years, and no less than that—about those visited upon it in the past; of the injustice done to others in it and the scars it has left. The feminine voice and the penetrating gaze of the filmmaker are present in the three films, accompanying the documented and at times documented themselves. The presence in voice and gaze give the cinematic text its reflexive dimension, that is to say the reflection of the feelings of the characters in the film beside those of the filmmaker who functions as its central awareness: an awareness that is simultaneously feminine, maternal and citizenly.

And her journey to the discovery of unconditional love, this love that is more precious than gold, is made possible by a subversive investigation of the traditional feminine foci:  the home, the family and the children. These three centers, which served in the past to anchor the woman's enslavement to the private space (the home) and to her exclusion from any political sphere, enable Cohen-Gerstel to deeply investigate the discourse and representation mechanisms of confident and patriarchal Israeliness, and to dismantle it, with no small measure of pain, into its components, with the intention of getting back to the primal place of calm and serenity, a pleasant place that may have never existed.

Of Homes, Families and Children

The topos of home is central in Cohen-Gerstel's three films. The home, which takes different forms according to the narrative, serves as a focus for the discussion of Zionism, rootedness and settlement as well as to defy the traditional positioning of femininity. Cohen-Gerstel's different homes appear in all three films: her private home with the small garden, kitchen and girls' room, the home in which she lives with her family; her parents' home with memories of childhood and the flowering; the Chelouche home that belonged to her great great grandfather, one of the founders of what has become one of Tel Aviv's most famous neighborhoods, Neve Tzedek, which has since become a gallery; the home of Dr. Moti Golani's mother that was built on the land of the Arab village Danyal as well as the nearby homes that were abandoned by the Palestinian residents when the State of Israel came into being. But the most symbolic home is undoubtedly her parents' home that is displayed in the first film and demolished by a bulldozer on camera in her last film, upon her parent's decision to move to a smaller apartment. This is the first home, a fifty-two year old home in which the filmmaker and her brother were born. This is the home from which she departed for the USA as a young adult and this is the home abandoned by her brother when he decided to become an ultra-orthodox Jew.

In the last film, My Brother, a chilling proximity of events is created when the bulldozer demolishing the filmmaker's parents' home that was sold parallels the actions of the State's bulldozers in the Gaza Strip settlements after to the Israeli government's decision to disengage. The insertion of Arik Sharon's speech to the nation seen on the home television screen which heralds the beginning of the disengagement process creates the link between the interior and the exterior, between the filmmaker's childhood memories and the memories of many Israelis who are also leaving their homes with no small measure of difficulty. Just as they do in the first part of the trilogy, My Terrorist, the personal and the national join together.

Cohen-Gerstel's camera seems to ask for the meaning of these homes that change hands, are conquered, demolished and rebuilt. Like the founding father of personal documentary filmmaking in Israel, David Perlov, Yulie Cohen-Gerstel also sees her home as her fortress, out of which she faces various entities in the outside world, entities that are not always delighted to greet her (a clear example is her brother who speaks with her on the phone but refuses to meet her). The view from the windows of her home, with the changes of weather and the changing colors these bring about, is evidence of the existence of the world outside, very much like the television screen that brings the world into the protected spaces.  Though it may seem that the visual connection between the images of the world and the space of the home simply expresses the position of the heroine, the juxtaposition of these images undermines the patriarchal gender mold that links the woman to the home and thus distances her from the political sphere. In the trilogy’s films, the filmmaker succeeds in going against the fixed traditional image of the home and shedding new light on it, when she formulates her thoughts out loud, while operating a washing machine preparing for a meal or painting a railing or tending the garden. There is nothing about these feminine tasks that can cast a shadow on her wholeness as a political subjectivity. On the contrary, the filmmaker's home corresponds with all the other homes that appear throughout the trilogy and becomes integrated as part of her general observation about the various homes that were built, populated, nationalized and sometimes also demolished. That is why the cache of photographs discovered in her parents' home just before it is demolished is displayed before the camera with the intention of immortalizing the experiences of the past in a changing present. That is to say, homes keep telling their inhabitants’ stories and histories even in their abandonment and destruction. And while the filmmaker would like to hang onto the physical homes, it becomes clear that this is not possible anymore. Even her family home in Neve Tzedek, the Chelouche house, has become a historical site that displays the beginning of Jewish settlement of Israel, and as such is visited by many people, strangers who expropriate it from the hands of the descendents of its owners (the filmmaker among them), and consequently from the ideology that accompanied its owners while they were alive: the possibility of the coexistence of Jews and Palestinians.

Thus the physical home loses its meaning in the Cohen-Gerstel’s trilogy: not because it has ceased to exist, but because in the course of the history of the region, it is what has signified more than once the thing upon which love depends, especially when it became a bone of contention between armies. This position is supported by the final image that seals My Brother, an image in which a completely different space, a cold expanse of sand and water, serves as the background for one last photograph of the filmmaker and her two daughters, Stav and Sahar.

Just like the concept of home, the concept of family also undergoes a process of reexamination in the trilogy’s films. A number of families appear in the films: the filmmaker's original family that is presented as a supportive environment but also serves as an arena for struggling with questions of nationality and the ways of expressing it (this becomes evident when the filmmaker brings the issue of her daughter joining the Israeli Defense Force to her parents’ home); the filmmaker’s family by marriage that falls apart due to her divorce in the third chapter, My Brother; Moti Golani's family which represents a family of a different genus, one of the son of a holocaust survivor who came to Palestine after the second World War; and the family of her brother who became ultra-orthodox, has many children, and is hiding from the filmmaker. Opposed to it are the images of the destruction of Palestinian families: those exiled from their homes and those that lose their loved ones, and also the absence of her terrorist's family; "He does not have a family to visit him", she says in My Terrorist and leans on this argument to advocate his release. The films’ concern with families in general raises a wider question: can, in certain cases, the family compensate for the absence of freedom?

The fact is that the most stable thing throughout the three films is the filmmaker's daughters. They grow up in front of our eyes, in the shadow of the threat of suicide bombings in Tel Aviv, in a trip to Hungary, at graduation parties and going to the military recruitment center. They are always there, with her, they are her family. The brother, who became ultra-orthodox way back in the eighties and thus caused a deep wound that does not heal, continues to haunt the filmmaker in the present,. She tries to make a connection with him and bring him closer to her, to her family, to her daughters. In one of the dramatic moments in My Brother, the filmmaker spots her brother as she is touring Beni Brak in her car. She says, "I am sure, that is him", and for a moment it seems to the viewer that she will get up and hug him but it does not come to pass. She observes him at a distance from inside the car and the recognition does not provide a place for action but only the pain of missing a thing that could have been and is not: the family.

That having been said, the family theme should not be considered the central motif of the trilogy.  The filmmaker's family, stained by the pain caused by her brother becoming ultra-orthodox, is only one of her assets, and they are all codified as titles in the trilogy's films. First it is her terrorist, the man who brought about the mental as well as physical change in her life, the man who caused her to doubt the solid truths upon which she was educated, he who made her rethink the concept of forgiveness. In the second film it is her land, Zion, the object of the Zionist ideology's realization in the light of which her personality was formed. And indeed, that land has a place of honor throughout all the trilogy's films: in the trees and the blooms that adorn the trails, on the path up to Masada in My Land Zion and also in the close up shots of the legs stepping on the desert soil in the beginning and the end of My Brother. Her last asset—he who has the greatest difficulty giving himself over to the filmmakers love—is her personal brother, Gil, who left home while she was living in the USA, became ultra-orthodox and left her with a gaping wound. One who looks closely at these three "assets" understands that these assets only seem secure because they all share a similar fate: the filmmaker's grasp cannot take hold of them. Cohen-Gerstel's insights do not, therefore, circumscribe these assets, or the possibility of preserving them, quite the opposite: they offer the option of living with an awareness of lack, with an awareness of imperfection. As her interviewees in Beni Brak say, "Esau hates Jacob": the state of confrontation is a given fact, without a solution. There is no way other than finding the detours to personal happiness, to love.

Ethics of Women and Emergency

Finally, the most fascinating aspect of Yulie Cohen-Gerstel's filmmaking is the choice of the mother's position. This position, which is not common in the Israeli critical political discourse , enables her to offer a unique perception motivated by universal ethics. While patriarchy distinguished the woman from the mother as part of its interest in subjecting the feminine to the patriarchal ordering of the world, the feminist position often identifies the woman with the mother. On this background the feminine voice which accompanies the trilogy's films stands out. These films do not ask to be read as feminist thought, nevertheless they reveal to the viewer an alternative to the common masculine documentary voice, often referred to as "the voice of God", as well as an alternative to the voice of the authoritative interviewer. Cohen-Gerstel's voice is an inner voice. It is inner even when it is directed to another. It is a voice that exposes both the observed and the position of the observer. The feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan claims that: “Voice is natural and also cultural. It is composed of breath and sound, words, rhythm, and language. And voice is a powerful psychological instrument and channel, connecting inner and outer worlds.” (Gilligan, 1982: 20)

And indeed the roots of the filmmaker's voice are found deep within the chain of historical/political events that shaped her identity, but the editing of this voice with the film’s visuals deconstructs those events and rearranges them according to principles of feminine writing: in a course that is not teleological but rather more associative, as it exposes the filmmaker's thought processes. As such, this voice renounces the possibility of directing in the common masculine language, which is to say, a language that is recruited by an idea or some course of action. If there is any truth in the world, Cohen-Gerstel muses in her films, the voice cannot expose it. It can, at most, add a layer to the discussion of fateful national and universal questions, because it presents the subjective aspect that is usually silenced. Cohen-Gerstel takes advantage of the woman's marginal position and identity in relation to the phallocentric hegemony to also speak for others—may they be Palestinians or holocaust survivors (see the second film, My Land Zion). This is a voice that is opposed to the marginal position of the individual within the collective and to the marginality of the woman within the phallocentric Israeli existence. At the same time it is a voice that points out the Israeli place and thus appropriates it. My Terrorist, My Land Zion, My Brother, all three films mark what Cohen-Gerstel identifies as her own within the national narrative: a traumatic experience that was expropriated by the shapers of policy (a terrorist attack on an El Al crew in London in 1978), the land of Israel that comes up for reconsideration due to post-Zionist theory and criticism and the appearance of the discourse of the others in My land Zion, and finally her own brother as well, in My Brother, the one who turned his back on his family and became ultra-orthodox.

But Cohen-Gerstel's voice goes outside the boundaries of narration. It is also the inner voice heard in her thoughts in front of the television screen; it is also a voice that confesses weakness and sadness, or an off-screen voice addressing its photographed interviewees. It is a voice that envelops the familiar landscapes of Israel with the experience of renewed observation by the auteur who seeks to see them as they were the first time in order to confront the hegemonic narratives in the past and in the present, and reveal their other, often hidden, meaning. And this meaning, as the filmmaker reveals, is born out of us, out of our willingness to accept or give up truths and myths that were presented to us as an indivisible unit in the beginning of our lives. Thus the trilogy's films that present a journey in space act as an inward investigation, an investigation of the forms of acceptance of otherness in one’s close (the home) and more distant (the nation) environment. In this framework Cohen-Gerstel’s voice has the power to give the viewer a different kind of experience, an experience in which meaning is not created by the landscapes but rather by the act of privately observing them. While the voice in Cohen-Gerstel's trilogy's films does not leave any doubt about the female subject's affinity with the Zionist narrative, the potential for resistance becomes part of the subtext of that feminine voice that can already be heard in the first film, My Terrorist, a potential that becomes more focused in times of crisis and emergency. In the end of the nineties Cohen-Gerstel begins her journey to free the one she calls, "my terrorist." During those years, a wave of murderous terror attacks reached new heights in many places in Israel. When the filmmaker comes to be interviewed about her initiative to free a terrorist who had harmed her and her colleagues, the interviewer confronts her with a bereaved mother, Yafa Elhahrar, who lost her beloved daughter in a murderous act of terror in the Israeli city of Afula. In the studio, in front of the cameras, the filmmaker presents her ethical position the heart of which is not speaking for the other: "I can not put myself in her place. I want to show my little girls that there is another way. I can not put myself in her place. I did not lose a child."

But the main message of the scene is actually communicated after the interview, when the two women part and the bereaved mother turns to her and says: "My whole life was destroyed, I have no more Sabbaths or holidays, I have nothing in life. I live with a constant feeling of pain and loss, and when I see people who went through it and are still willing to talk to them [the terrorists]...I do not know, we each have different thoughts, we each have different ways."

The filmmaker remains silent with Elhahrar, after all she has already had her say in the interview, but the editing provides her response: right after Elhahrar speaks the film goes to a still photograph that shows the filmmaker hugging her two daughters, looking directly at the camera. The sound track that envelops the protective mother is one of the Zionist Israeli songs that appear throughout the trilogy, songs whose role is to plant the heroine in the ethos out of which she grew. Even though the words of the song (which were written by the poetess Rahel and set to music by Noemi Shemer) are not heard, they echo in the mind of every Israeli viewer.

Cohen-Gerstel does not give up on the Israeli myths upon which she was raised, but rather attempts, by incorporating them in the film's narrative, to understand their meaning today, after more than half a hundred years of sovereignty and nationhood. Like the mother who hugs her daughters, the song "There Are the Golan Mountains" hugs Yulie. Like her it tried to show the way. But the editing superimposing it over the image of the embracing mother reveals it as nostalgic, and therefore not applicable. It is as if the film is saying: what is needed is an ethical stand that is reformulated every time in the face of changing circumstances, because the old doctrines have become nostalgia for a dream that was once and is no more.

Not an Agent of the Patriarchal Order but rather its Investigator

The desire and the need to formulate a new ethical stance in the wake of the dramatic events occurring in both the private and the public sphere lead the filmmaker to address experts in various fields. What could easily be considered surrender to patriarchal authority is presented in the film as part of that same ethical stance. It is as if she says: I cannot gauge the limits of the subject and therefore I must turn to those who investigated it before me. In the face of masculine authority the filmmaker does not cease to function as a woman and a mother. Even though her ability to listen is evident she does not become passive but on the contrary, her intense listening produces action that brings her closer to understanding. In the first film, My Terrorist, the expert is the journalist Gideon Levy, the filmmaker turns to him just before she writes to London to advocate the release of her terrorist. In the second, My Land Zion, it is the historian Moti Golani with whom she travels in Israel and Hungary, his parents' country of origin, in order to understand the tension between Israel and the Diaspora, and the absence of compassion that Zionism showed toward the weak in general (holocaust survivors, Palestinian refugees). In the third, My Brother, it is the formerly orthodox filmmaker, Naftali Gliksberg, who accompanies her in the streets of Bnei Braq and interprets for her the signs and norms that are customary in the ultra-orthodox society in which her brother lives with his family.

It seems that this choice made by the filmmaker makes evident her unique way that seeks to investigate and understand, starting from the beginning each and every time, far away from ideologies and established doctrines as such. Wishing to find her true voice in this field commonly referred to as Israeli identity in conflict, Yulie Cohen-Gerstel investigates the different responses that have been formulated by others, knowing that she cannot reinvent the narratives from the beginning. She can, at best, clear her way in them, hoping for a dialogue that will not necessarily come to be (as the viewer learns at the end of the trilogy, when the filmmaker discloses that she has not succeeded in meeting her brother). All the same, the willingness and the intention are the key here. The filmmaker knows that, in order to address the Other, one must first listen to him and try to understand him. The images in themselves (as they are frequently reflected by the television screen) are not sufficient to produce the responsibility on which every dialogue is founded. The images lack the body of knowledge that makes it possible to sound their meaning and resonate with it.  The curiosity that the filmmaker exhibits in dealing with the experts interviewed in her films demonstrates that there is no esoteric body of knowledge.  There are only bodies of knowledge that refuse to open to interpretation, like the sentence repeated among the men of Beni Braq who explain the insolvable nature of the conflict in the region with the quote: "Esau hates Jacob." In other words, hate has existed since time immemorial and there is no way to change it.

Just as the filmmaker does not accept hate as a static situation, the continuous long shots filmed from the her car window and the photographs from the public and private archives suggest seeing the search itself as a kind of meaning and, more over, a kind of responsibility. Thus does Yulie Cohen-Gerstel go from being one who learns the patriarchal order to one who investigates it. This is not an unquestioning acceptance but rather the exact opposite: this is a learning based on ethical intentions, which is to say the learning of materials that are to be dismantled, to be appealed and pondered, in the hope of finding the other way. And the words quoted at the beginning of this paper, those sentences which conclude the trilogy, teach that there is another way, the way of understanding and reconciliation: an ethic of unconditional love. This way, which is perceived as fundamentally feminine, is the human way. As Gilligan writes:

“When assertion no longer seems dangerous, the concept of relationships changes from a bond of continuing dependence to a dynamics of interdependence. Then the notion of care expands from the paralyzing injunction not hurt others to an injunction to act responsively towards self and others and thus to sustain connection. A consciousness of the dynamics of human relationships then becomes central to moral understanding, joining the heart and the eye in an ethic that ties the activity of thought to the activity of care.”(Gilligan, 1982: 149)

 

Bibliography
Bruzzi, Stella (2000). New Documentaries: A Critical Introduction. London and New York: Routledge.

Gilligan, Carol  (1982) In a different voice: Psychological Therapy and Women’s Development. Harvard University Press.

Nichols, Bill (1993). Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary: Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press.