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More than ever, motion pictures – body cameras monitoring police behavior, video review of sports competition decisions – claim to capture indisputable truth. But can framed “evidence” based on human interpretation really compel us to meet eye to eye?
Filmmaker Ra’anan Alexandrowicz tests this hypothesis in “The Viewing Booth.”
Filmed at Temple University in a dark studio that resembles both confession and laboratory, the documentary examines a young woman’s reactions to videos of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Maia Levy, a Jewish-American supporter of Israel, selected from a larger student body, examines a series of videos she has questioned loudly, doubtful about their authenticity, mostly produced by the human rights watchdog B’Tselem. In one video, soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces raid a Palestinian family’s home in the middle of the night, waking and interrogating several children. Levy, who we observe from the perspective of a computer camera voicing his objections to the brutal close-up, believes the video is manipulating us to empathize with the family. Alexandrowicz watches the screen shared in an adjacent room, struck by Levy’s skepticism.
Six months later, Levy is invited back to the studio to review footage of his reactions, and he actively replays excerpts from the first half of the documentary with commentary by Levy and Alexandrowicz. In short: Images are not enough to challenge one’s beliefs.
While moderately compelling to witness one’s objections in real time, “The Watching Booth” touches on the bleak realities about viewership in the digital age that might have felt new a decade ago. While we’ve been flooded with traumatic images and indiscriminate claims of “fake news,” it should come as no surprise that bursting our ideological bubbles is actually quite difficult.
Monitoring Cabinet
Not rated. English, Arabic and Hebrew, with subtitles. In movie theaters.
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