Killer Images: Documentary Film, Memory and the Performance of Violence

Avi Mograbi, a documentary film director, lives and works in Tel Aviv, Israel. Z32 was produced in 2009 as a French/Israeli co-production.

Joram ten Brink: Can we start by discussing the use of a digital mask in Z32 to conceal the identity of the soldier?

Avi Mograbi: This was done in response to his demands, that his identity would not be exposed. He wanted to travel to London and not be arrested in Heathrow. He was fearful because he participated in a revenge operation. You can understand, although it almost never happens – in his mind he also can become a subject for revenge. Somebody might take revenge on him. And so he doesn’t want to be exposed so that the son of the person he killed will not have ideas about how to ‘bring back’ his father by killing someone else. His demand has brought up many issues but, of course, I kept my promise and I concealed his identity. It was a very elaborate and economically painful operation. At the beginning you start working on the film and then you come up with the idea of the mask, and when it works, you say, ‘oi-va-voi’ it works! I’m concealing a murderer in my film! I’m giving shelter to a murderer! Of course, it’s a problem for the filmmaker, but basically it’s a problem for the society. We are a ‘defense shield’ for many murders that are done in our name. We talk about wanting to have a high moral society but we send our kids to do terrible things and then we give them shelter.

JtB: But then your responsibility as a filmmaker is not to betray your subject. You ‘play the game’, and you do shield him. Because he says ‘I won’t participate in the film if you reveal my identity.’

AM: My responsibility is more complex. It’s not just as a filmmaker. Before a filmmaker, I’m a human being, and a moral human being, and a citizen, or someone who cares about his society and communicates his ideas etc. Let’s say, that if this was a Nazi officer, I would not be condemned for having lied to him, after I have promised that I will conceal his identity, and then exposed him. On the contrary, you would say that I have done the right thing.

JtB: Here you chose to shield him and not to betray him, because you promised him not to reveal…

AM: Yes, but also I chose to deal with those questions, which have become actually the main subject of the film. It’s more important, I think, to present to the society here, to my community, those questions of sheltering our own assassins, then to expose one soldier who was really the last person in this huge chain of command. He was the person who pressed the button, but he was only the person who pressed the button. He had no power and of course the big guys are not in danger. So for me it’s more important to bring it into discussion the whole issue rather than to expose one person. I found his testimony in the archive of [the group] Shovrim Shtikah [‘Breaking the Silence’], which I’m part of. One of the things I do with the group [of soldiers] is to listen to testimonies and log them. Later they are transcribed, edited and published. In Shovrim Shtikak, one of the first things that they are very clear about is that if you break the rule once i.e. of exposing somebody, you lose the rest. As there will never be anyone who will be prepared to step forward again. Never. By now, Shovrim Shtikah include four hundred, five hundred soldiers, reserve and soldiers in active service, who have already testified during a period of five years. Now, after the Gaza war, there have been more than thirty or so soldiers who came forward to testify. There is a booklet out of their testimonies. It’s absolutely clear that if a person is exposed, you know that this is the last soldier that you have seen coming forward. And the question is, what is more important? The publication of testimonies right after the events, as it’s not so easy, as the press and public are reluctant to deal with our own doings, or, to have a ‘victory’ of one person being sent to jail. Mind you, he wouldn’t go to jail either after all.

JtB: What you also create is a very strong filmic presence through the use of the mask.

AM: Yes, of course, but again, this was not the intention, but as we moved along we realised that giving him a mask created something that was not planned: the fact that he is both himself, and not himself, that he is one person but he also becomes many persons. In one of the screenings of the film in Tel Aviv a friend of mine came to me after the screening and said that he saw him in the crowd, watching the film. But he wasn’t there, I didn’t allow this to happen – that he would be identified. But the fact that this guy started looking at possible candidates in the audience for being Z32, this has made Z32 more than one person. It became more an abstract idea and a very interesting reflection on making the film. Of course it also reflects on Greek theatre, not only because of the masks, but because of the music, the songs that I sing, which become like a Greek chorus, or it reflects on Brechtian theatre etc. But I think it’s mainly that you get a very strong sensation when you watch it: sometimes, you think it is a real person, because it’s done in such a way that it’s very hard for you to say that this is a person with a digital mask, but then he smokes, and he brings his hand under the mask, and the smoke comes out of his eyeholes and the illusion collapses immediately. So it becomes a very strong cinematic and viewing experience.

JtB: And there’s also of course the issue of the truth, because one speaks of evidence in documentary. So does he stop being ‘evidence’? Is he ‘evidence’ in the traditional sense?

AM: Yes, it reflects on those questions of testimony. Confession used to be in British law ‘the mother of all testimonies’. Now it is not so any more, but in Israel it is still the case. If I confess to having done something terrible, then you will say: look, unless you think I’m a psychopath, a normal person would not say such terrible things about himself, unless they were true. It is such a big risk for the person to confess. We have learned that this is our intuitive response to self-incriminating testimonies, but we know that a lot of times people have said things that have never happened. I made a film called The Reconstruction fifteen years ago, about five Palestinians who confessed to killing a child, Danny Katz from Haifa, and they are still in jail, but it’s absolutely not clear that they’re the killers, and if you ask me, I think that they are absolutely innocent. Although you see them in front of the camera saying that they have done it. They confessed to the camera.

JtB: Can we speak a moment about the music, before we go back to the image. How did you decide on the music and its style?

AM: It was Noam’s [the composer] idea. It’s in Eisler’s style. It was Noam’s idea to take it to a Brecht-ish concept. When I started talking to him there was not even an idea of what this film would be like. There were two basic ideas: one was to make a very, very simple film with the person talking to the camera, and telling his story. I heard his story on an audiotape, during my Shovrim Shtikah voluntary work. I thought it was very strong and impressive and I thought that it will be even more impressive on video. I thought to make a very, very simple film, not an ‘Avi Mograbi’ film. This is why I resisted making this film. I didn’t want to make it. I thought it should be made, but not by me, because it didn’t fit the way I make films. The other idea was very, very different from that – it was to turn his text into a libretto for an opera. Because I thought his story is a tragic story, he is, you could say, a tragic figure; I wouldn’t say a hero, but a tragic figure, someone who had the opportunity to make the right decision, yet he made the wrong decision, and he will have to live with this decision for the rest of his life. There’s no ‘correction’ possible. And if you understand that you made the wrong decision – and he does understand it – and because there are millions like him that don’t understand it and they make the wrong decisions but they don’t even give it a thought. But he will never be able to get rid of this burden, because he, at a certain point, understood that what he has done was wrong and that he could have taken a different choice. So I thought, this sounds like an operatic protagonist. But the opera idea died very early; we very quickly understood that it was too big for us as I spoke with Noam Inbar, the composer, about the opera. I gave him the audio recording of the testimony, and he then tried to do some kind of an audio experimental piece. Anyway, nothing came about. Then I approached the Z32 person, and proposed to make a film. He immediately said yes, with a ‘but’. And the ‘but’ started the real film: ‘Okay, no problem, but you cannot expose my identity.’ And so from being a very, very simple film about someone talking to the camera, it became a very complicated film of how to make a film with a person speaking to the camera for ninety minutes, and you don’t see his face, or his facial expressions. How is this different from a radio show, and what will keep you watching it? There is a film called Massaker [2005] by a German director, Monica Borgmann, and a Lebanese director, Lokman Slim, interviewing three Phalangists who participated in the Sabra and Shatila massacre. You cannot see their faces as they are completely darkened, and thus there are many compensations for the lack of expression and identity. First of all, it’s shot inside the destroyed building, with many coloured lights on the walls. You see parts of bodies, and sometimes they are topless – everything to get you interested. I didn’t want to do a Massaker film. I wanted to do something that would be cinematic. It took months to come to this mask solution…

JtB: So, back to the music…

AM: The music came back once I realised that it is going to be an Avi Mograbi film after all, because the making of the film raised a lot of questions, a lot of dilemmas. I decided I will address those dilemmas in the film, and not ignore them, or deal with them outside of the film. And thus I started thinking about my presence in the film, or how to present those dilemmas in the film. Having done this and that in previous films, which I didn’t want to repeat, at a certain point, without really understanding what the impact of it will be, and whether I can sing at all, because there was no record of me singing without people leaving…

JtB: The film itself is such a radical shift from your initial idea, as you said. What you achieved here is a much more complex structure which actually gets us to a much more accurate understanding of the state of mind of a killer. Four ‘characters’ tell the story: the songs, the soldier, the girlfriend, and the film, as a film. There are four attempts to look at the story through different characters and protagonists. Although the girlfriend is in essence the protagonist of the film, we’ll come back to her later…

AM: She’s the most important. Without her…

JtB: Without her there’s no film.

AM: Yes. And it wasn’t my idea to put her in the film.

JtB: She’s the audience. She is ‘me’, the viewer.

AM: Yes, yes. She’s you, but not the obvious you. Not the ‘Israeli’. Most Israelis don’t identify with her. They identify with him. But yes, she’s definitely the audience, definitely the listener; the listener who asks difficult questions.

JtB: In the last shot, she brings the film back to me when she turns to the camera and looks at me.

AM: Yes. She looks at the millions watching her at home.

JtB: She hears the story and she cannot make sense of it. She refuses up until the last moment to forgive him and you don’t know if she will ever forgive him. She doesn’t say anything.

AM: She looks at the camera…

JtB: She looks at the camera, and says, ‘What do you think? Now you’ve seen the film; I presented it to you for the past ninety minutes, now what do you think? You, the viewer.’

AM: I think she also looks at the camera as a kind of enemy because she’s trapped by the camera. If the film starts with some kind of embarrassment with the presence of the camera – people are embarrassed because they are dealing with an intimate story and they’re not ready for the exposure – at the end, she looks at the camera as a kind of enemy. The camera has done much more than just be present in a private or intimate moment. The camera has stimulated some kind of penetration to places she didn’t really acknowledge that she would go to.

JtB: But she wanted to go there…

AM: Yes, but…

JtB: That’s why she confronts her boyfriend? She wanted to go there and, in a sense, the camera helped her in her mission?

AM: I’m not sure. I think that in the end she feels, even if she wanted to do it, that the camera somehow is an enemy, she doesn’t want it there any more. She wants to be away from it. But it’s a question of interpretation of what you see in that look of her at the end.

JtB: Does the camera help her to discover the truth about the murder?

AM: No, because she knows the truth. She’s heard it tens of times. She has, like most people, found ways to inhibit the story, although she heard it many, many times, and even on video she hears it, and yet she doesn’t remember it. Again and again. She inhibits it completely. She finds a way to repress it. Not to know it. She feels inhibited, unlike for instance, others who inhibit because they identify with the event. It is burning material for her; it’s too dangerous stuff. Once she deals with it, she has to deal with who he is. She doesn’t want to deal with it … he’s her lover.

JtB: In some situations she pushes him to go on; in some situations he is the one that pushes her to go on.

AM: She inhibits it from outside of the film. But in the film you see the traces of it. Because when the film starts, it’s not the first time she hears this story. When the film starts, at the first conversation on the bed in India, they mentioned previous times when talking about it, it created tension between them. And so she heard it many times, and knowing him, I know that he tells it all the time. If he sits with you for fifteen minutes and trusts you, you will hear this story.

JtB: So you found the right person, as a filmmaker.

AM: I think I made the right choice. Because there was another person who did the same thing on the same night in a different location, and he wasn’t the right person for the film. Unlike Z32, he really wants to find absolution. He’s now working with the lawyer representing the families of the victims in a civil law suit, to help them to get compensation. Z32 was asked to do the same thing and he declined.

JtB: Why?

AM: Because I don’t believe he is sincere. I don’t think he’s very sincere. I think one of his reasons for making the film is that he thought the film would absolve him. And this will be the end of it. He will not need to ask for forgiveness again. Apparently it’s not so easy, more complex than that. But he’s less serious.

JtB: So the film actually has two functions; the cinema is a tool that helps us to uncover and recover acts of violence, but also a tool to help us to find redemption.

AM: Of course, I use him and he uses me. I use him for two purposes. One, the one you mentioned, and the other one is to be even more famous, for my own career… I also try to deal with it in the film, with who gains from all this, or what comes out from all this. For him it is some kind of absolution or forgiveness or temporary forgiveness. He hopes to feel better at the end of it. He definitely uses me to get there, and doesn’t go where one would go. Many people have asked: Why ask forgiveness from his girlfriend? How is she connected to the event? How can she forgive? Nothing was done to her. Of course, psychologically one understands it. He is not really asking for forgiveness. When he says ‘Do you forgive me?’, he actually asks ‘Can you still love me? Will you stay with me?’ It’s not real forgiveness, it’s a sort of forgiveness within an image of what you expect your spouse to be. He asks for acceptance, not forgiveness for the act of violence. He uses forgiveness, but if he really looks for forgiveness he could have done a lot of other things. Like the other soldier does…

JtB: Through the film one understands how violence operates…

AM: This film came after my film Avenge But One of My Two Eyes.¹ In the last scene of Avenge… I shouted at the soldiers at the checkpoint: ‘We don’t let the children cross.’ This was shot at the end of 2003. In 2004, the group Shovrim Shtikah was formed. Miki Kratsman, the photographer who works with Gideon Levy, the human rights journalist, and the guys who formed Shovrim Shtikah wanted to create an exhibition of their own photographs taken during their military service in the city of Hebron. They approached Miki and asked him to curate the show. They said that they may want to do some video testimonies, and he asked me to join and produce the video testimonials. It was a very interesting exhibition and very well attended.

JtB: Were the soldiers speaking to the camera, without hiding their faces?

AM: We blurred all their faces. The first testimonies that came in were mostly concerned with the activities of the Jewish settlers of Hebron. My contribution was to distract them from the Jewish settlers and lead them to their own conduct. So I became involved in Shovrim Shtikah and listened to a lot of testimonies and edited their video testimonies etc. This was 2004. In 2005, my elder son refused to serve in the military and was jailed. And so I found myself, again, but eventually, in retrospect, I realised that I was very much into thinking about what it means to be a soldier, what it means to become a soldier, what makes a good kid…

JtB: Which was never a question you asked yourself when you were his age?

AM: Not in this way. I didn’t want to go to the military, but my mother … it wasn’t so much an ideological thing, but my mother told me that if my father will hear that I am planning not to go to the military he will kill me, so I decided to live. [Laughs] And I did my military service, but eventually in ‘83 I refused to serve in Lebanon and was jailed for that. I was a founding member of Yesh Gvul [‘There’s a Limit’], one of the first ‘refuseniks’ [to serve in the army] movement in Israel. So in retrospect my interest in the soldier in the Z32 film is how you become a soldier and what makes a good kid soldier, which in turns, is a bad human. It’s supposed to be obvious but it’s not so obvious. I was more interested in those questions, not only for dramatic reasons, but also for my own reasons. That is why in the first third of Z32, we don’t talk about the ‘story’ but we talk about his training; how he has developed as a soldier; how he arrived to the moment when he was told to do the revenge operation, and kill people who, as far as he knew, were innocent. In retrospect we all know that they were also unarmed and elderly. This is why the Z32 film starts with the pre-production part, a pre-production to the event, and so I use in it in the film as a pre-production for the development of the mask and a pre-production for the development of the singing.

JtB: Back to the girlfriend in the film…

AM: I knew about his girlfriend who wasn’t very happy about what he had done. He told me himself.

JtB: It bothered him?

AM: Yes, but I didn’t know how bad it was. It developed in such a way that I didn’t think of having her in the film. At that early stage I had a very different concept – I still wanted to have a second soldier [involved in the killing] in the film. I was looking to find a way to conceal him, not just with a digital mask but I looked also at an option of finding someone to play his role. I wanted him to find the person to play himself. I proposed to do auditions for young men, without me being there. The idea was that he will tell them the story, they will repeat it in the way they see it, and hopefully – because he would perhaps pick people with a similar history and upbringing like his – maybe they will have their own stories as well to tell in the course of the audition. At a certain point I thought of sending Z68 to this audition, the other soldier who did the same thing on the same night. So they went together. But they had very similar stories, and I thought that perhaps they will exchange stories and in the film we’ll find ourselves with two gladiators with masks each telling the story of the other. He did a couple of these auditions and they weren’t very interesting. At a certain point, after one of the interviews when I filmed him quite a few times, he said that he wasn’t very happy with how he was talking to the camera during the interview. He explained that the night before he would rehearse the interview at home and he would think of saying things differently and yet when it came to the interview, he didn’t say what he was hoping to say. So I gave him a camera, and sent him home to do his own interview, without my interference, and without my presence. Which he did. And there were some interesting things there.

JtB: As a video diary?

AM: Well … a self-confession kind of thing. When I watched the first batch of tapes, he was in India with his girlfriend. The second Lebanon War started and he was afraid that he would be called to serve in the war. They brought the trip to India forward and left a day or two after the war started, so I watched his tapes when they were already in India. I thought they were interesting, and maybe I’ll ask him to film one testimony in India too, because India is a place of symbolic value for Israeli soldiers. They go there after the military service to ‘take off’, or get rid of whatever they have to get rid of, and some even go deeper into ‘purify’ themselves after the military service through different methods. I thought maybe this will add something to the film, and also they were planning to go to Varanasi, the death city, where they burn the bodies on the river… It was a long shot. He took a camera in Delhi and did his own ‘diary’. He then started talking to his girlfriend. And from then on…

JtB: So when they came back you continued to work with both of them…

AM: No, I was never there. I met her only for the rough-cut viewing of the film, I felt I was obliged to. I never asked her, why she did it. Maybe she thought that he wants her to do it as she knew it was bothering him. Maybe she thought she should collaborate to help him. I don’t know what she thought.

JtB: She doesn’t just try to help him, she also tries to help herself. She needs to find answers for herself, and in the last shot of the film, she really needs to find out. She becomes more and more disturbed throughout the film and that’s why the last shot is so strong, because she says ‘I don’t know anymore; what am I supposed to say to you now? I don’t know what to do with you now? Am I going to kick you out?’

AM: I’m not sure all of this was part of her incentive. I think that this is where she found herself. She found herself in a situation where her own dealing with the story of murder had to change because of this ‘staged’ moment that they arrived at.