The filmmaker Yair Lev, for instance, whose film Yakantalisa (1996) is discussed in the chapter, said in an interview with Zman Tel Aviv that his idea o f making a documentary came after

Non-fiction Film and the (De)construction of Gay Identity

The increasing number of gay documentaries and autobiographical films produced in Israel stem not only from growing interest in gay stories, but also from a universal shift in the form of the documentary film, which is directly related to the strengthening of the politics of identity. Keith Beattie has argued that the greater commitment to promoting personal issues of sexuality, gender, race and ethnicity in recent years has led to a stronger need for the expression o f self and identity in autobiographical forms of filmmaking (105).

Michael Renov has dubbed the period of documentary filmmaking since 1970 “post-verite”, one in which “the documentative stance that had previously been valorized as informed but objective was now being replaced by a more personalist perspective in which the maker’s stake and commitment to the subject matter were foregrounded” (The Subject o f Documentary 176). According to Renov, the emergence of a politics o f identity has meant that “the clarion call to unified and collective action came to be drowned out by the murmur o f human differences” (The Subject o f Documentary 177).

XXiring the preceding Direct Cinema period, which inclined towards “objective” observation, the presence of the filmmaker was silenced. This, Renov suggests, was “the symptomatic silence of the empowered [...] white, male professionals” {The Subject o f Documentary 181). The self-enactments of the current generation of documentarists are a transgressive act. Their self-referenced films speak the lives o f those who have lived outside “the boundaries of cultural knowledge” (Renov, The Subject o f Documentary 181). A particularly vital and dynamic element within this trend, Renov suggests, is a growing group o f gay filmmakers who, rather than conforming to any particular template, test and try new ways to explore their sexual and cultural identity {The Subject o f

Documentary 180). Trying to define non-heteronormative identities, or to defy

notions of fixed identities altogether, gay documentary and autobiographical films (made by both gay and heterosexual filmmakers) become “queer”; they tend to blur boundaries, mix genres, and create new modes of filmmaking. The blurring of distinctions between documentary and fiction as two separate genres reflects the blurring of lesbian and gay sexualities as discrete identities, and is accompanied by the celebration o f queemess as a postmodern strategy of

confounding identity. In this sense, contemporary gay non-fiction films are often more interested in deconstructing or questioning gay identity than in constructing/corroborating it. These films, and the filmmakers, indicate “the myriad possibilities o f representational tactics available to apprehend [...] very elusive subjectivities” (McHugh 225).

The many techniques that some gay non-fiction films employ attest to the elusive, undefined quality of the “truth” they come to convey. In their cinematic approach and narration, the filmmakers make a point of rendering the films’ artificial, constructed, discursive nature as transparent as possible. The films expose the fabrications, prejudices and artifices that dominate our culture and shape the ways we perceive ourselves, as well as others. This is particularly important when addressing stigmatized sexual identities such as gay men, lesbians and transsexuals, for the queer’s aim is to unmask the ways in which society constructs identities and labels its subjects. The films allow us to explore further the ways in which one rewrites one’s self, interprets one’s life, and gives meaning to one’s existence, especially when one is a gay man, a lesbian or a transsexual.

One o f the aims of this chapter, therefore, is to explore the tendency of some new Israeli gay documentaries to playfully cross the line between fiction and non-fiction, and consider what ends it serves. I will attempt both to tackle the uniqueness of these films as postmodern artefacts, which blur the once clear distinctions between the objective and the subjective, and to examine the nature of their contribution to the notion of gayness in contemporary Israel. It is important to note that not all the films included in this chapter follow these experimental lines. The majority o f them, formally, at least, are conventional documentaries. However, a few of the filmmakers, most notably Anat Dotan and Elle Flanders, mobilize new means of documentary filmmaking, such as dramatization and incorporation of “found” footage. Their films constitute a link between formal experimentation and the challenging of identities.

The diversity of the films considered in this chapter, classified as non­ fiction, calls for different categories o f analysis, based on thematic and structural principles. As all of them are based on personal life stories, questions o f the biographical/autobiographical status of their narratives might be raised. For the following categories of analysis, I have preferred to use the term “autobiographical film” only when the filmmakers are also the characters in the

films documenting their own life experiences. Two o f the selected films, Say

Amen! {Tagid Amen!, David Deri, 2005) and Almost There (Kim ’at Sham, Sigal

Yehuda and Joelle Alexis, 2004) are discussed in this category while in other cases films that might fit this description are categorized differently, either because the autobiographical elements in them are challenged or their presence in the film works towards other purposes (as in Zero Degrees o f Separation [Elle Flanders, Canada, 2005], for instance).

The first three categories in the chapter relate mainly to biography/autobiography:

1. Hybridity: non-fiction and its dramatization {Last Post).

2. Essayist films: the autobiographical turn in Israeli gay cinema

{Almost There, Say Amen!).

3. Performativity and performance: staging sexual and national identities {It Kinda Scares Me [Tomer VeHasrutim, Tomer Heymann, 2001] and Edinburgh D oesn’t Wait fo r Me

[Edinburgh Lo Mechaka Li, Erez Laufer, 1996]).

The following three are thematic categories:

4. Representations o f AIDS: living with and dying from AIDS in 1990s Israel {Positive Story [Sipur Chiuvi, Ran Kotzer, 1996] and Yakantalisa).

5. Alternative Parenthood: the demise o f gay partnership {Family

Matters [Mishpuche, David Noy and Yoram Ivry, 2004]).

6. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict and gay identities and practices

{Zero Degrees o f Separation, Gan [Ruthie Shatz and Adi

Barash, 2003]).

Last Post (Anat Dotan, 1997): Fables of the Reconstruction

The short film Last Post was written and directed by Anat Dotan as her final project at the Sam Spiegel Film School in Jerusalem. It was first screened in 1997. The film is an elegy for Amos Guttman, with whom Dotan had a professional and personal relationship. Like Guttman, whose films are largely based on his life story, Dotan deals in her film with real-life events but employs fictional

storytelling devices. The emphasis is on dramatization in the form of restaging, reconstruction and reenactment of events. As the actress Sigal Tzuk, who plays her in the film, declares in a voice-over at the beginning: “His films were always about himself. He didn’t know how to make films about anything else. I think that was another thing that connected us. He told me to make films so I could tell my stories”.

Like Guttman’s Drifting, Last Post draws the spectator’s attention to the gap between reality and its imaginative, distanced reconstruction. Dotan does not try to create the illusion of autobiographical transparency. On the contrary, she critiques the notion of an accessible and verifiable personal history. Judith Butler has stated in the new preface to her book Gender Trouble, that while she does not believe that poststructuralism entails the death of autobiographical writing, “it does draw attention to the difficulty o f the ‘I’ to express itself through the language that is available to it” (xxiv). Drawing on this, Dotan opts for a richly constructed account o f selfhood, which is as playful as it is opaque. This allows Dotan to conflate personal revelation with a broader socio-cultural critique.

Dotan mixes genres, and crosses the boundaries between fiction and non­ fiction, meditating on the artificial, reconstructed quality o f our memories and histories. As she moves away from the traditional documentary style into a performative74 section (and then back, towards the end, where a short clip of the “real” Guttman shortly before his death is shown), she points to autobiography as, in the words of Keith Beattie, “an act in which the author ‘performs the s e lf” (109).

Using dramatization and reenactments, Dotan offers her unique interpretation of real events as she remembers them, expressing her longing for her dead friend. The film stresses the importance o f the way we think about the past rather than the accuracy o f our memories. As Marita Sturken has observed, writing about the production o f cultural memory, “[w]e need to ask not whether a memory is true but rather what its telling reveals about how the past affects the present” (2). It seems that more than “objective” documentation o f past events, the film, or rather, the making o f the film, had a therapeutic function for Dotan, and

74 I use the term “performativity” after Judith Butler. Suggesting we perform our identity