Brief Encounters by Ohad Landesman

Brief Encounters by Ohad Landesman

Explores how non-Israeli filmmakers have used the essayistic travelogue to capture Israel's complex and contested landscape.

Brief Encounters offers the first extended exploration of a distinct and often overlooked corpus of travel documentaries made by foreign filmmakers in Israel and British-Mandate Palestine over the past century. Focusing in particular on the tumultuous period of the 1960s to 1970s, Ohad Landesman shows how renowned filmmakers such as Chris Marker, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jules Dassin, Susan Sontag, and Claude Lanzmann turned to the essayistic travelogue to grapple with a bitter reality of armed conflicts and political upheavals. At the journey's outset, each filmmaker had a different vision of Israel in mind, shaped by either socialist ideals, biblical myths, or Zionist sympathies. Yet what was found rarely affirmed initial expectations. And accordingly, these travelogues end up becoming testaments to disillusionment, as the filmmakers come to confront the unrealizability of their fantasies through the landscape of Israel. Using close analysis, the book aims to recover the significance of such transnational perspectives for what they say about the evolving image of the Israeli nation and, more broadly, the fruitful intersection of cinema and travel.

"This book offers a new and exciting perspective on the filmic representation of IsraelWhile much has been written about how Israeli cinema has represented Israel on film, the ways in which non-Israelis have portrayed Israel on film has received little attention. Landesman makes a compelling case as to why these films can and should be studied together, and his analyses of the films are insightful and erudite. This is a genuine contribution to Israeli film studies and to the study of documentary films more broadly." — Eran Kaplan, author of Projecting the Nation: History and Ideology on the Israeli Screen

Ohad Landesman is Assistant Professor in Film Studies in the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television, Tel Aviv University. He is the coeditor, with Laliv Melamed, of Truth or Dare: Selected Essays on Documentary Cinema.