A Film Never Completed

Representing Social Relations in a Mixing Neighbourhood

in Anthropology of the Middle East
Author:
Regev Nathansohn Sapir Academic College regev@umich.edu

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DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3167/ame.2019.140107
Keywords:
coexistence; community art; filmmaking; Haifa; mixed cities; reflexivity; representation
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Abstract

This is a story and analysis of a film production that has never materialised. The case study features a group of neighbourhood residents who wished to produce a film representing their experiences of living in a mixed neighbourhood in the northern Israeli city of Haifa, where Jews and Arabs live together. The ethnography of their work documents the incommensurability between the social interactions within the group and the content of the film's script. While the group dynamic reflected the mixing atmosphere of the neighbourhood, their script succumbed to the hegemonic discourse of separation in Israel and to steering away from ambiguities. The group's aspiration to create a realistic representation required a political and visual language that was not available as an objective possibility and thus was challenging to imagine.

Contributor Notes

Regev Nathansohn is Head of the Digital Media Program and Lecturer in the Department of Communication at Sapir Academic College. He earned his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan. In 2007, he co-founded and served as the first president of the Visual Sociology Group working under the International Sociological Association. He co-edited (with Dennis Zuev) Sociology of the Visual Sphere (2013) and edited a special section entitled ‘Sociology as/of Visual Activism’ in Current Sociology 64, no. 1 (2015). Email: regev@umich.edu

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Cover Anthropology of the Middle East
Article Category:
Research Article
Page Count:
17
Keywords:
coexistence; community art; filmmaking; Haifa; mixed cities; reflexivity; representation
Print Publication Date:
01 Jun 2019
Online Publication Date:
01 Jun 2019
Copyright:
© Berghahn Books 2019

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