Browse Films
Film Reviews
States of UnBelonging
"Both humanist reverie and implicit cautionary tale."
Joshua Land
Village Voice
Full Review:
Using a woman's death as a gateway into the politics of the West Bank, "States of Unbelonging" recounts a correspondence between its New York-based director, Lynne Sachs, and a friend in Israel revolving around the 2002 murder of Israeli filmmaker Revital Ohayon and her two children in a terrorist attack. States of Unbelonging decries Israel's West Bank wall for cutting Palestine off from itself. Both humanist reverie and implicit cautionary tale, the film is ambivalent in more ways than one, ironically evoking the Old Testament, and evidently taking its cues from Ohayon's own work, described by her husband as less a search for answers than an attempt to 'put a question mark in the right places'.
"A meditation on fear and filmmaking, tragedy and transformation, violence and the land of Israel. Surprisingly beautiful, like the embattled countryside it depicts. War, creativity, beauty -- it's a depressingly frequent concatenation, but Sachs makes it sing without glorifying death."
George Robinson
The Jewish Week
Full Review:
Of all the literary formats, the essay, perhaps, seems the least suited to cinematic adaptation; with its intensely personal nature and often rambling paragraphs, it appears to elude the sort of tight structural discipline demanded of a coherent piece of film. All of which makes Lynne Sachs' achievement all the more impressive: Here is a cine-essay, maintaining all the benefits of the original format while adhering to the demands of the visual. At the heart of the film is Sachs' two-year exchange of letters and pictures with her Israeli friend Nir Zats, an exchange that begins when Revital Ohayon, an Israeli filmmaker and mother, is killed in a terrorist attack on her kibbutz near the West Bank. Soon, Sachs herself embarks on a journey to visit Ohayon's grieving family, and her film becomes a meta-essay of sorts, meditating on fear and filmmaking, tragedy and transformation, violence and the land of Israel. This elegant and beautiful piece of filmmaking is greatly enriched by its soundtrack, featuring works by some of the Jewish avant-garde scene's best and brightest, including Jewlia Eisenberg, Raz Mesinai and Basya Schecter.
"A profound meditation about living in an unstable world, with the personal densely blurred with the historical. Sachs has created a challenging, invigorating film-essay that could rank with the multi-layered ruminations of Chris Marker."
Fernando F. Croce
Cinequest Film Festival
Full Review:
What separates each of us from the other? Director Lynne Sachs explores this complex question and others in her haunting new film States of Unbelonginga beautiful poetic journey that searches for how one person understands another across cultural, historical and political divides. The two people in question are Sachs herself and Revital Ohayon, an Israeli filmmaker killed by terrorists. Like Sachs, Ohayon was a mother, a filmmaker, a teacher and a Jew. Though she never met Ohayon, Sachs examines the onslaught of modern media that united both artists, mediated through the letters, messages and phone calls exchanged with Israeli friend, Nir Zats. Deeply interested in 'history's histories and ruptures,' Sachs embarks on a private journey to ponder issues of identity, violence in the Middle East, and the hope for union, culminating in an unforgettable visit with Ohayon's grieving family. Intensely personal yet thoroughly accessible, States of Unbelonging is a profound meditation about living in an unstable world, with the personal densely blurred with the historical. Drawing on a wide variety of forms, from TV coverage to phone messages and film, Sachs has created a challenging, invigorating film-essay that could rank with the multi-layered ruminations of Chris Marker.
"Sachs can turn simple ingredients into poetic imagery.Mixing found footage and her own crisp digital imagery with great success, Sachs' sensitivity towards Ohayon, with whom she identifies, results in the kind of layered story you won't find in any newspaper."
Johnny Ray Houston
San Francisco Bay Guardian
Full Review:
Sachs can turn simple ingredients into poetic imagery. (Her)new featurette features more than one instance of this talent, such as a sequence in which hands arrange a vase of flowers in close-up -- a series of not-quite-still-lives that grows lovelier by the second. Mixing found footage and her own crisp digital imagery with great success, Sachs' sensitivity towards Ohayon, with whom she identifies, results in the kind of layered story you won't find in any newspaper.
"So, what is an "experimental documentary?" In this case, it means a film that, rather than posing as an Objective Statement of The Truth from a Noted Authority, attempts to convey the inner experiences of a whole person, with a spirit, a heart, and a mind, as she grapples with some bewildering aspects of the real world. We need more films like this."
4 stars
David Finkelstein
Filmthreat
Full Review:
This haunting film is at once a documentary, a highly personal film essay, and a poetic meditation on the human consequences of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The film tells the story of how Sachs became gradually drawn into the story of Revital Ohayon, an Israeli filmmaker who lived on a kibbutz directly adjacent to a Palestinian refugee camp, and who was killed, along with her two young sons, by a terrorist in 2002. (To add to the horror of the story, her young husband heard the entire gruesome murder on his phone.) Sachs reads about the story in the New York Times, and begins a correspondence with an ex-film student of hers, Nir Zats, who lives in Israel. It is natural that Sachs is fascinated by the story: like her, Ohayon is a female Jewish filmmaker with young children, trying to make films which address social conflicts. Like her, Ohayon was opposed to the Israeli occupation of Arab lands. ("She believed that peace must pervade," says her mother.) Ohayon was a fiercely independent thinker, whose films, shown here in fragments, tell stories of women who strongly assert their right to define themselves. Ohayon's story holds a key to how a woman, a mother, and an artist can find a sane way of living in a world of seemingly irreconcilable conflict and violence. The film casually employs many of the techniques of experimental film, including collage, slow frame rates, overlapping projections, and a soundtrack which runs in counterpoint to the images. However, these techniques are applied in a highly expressive way which is never arbitrary. A beautiful score by Ted Reichman adds to the film's emotional impact. The film is enhanced throughout by Zats' video footage of the Israeli landscape, and by his thoughtful, poetic ruminations on the impossibility of normal life in Israel. The result is a flowing collage of words, music, and images, which is a powerful and convincing representation of Sachs' inner experience as she continually learns more about Ohayon's story and attempts to make sense of it. Some of the most riveting footage in the film comes from a videotape of the kibbutz day care center, taken the day after the funeral, in which a wonderful teacher talks with a group of kids (they seem to be about 5 years old) about death, funerals, and how to cope with the loss of Ohayon's two sons. The scene, in which the kids all sit in a big circle, discussing their feelings, could have easily come from a classroom in the Bank Street School for Children on Manhattan's West Side, where I used to work. But watching these kids, who not only are attempting to deal with their feelings about two members of their class who were violently murdered, but also with the fact that they continue to live on the kibbutz, right up against the security fence and the West Bank, which is so dangerously near the ongoing conflict. One child says he heard someone on TV say that the terrorist had "the brain of a chickadee and the common sense of a dog." While, given the senseless cruelty of the murders, I am inclined to agree with the assessment, it is still chilling to see how, at such a young age, these children are already being inculcated with a feeling that the terrorists are crazy people who have no real reasons for their anger. Also fascinating is the story of Debra, Sachs' friend, who, as an idealistic young person, spent some time living on the kibbutz in 1972, when, apparently, the kibbutz and the neighboring Arabs got along peacefully. One cannot help feeling, however, that the social and economic inequalities which became the root causes of the intifada must have been present in 1972, even if Debra wasn't aware of it. In an interview with Ohayon's brother, it becomes clear that her approach to the danger of life next door to the West Bank was to try and ignore it, and to create her own personal world, in which people treat each other with respect instead of prejudice. In a sense, you could say that her reward for ignoring the conflict was to become one of its victims. But you could also say that her solution to the impossibility of life in Israel was brave and life-affirming. "I know I can't do anything about this immense conflict all by myself," Ohayon seemed to be saying, "but, as a creative person, I will create a reality where people behave decently towards each other. Some day, I may become a victim of the conflict, but, until that day, I will have created an atmosphere of peace and respect, instead of fear and hatred." Her life is indeed an inspiration. I have always been bothered by a certain kind of liberal approach to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, in which an artist or commentator tries to take a "neutral, balanced" approach, by acting as if both sides suffer equally and are equally guilty of horrendous acts. In a conflict such as this one, in which one side is immensely wealthier than the other, and the wealthier, better armed side is committing far greater acts of violence, and causing far more disruption in the lives of the poorer side, and is, in fact, the aggressive, occupying force, it is quite misleading to give the impression that blame for the conflict is equal on both sides. For much of the film, Sachs indeed takes this kind of stance. She represents the Palestinian experience by including a small amount of news footage about the building of the security wall and how it affects life on the West Bank, and there are images which contrast the wealth of Israel with the poverty of the West Bank. A single report about a Palestinian child who is senselessly killed in the conflict reinforces the vague, unarticulated impression the film gives that "there is equal blame on both sides." Although Sachs searches extensively within the bible, trying to find an explanation of a landscape that "makes normal people go mad," she doesn't really look at the history of the last fifty years, which would make the motivation of Ohayon's killer easy to comprehend. In the end, the film makes an argument for its neutral political stance which I largely buy: in order to move forward and get somewhere with this conflict, one must get out of the ideologies, and into the lives and feelings of those who are suffering. As Ohayon's husband says, the violence "will only stop when we go back to our feelings." Sachs has set a supremely difficult task for herself, and, implicitly, for us: to realize the full horror of the senseless murder of a woman and two children, and yet not close ourselves off from acknowledging the injustices suffered by the Palestinian people. It is true that the feelings of the killer are unexamined in the film, and, halfway through the film, we learn that he has been killed in turn by the Israeli army, ending once and for all the possibility that any healing, growth or change can ever come of Ohayon's murder. But this is not a film for beginners. By now, educated viewers have access to a myriad of documents which purport to explain the conflict from all sides. Meanwhile, by taking the edge off of this loaded issue, Sachs has done her audiences an invaluable service by making her film accessible to people from all ideological perspectives. Ohayon's husband, speaking of Ohayon's films, says that they will not provide any answers, but will enable the viewer to put question marks in the right places. His remark also serves as a perfect description of why "States of Unbelonging" is so effective as a humanist argument. The underlying story of the film concerns Sachs, and her increasing level of involvement with Ohayon's story, which gradually leads her to overcome her (perfectly natural) fear of going to Israel, until she finally feels that the lessons to be learned from her trip are so valuable, that she buys a ticket, packs up her camera, and goes. As any mother would, she tries to calm her kids' fears about the trip. The film ends with a question her daughter asks about the biblical story of Abraham, in which he sends his maid Hagar and their son Ishmael into exile in the desert, where they become progenitors of the Arab people. "Who sent them into the desert?" she asks. Answer the question, and the film's unspoken questions are also answered. So, what is an "experimental documentary?" In this case, it means a film that, rather than posing as an Objective Statement of The Truth from a Noted Authority, attempts to convey the inner experiences of a whole person, with a spirit, a heart, and a mind, as she grapples with some bewildering aspects of the real world. We need more films like this.
"A search for a person beyond reach, a meditation on things one cannot know, a moving kaddish for uncertain, dangerous times."
Kathy Geritz
Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley Art Museum
Full Review:
At a time when conflicts scar the globe, the experimental "States of UnBelonging" seeks to personalize the violence by considering a single death: that of Revital Ohayon, an Israeli filmmaker living on a kibbutz near the West Bank, who was killed-along with her two young children-by a terrorist. The visually arresting film's layered and refracted images drawn from television news and home videos shot in both Israel and New York, where director Sachs lives, attest to the complex process of "accompanying" a stranger in her death. Sachs and former student Nir Zats, who lives in Tel Aviv, seek to fill in details of Ohayon's life and the hostile landscape where she lived and died. Drawing on the Bible, Allen Ginsberg's poetry, and interviews with Ohayon's family, the film is a three-year search for a person beyond reach, a meditation on things one cannot know, a moving kaddish for uncertain, dangerous times.
"States of UnBelonging presents a mature, artistic meditation on Middle East violence."
3 stars
P. Hall
Video Librarian
"Reminiscent of Marker’s Sunless with its rapid and unexpected global movements, States of UnBelonging disperses perspectives and voices across different individuals and material representations. A multi-technological epistolary exchange between New York City and Israel across e-mails and phone conversations, the film ultimately culminates in a series of face-to-face meetings in Israel, meetings with the living and the dead."
Timothy Corrigan
The Essay Film:From Montaigne After Marker
Full Review:
"Of the Currency of Events: The Essay Film as Editorial" by Tim Corrigan
Lynne Sachs’s States of UnBelonging (2006) begins in a private life suffused by global television images, visible on a screen in the background of a living room in New York City. A young girl (Sachs’s daughter) plays on the left side of the frame, while Sachs sits at a table on the right side, watching a news report that shows scenes of war and protest in the Middle East. Over the clicking of an e-mail correspondence, Sachs writes to her Israeli friend Nir: “Did you ever have the feeling that the history you’re experiencing has no shape? War helped us establish time. A war established beginnings and endings.” She writes Nir about a news report in New York Times that describes the terrorist murder of Israeli filmmaker Revital Ohayon and her two children living in Kibbutz Metzer on the West Bank. As she later talks with Nir on the telephone about the incident, a close up of Sachs’s hands cuts out the newspaper article while the blurred television image continues in the background. She folds and turns the material of the newspaper article, then a map of Israel, through a series of superimposed images. Introducing a kind of home movie of current events, these first, dense, and layered images locate the film against the background of television news and the difficult understanding of history through the crisis of war. Here a seemingly never-ending crisis becomes the quintessential contemporary current of events that, in this essay, must be engaged and rewritten as a caesura across global geographies, an imagistic constellation rather than an historical current. Over television images of street violence in Israel, Sachs’s daughter Maya later asks her, “Is there are war in Israel?” “Not today” is Sachs’s ironic reply.
Through the course of the film, this current of events changes directions constantly, as the film arrests, redirects, and reverses the movement of those events. Reminiscent of Marker’s Sunless with its rapid and unexpected global movements, States of UnBelonging disperses perspectives and voices across different individuals and material representations. A multi-technological epistolary exchange between New York City and Israel across e-mails and phone conversations, the film ultimately culminates in a series of face-to-face meetings in Israel, meetings with the living and the dead. At one point, Sachs searches for information on the Internet in foreground, while watching a video in background of the weeping Avi, husband of Revital, and at the same time speaking to Nir on the telephone. Even global geographies fluctuate and overlap within this current of crises: when Sachs interviews Revital’s brother and asks why, after 9/11, did she live so close to danger, he replies that his sister may have wondered why Sachs would live in New York with two daughters. Exact dates announce moments and movements–Nov. 12, 2002, December 10, 2002, Feb. 27, 2005, March 1, 2005—but rather than indicate a chronological movement of history the dates suggest ruptures and gaps in the difficult effort to comprehend the everyday current of a present through the ruins of a past. Like dates of a daily newspaper, these dates threaten to become only fragments of the past.
Materialized as found footage, old home movies, and rebroadcast television news, history surfaces in the course of the film as the shifting and superimposed constellations of different geographies, textualities, time zones, and imagistic fabrics. News broadcasts of war, home movies of Revitale and her son, videos of the daycare center day after the death of two children, Nir’s filmed interview of Avi, clips of Revital’s own films Young Poetry and It Happens So Often, together create a fractured montage of the past and the present, the public and the personal, which even images of the luxurious beauty of abundant olive groves and Sachs’s readings of Biblical histories are unable to harmonize and resolve as anything but clashes across a geography that “drives people mad” and where individuals “on both sides of the green line” live with death minute to minute. Even the everyday waivers and cracks: shots of a soldier walking the streets are slowed and disrupted by small jumps cuts, and street scenes tilt out of focus or tip within canted frames. Like an endless war, these states of unbelonging have no place in which a self can be situated and clearly articulated. It is rather a state of perilous expectations or, as Revitale’s husband describes it, a place of such intense longing that there is simply nowhere to locate the extreme sorrow of that longing.
In this current of unbelonging, however, Sachs simultaneously discovers and creates an image of recognition, the image of an agency that is in fact the face and history of the film itself. Early in the film, her voice-over describes a hesitant, fearful, and divided self, doubled in fact as the reflection of Rivetal, that other woman, mother, and filmmaker. Throughout this first part of the film, Sachs’s presence assumes, despite its centrality, almost a marginal position. Watching, commenting, reading, she is ubiquitously there, but the film never provides a full image of her, only parts of her (hands, hair, and partial glimpses). Gradually, though, she begins to emerge as a recognizable presence and body, first in a café interview with Revitale’s brother, Rossi. Later, a full shot of her shows her adjusting her camera, and then a close up focuses on her as she places the rock on the grave of Revitale, a gesture which, while an act of mourning, also describes, I believe, an act of mutual recognition.
Sachs’s gradual assumption of an agency here, as part of a recognized bond with Revitale, depends on and provokes two related actions: her turning off the television and her decision to go to Israel. They are complimentary actions, suggesting, first, her refusal to participate in the media’s empty flow of current events and, second, her choice to enter the current of real events. Unlike Revitale whom Rossi describes as living in “a bubble” on her kibbutz, not reading or watching the news and not wanting to know, Sachs chooses ultimately to “know” as an investigation beyond the news, and her words and voice quickly assume a declarative rhetoric that confronts the alienating collage of abstracted images of the televised streets in Israel. Two titles on the screen describe at once her hesitation and decision: “I don’t think there’s any way I can go to Israel,” immediately followed by “I don’t think there’s anyway I cannot go to Israel.” On March 1, 2005, she announces, “I’ve stopped watching television all together. I have a rock to put on her grave.”
What is most significant about this transition is, I believe, that it is act of will and mind to overcome the paralysis and distance of world events. Earlier Avi observes that “When you see those pictures coming from Israel everyday, you stop seeing it as something that’s happening to people and you start approaching it as” a big event in the corner of the world, as part of a “geographic farness makes you numb.” It is precisely that numbness before the geographic farness of media events that Sachs’s engages and chooses to physically and mentally overcome. Remarking on a world of bombs and explosions constantly flowing across the news from Israel to Istanbul to Iraq, Sachs thinks out loud in a flash of recognition and participation: “Any shake up on the surface of the earth dislodges my equilibrium. Newspapers drape us with the news of another person’s death. When scanning a page of horrors, … an open window onto the spectacle of killing. A gust of wind and I almost smell it.” As she leaves for the Middle East, she will not be “a war photographer,” and, unlike the endless stream of news reports, she is “not going to Israel to shoot a film.” Hers is a decision to experience that world as an active agency outside images in search for knowledge, a knowledge that will presumably extend her beyond the boundaries of not just New York or Israel but of her own self and her own film. Avi remarks earlier that for Revitale “no matter what choice you make it’s the right choice,” and here Sachs’s choice becomes, not too far from that of Ari in Waltz with Bashir, the critical choice to be the changing agent of her own destiny, which is inextricably also the destiny of her children.
If recognition, expectation, and choice are the cornerstones of essayistic investigations, their agency becomes positioned in State of UnBelonging through Sachs to the many children in the film as the emblems of choice and anticipatory expectation. Sachs’s identification with Revitale as a filmmaker most obviously functions as a point of subjective transference and transformation whereby she remakes the filmmaker’s death and the found footage of Revitale’s films as she incorporates them into herself and her own film. A second, and probably more important, point of identification, though, occurs with Revitale’s children and Sach’s two daughters who appear in the opening and closing sequences and sporadically through the film. Images of these and other children and their loss suffuse the film: a videotape of the day care center where young boys and girls work to process the death of their former classmates, a child plays in extreme foreground of an image while Jewish children play in street on a large monitor in the background. In one shot, a corner of an otherwise black image contains only the image of a terrified child.
In the final sequence, these images of children crystallize in an almost naive flash of insight and awareness, as the film returns to the New York living room that opened the film, now brightly lit. Before the television news in background, a daughter’s voice recounts the tale of Abraham and the casting out of Ishmael that she and her sister heard from Sachs that morning. When Sachs asks her daughters how they think the two separated brothers in the tale felt, one daughter responds that she thinks they could have learned to live together. The daughter then continues with a simple question that is the kind of question rarely asked of those current events whose past moves relentlessly through the present into the future: “Who sent them into the desert?” The film then cuts to high-angle shot of the daughter sitting down in front of a silent television. In this crisis to know and to act, States of UnBelonging, like Benjamin, concludes with the recognition that “To write history means giving dates a physiognomy” (Arcades 476).
