There’s a retrospective of Avi Mograbi’s films on at a leading Buenos Aires art house and  Z32, his most recent effort,  has a regular slot at a state-sponsored cinema that normally  only puts on Argentine films that wouldn’t survive on the commercial circuit.

Our local film critics have spared nothing in their praise for Mograbi and his work. According to Quintín (yes folks, he goes by one name only. What’s pretentious about that?) Mograbi is “an indispensable film maker” and the man with one name says the following about Z32:

The Middle East conflict has been devastating for the Palestinians and has placed Israeli society in an impossible position. Over recent decades its governments have pushed the country towards ever more militarism, racism and human rights violations. The soldier in Z32 is a […] “normal” young person, very much representative of his fellow citizens and their ambiguities with regard to the conflict with the Palestinians. This is the most devious way that fascism grows, when its imposition is placed in the hands of ordinary people […]

What all this produces is the unmistakable style of Mograbi, at the same time simple and sophisticated; simple in the transparency of its gaze, courageous in not hiding its own contradictions, and complex in the way the film develops and analyses itself, creating a space in which there is room for humor and music but where the tragedy doesn’t lose an iota of its weight.

Writing about the same film, Horacio Bernades says:

But there’s still a problem; the killer not only seems to be a good kid, at one point he also describes himself being “on the left”. If you can be a good leftist kid and kill enemies in the name of a rightist state - kill them in circumstances where you have an advantage over them, is the big question asked by Z32.

Diego Battle, for his part, says of Mograbi that he is “one of the most provocative and non-conformist directors in Israeli cinema”, and of Z32:

If this mixture of political cinema, musical and home movie sounds ridiculous, lacking in respect or pretentious to anyone, they’ll just have to give a chance to an artist of Mograbi’s class, one who is capable of questioning himself, his dilemmas, problems of conscience and the artistic mechanisms he uses to approach an urgent, ungraspable, red hot reality like that of the Arab-Israeli conflict. We are not only in the presence of a great film maker but also of a brave and audacious intellectual, one of those that fear nothing, not even the exposure of their own flaws, fears and contradictions.

1.

I saw the film yesterday and indeed it’s a pretty good one. A former Israeli soldier who says he participated in a revenge killing of Palestinian policemen talks with his girlfriend about what he says he did, he describes the same event in Mograbi’s living room and returns to the place where he says he participated in the killing, accompanied by the film’s director. His face, and that of his girlfriend, is covered by a series of digital masks throughout. There are also a couple of scenes where Mograbi sings songs - backed first by his son on piano and later by something of a mini-orchestra squashed into the aforementioned  living room - with lyrics that question his decision to cooperate with the former soldier in the making of the film.

It’s all very reflexive, questioning and postmodern and Mograbi himself comes across as a decent enough sort who stops just short of taking himself too seriously. What struck me about the film was that it was willing to question all sorts of things but never the veracity of the former soldier’s story. His  first-person narrative is taken as an entirely accurate report of his experiences in the army in general and the night of the killings in particular. Note that I am not saying that he isn’t telling the full truth but the possibility that he isn’t is not considered. For an Israeli audience this may not be an issue of great importance as it would have the linguistic and cultural resources to make up its own mind but it’s quite a drawback for an audience in Buenos Aires that doesn’t have a clue about life in Israel.

2.

The film also makes no attempt to provide any sort of historical context for the events described by the former soldier; they occur in a kind of eternal, ahistorical present of endless conflict. Again, for an Israeli audience this wouldn’t be an issue but here in Buenos Aires it allows the likes of Quintín to trot out his hobby horse view of Israel as a fascist state and Bernardes to speak of it being an intrinsically rightist one.

3.

A certain amount of the current fascination with Mograbi and Z32 among Buenos Aires  cinephiles seems to me to be related to  surprise that a nice, normal, Jewish boy with a vaguely leftist background might be capable of murder. In order to be surprised by this you have to regard Jews as somehow special or better behaved than other people, or at least believe that they are required to behave better than other people. If you regard Jews as being just like other people, capable of reaching as high and stooping as low then you won’t find much to fascinate you  about what is described in Z32.

4.

Another part of the fascination produced by Z32 has to do with the view of Israel normally held by left-liberal opinion formers, a group that includes the film critics cited above. They tend to see Israel a homogenous block of Americanized white settlers, inherently blood thirsty, lording it over the Arabs and lacking in the social and cultural resources necessary to question and doubt their own behavior. Some within this current of opinion regard Israel as America’s faithful guard dog in its region while those of a more conspiratorial bent see it as manipulating the innocent North American behemoth to further its own ends.  Hence their amazement and delight when they come across someone like Mograbi, a man who makes films anchored in an intellectual grammar they can grasp and who at the same time is corrosively critical of his own country and society. Again, nobody who perceived the Jews’ state as being as a state like any other, with its share of achievements, failures and horror, could be so fascinated by Mograbi and his films.

The most important thing that our local film critics are missing in their reaction to Mograbi and his work is that he isn’t making films to impress them. He’s an Israeli who is committed to his country and society.