Brief Encounters: Documentary Visits to an Imagined Israel

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.