The short film Gelem is available to watch at theย top of the page.
Gelem, a short film by Alon Sahar, examines a military police investigator, a soldier, and a cinematographer as they reenact the suicide of another soldier. The film begins with an overexposed shot of an orange marker on a high-voltage line. The cinematographer corrects the exposure in-shot, after which the investigator, who has just finished a phone call, signals the start of the reenactment.
Their reenactment of the suicide, which took place a mere two hours earlier, commences with a precise timestamp: “Friday, exactly half past two, 27/2/2004, 5th of Adar 5764 (Jewish calendar), scene of a non-operational death incident.” The film’s opening aims to encapsulate a moment in time, stamped materially through the videotape’s operation. The era of the event, 2004, is indicative of a period when technological limitations necessitated the use of videotapes, requiring a few seconds of recording before the crucial shot. The initial seconds of a videotape were often deemed unreliable, potentially compromising the recorded material’s quality. Consequently, the film commences with a delay, awaiting time’s advancement, much like the linear movement of the videotape reels. From this point, however, the film’s concept of time becomes more and more complex.
Gelem (meaning “Raw” in Hebrew) simultaneously seeks to revert to the past, reviving a past event in the present, and offers a fresh visual form and renewed interpretation to what appears on the screen for the first time. It aims not merely to reenact the events but also to recreate the memory of them, specifically the visual and video graphics memory that either remains or has vanished and is no longer available. The film operates on multiple levels of interpretation: it reenacts the reenactment of the original soldier’s suicide, and a subsequent scene introduces another layer, a reenactment from the seemingly objective perspective of a security camera documenting the original event. To these layers adds the remnants of a true event that occurred in real life, and which inspired the filmmaker to make this film.
Indeed, while the film is centered around a real event, it uses the tools of fictionโscript, mise-en-scene, casting, directing, and filming decisions that might not necessarily align with the originalโto create situations that uncover traces of the past still lingering in the present. Rather than reenacting the event itself, the film hones in on the echoes created between the past event and current reality. Additionally, it highlights the discrepancies between the reenactment by the soldier, reliant on his memory, and the supposedly objective details provided by the security camera footage.
Gelem doesn’t use reenactment as a means to uncover truth, fill in factual gaps, or to recreate the original event as faithfully as possible, as is often the case in documentary cinema. Instead, the film emphasizes both the object of representation and the process of representation itself. The viewer is consistently aware of the reenactment as an act of mediation and interpretation throughout.
The experience of viewing this cinematic reenactment raises questions about cinema’s ability to completely recreate a lost element from the past. Attempting to restore what cannot be recovered is a Sisyphean task, one that conjures an absent presence, a ghost that haunts the film. Through reenactment, we can evaluate our capability to return to a past moment or to bring the past back to us, scrutinizing the act of representing the past and the role of memory and performance in this process.
In Gelem, the ghost from the past disrupts the linear progression of time and the surreal performance of soldiers who are reenacting an unfathomable suicide event, even as they strive to control the case’s details and facts. The film brings two significant ethical aspects to the forefront: First, the sterile term from the Israeli Defense Force, “non-operational death incident,” which defines death by what it is not, compels us to contemplate this singular event. Yet, it also reminds us of a more extensive phenomenonโdozens of soldier suicides each year that are frequently silenced and forgotten. The second point comes at the end of the first scene. The commander, having already reenacted the event, brings up his possession of the deceased soldier’s paintings. This statement is abruptly and seemingly arbitrarily cut off, serving as a poignant reminder of the harsh hierarchy of memory remnants.
The short film Gelem is available to watch at theย top of the page.
