An introduction to my project.
My project will map how Palestinian narrative film documents Israeli military occupation with a focus on checkpoints in the West Bank from 2000 to 2025. I will be focusing on 3-5 significant checkpoints that appear across multiple films. By mapping these repeated locations and comparing how different filmmakers cinematically reimagine these spaces over time, the project analyzes checkpoint cinema as a practice of visual resistance. This work becomes one that refuses the surveillance gaze through specific strategies, whether through camera angles that reject panoptic angles, ellipses, and offscreen space that protect privacy, or editing that counters the logic of security footage.
Some of the issues with checkpoints are that they are designed as architectural structures built for total surveillance, that is, visibility, control, and documentation. The fact that security cameras capture people from a fixed and elevated position reinforces the logic of panopticism. The ability to see everything, track everyone, and maintain control through visibility.
My Research Questions:
- How do camera angles refuse the surveillance gaze? What happens when films reject elevated panoptic views?
- How do positions of intimacy (closeups, eye level shots), obstruction (blocked frames and limited sightlines), or the deliberate disorientation (unstable cameras or unclear spatial relationships) end up creating a different visual logic?
- So, what does it mean to film checkpoints from within rather than from above?
- What do ellipses and offscreen space preserve from view?
- How does refusing to show everything become an act of protecting privacy and dignity?
- When does action movement move offscreen, and what does it protect?
- What remains deliberately invisible even as checkpoints are documented?
- How does editing then create counternarratives to security footage?
- What temporal strategies counter the continuous recording?
- How does narrative structure refuse surveillance’s claim to objective real-time documentation
The work of Palestinian checkpoint cinema can function as visual resistance through formal refusal. Palestinian filmmakers do not simply capture; they document differently, using cinematic strategies that explicitly counter surveillance logic. So I will take a case study approach, examining 3-5 checkpoints (Qalandiya, Bethlehem, and Huwwara) that appear across multiple films, which will serve as sites of entry for creating a comparative film analysis. Using a film analysis method, I will conduct a frame-by-frame examination of camera position, angle, and movement, and analyze editing patterns, ellipses, and offscreen space. Having a comparative map that tracks how different filmmakers approach the same checkpoint lets me see which formal strategies are repeated and how refusals operate differently across directors and decades.
The films and checkpoints are vital to this project. Though I initially want to explore Palestinian women filmmakers, I am not sure whether this is limiting other checkpoint cinema that could add to it. If I were to focus solely on Palestinian cinema, I would explore the work of Annemarie Jacir, Farah Nablusi, Mai Masri, and Elia Suleiman. Likewise, the 3-5 checkpoint locations will allow me to see the reimagination of space over time, as discussed above, and how each checkpoint functions as a case study in cinematic resistance, and these directors create counter-cartographies.
The website will have four main sections. The first section will be the map and archive page, which will house an interactive map showing which checkpoints appear in which films. There will be gray markers representing all the actual checkpoints, and the colored markers will represent the filmed checkpoints. This should illustrate the repeated locations and the gaps that remain undocumented. The next page will be where the visual analysis is housed, featuring side-by-side video comparison tools that analyze formal strategies across films. This will compare how different directors frame the same checkpoints. The third page will have the checkpoints, and the fourth page will include an analysis of my core questions.
Here are some mockups of what my homepage could look like:
Ultimately, I don’t know how this project will turn out and how the direction/timeline will shift. I will be working through a GitHub Repository using Leaflet.js for mapping, GeoJSON for location data, and Bootstrap for the interface. Also, this direction might shift depending on what patterns unfold from the formal analysis section.
Some potential sources I will be using are:
- Palestinian Film Institute
- Human rights organizations documenting checkpoints:
- B’Tselem
- OCHA (UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
This project matters in the fields of Palestinian studies, film studies, surveillance studies, and spatial studies by helping us understand checkpoint cinema as a specific practice of refusal under occupation, how formal strategies function as political practices, and how it can serve as a formal refusal and counter-surveillance. This project focuses on how Palestinian filmmakers are not just filming content differently, but also using formal strategies that refuse surveillance’s visual and temporal logic. There is such important work being done here, and so many different ways to interact with these materials. I am interested in how checkpoints get filmed as a political practice.
Likewise, film archives have been continuously targeted by Israel over the years, so the act of creating documentation that can survive despite systemic attempts to destroy the archive is fundamental. This project makes the focus on formal strategies of documentation more urgent as we consider and understand how filmmakers create works that might survive, how they return to the same sites to rebuild what was lost, and how visual resistance operates under the constant threat of erasure. Access to these films is difficult, and as we have seen, many have been removed from circulation or cannot be released in certain countries, making the documentation and analysis more significant. Which means gaining access and permission will be a fascinating journey for me. I have four months to work on this project and a timeline I won’t post because who knows how things will actually play out…
-Ayaat (Yoyo) Ismail
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