L’esthétique du quotidien dans Août, avant l’explosion d’Avi Mograbi : lieu et moteur de résistance politique

Abstract

In his film August, a moment before the eruption, Israeli filmmaker Avi Mograbi is talking to his spectator and confides his project: shooting every day during august the daily life of his Israeli compatriots. But this apparently innocent project becomes an act of resistance starting when the camera collides the daily life affected by politics. Documentary sequences of fleeting and violent meetings with Israeli and Palestinian citizens are edited with fictional sequences when the director reacts and romanticizes his intimate conflicts with his wife or producer, but also with documentary sequences of casting for a feature film he’s preparing. Analyzing different layers of the film, this paper questions Mograbi’s aesthetic choices: filming the daily life of his country, he reveals the “présentisme” as a regime of historicity where the contemporary story of Israel is unfolding. Director’s aesthetic proposals become political acts because they’re revealing the common dynamics of these different timelines: banalization of the violence.

Keywords

• political cinema
• Israeli cinema
• Israeli-Palestinian conflict
• regime of historicity
• film aesthetic
• Avi Mograbi