Brief Encounters

Documentary Visits to an Imagined Israel

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by Ohad Landesman

Type

Studies

Subject

Countries > Israel

Keywords

Israel, documentary

Publishing date

2026 (November 02, 2026)

Publisher

State University of New York Press

Collection

SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 272 pages
6 x 9 inches (15 x 23 cm)

ISBN

979-8-8558-0665-6

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Book Presentation:
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.

See the publisher website: State University of New York Press