Rorschach "Rachel"

[proud2BlibKansan]

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Simone Bitton's documentary "Rachel," which premiered this week at the Tribeca Film Festival, is what's not in it. Bitton, a Moroccan-born Jewish filmmaker who spent many years in Israel and now lives in France, conducts a philosophical and cinematic inquiry into the death of Rachel Corrie, the 23-year-old American activist who was killed under ambiguous circumstances in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip in March 2003. But the political firestorm that followed Corrie's death, which saw her beatified as a martyr for peace by some on the left and demonized as a terrorist enabler by some on the right, is virtually absent from the film.

We do not see the infamous photograph of the keffiyeh-clad Corrie burning an "American flag" -- not a real flag, but a crude children's drawing of one -- at a demonstration about a month before her death. Nor do we see the torrent of exaggerated and often shocking verbal abuse to which Corrie was subjected, postmortem, on right-wing bulletin boards and Web sites. Corrie, who suffered massive internal injuries when she was either crushed by a bulldozer or buried under construction debris, was routinely dubbed "Saint Pancake" in such venues, or described as "terrorist-loving swine." (That's without getting into the grotesque sexual fantasies and elaborate conspiracy theories.)

Bitton approaches Corrie's death from an Israeli point of view, which means she sees it quite differently from the way Americans do. For her, it's partly a forensic puzzle -- an episode of "CSI: Gaza" without a clear resolution -- and as a philosophical challenge to the military and political status quo. It's important to understand that within Israel, Corrie's encounter with a military bulldozer (an enormous armored machine called the Caterpillar D9, built in the United States to Israeli specifications) and the subsequent investigation were a relatively minor news blip, not the full-on media frenzy we enjoyed.

While it's unusual for a Westerner to die in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Corrie was neither the first nor the last, and no individual death can make much impression amid the constantly clicking body count on all sides. In the film, one of Corrie's friends recalls that the Gaza hospital mortuary had to move her body out to make room for someone else, a Palestinian man who had reportedly left his house to smoke a cigarette and was shot by an Israeli sniper.

more . . . http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/btm/feature/2009/05/03/rachel/?source=newsletter

[Name removed]

1. Deleted message

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[Douglas Carpenter]

2. here is the link to a video of the full interview and some excerpts:

link to video of interview:

http://www.salon.com/ent/video_dog/ifc/2009/05/03/btm_rachelcorrie/index.html?source=newsletter

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link to listen to interview on MP3:

http://media.salon.com/media/mp3/2009/05/conversations_bitton.mp3


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Excerpts from the interview:

link:

http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/btm/feature/2009/05/03/rachel/?source=newsletter

What specifically was Rachel Corrie's group doing in the Gaza Strip?

They were there, as far as I know, to be with Palestinian families, to live with them, to help them, to express their solidarity. Rachel herself had a vague project of promoting the idea of twin cities between her home city and Rafah, in Palestine. But when they found themselves there, the Israeli army started demolishing civilian houses, one after the other, because they were aiming to create a no man's land along the border with Egypt. So they started trying to protect these people from having their lives destroyed. They slept in these houses and called out by megaphone to the soldiers that they were there, hoping that this will stop the soldiers from shooting. Actually it did, many times. They were trying to prevent the bulldozers from demolishing the homes of just, you know, normal, completely innocent and very poor families.

It has also been suggested that Rachel was an idealistic and naive person who found herself in a situation she didn't fully understand. Or that her group, the International Solidarity Movement, was being manipulated by Hamas or other players in the conflict, to cover a more sinister agenda.

You know, for sure they were not manipulated by anybody. They were very lucid and independent young people. They -- what other insults do you have? Really, the word "manipulated" is so horrible because it shows... It's very insulting towards them. You know, you have to be a very weak personality to be manipulated. They knew what they were doing, and they knew why they were there. They were politically conscious.

Edited to conform to DU's fairuse policy for copyrighted material - Lithos, DU Moderator

link:

http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/btm/feature/2009/05/03/rachel/?source=newsletter


― Andrew O'Hehir

[Enrique]

3. I must have missed the "full-on media frenzy"

what struck me about the media coverage of Corrie was that I never saw any.

[Douglas Carpenter]

4. outside of media that specifically concentrates on the Israel/Palestine conflict and perhaps some

local media in her hometown and perhaps specifically right-wing and specifically left-wing websites, I think you are probably right.

That statement struck me as a bit odd too.

[proud2BlibKansan]

5. A good friend of mine was with her when she died

So I had a personal interest in media coverage. It sputtered and then died out completely 3 days later, when we invaded Iraq.

Those were such sad days.

[Scurrilous]

6. Controversial play 'Rachel Corrie' opens in South Florida at last

<snip>

"Rachel Corrie was a passionate American activist, a young woman who had cared about the larger world since she was a child.

As a fifth-grader in Olympia, Wash., she said this in a speech about world hunger: ``We have got to understand that people in Third World countries think and care and smile and cry just like us. We have got to understand that they dream our dreams, and we dream theirs. We have to understand that they are us. We are them.''

The speech is part of My Name Is Rachel Corrie, a controversial play that culminates in the intersection of protest, politics and death in the Gaza Strip on March 16, 2003. This lightning-rod work about the short life and terrible death of Corrie -- whom some see as courageous, others as misguided -- is finally being staged in South Florida after an abortive attempt two years ago.

The Miami Lakes-based Alliance Theatre Lab opens its production, a solo show constructed by actor-director Alan Rickman and journalist Katherine Viner using material from Corrie's journals, letters and e-mails, at 8 p.m. Thursday at the Main Street Playhouse.

The play has drawn fire from those who believe Corrie was pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli and politically naive, and protests have led to its cancellation in cities including Plantation, where Mosaic Theatre announced the show in 2007."

more

[Howardx]

7. must be the water in olympia

i have known many activists from there.