Avi Mograbi: Gonzo-Documents

Beata Kosińska-Krippner

beata.krippner@ispan.pl
Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8096-9708

Abstract

Born in 1956, Avi Mograbi is considered to be one of the most important, but also most controversial Israeli filmmakers of his generation. He makes specific political films, consistently criticizing the condition of the Israeli society and the state’s policy, especially towards Palestine. Making films at the intersection of fiction and facts, he developed his own, distinct poetics; his films function mainly as documents, and he himself refers to this stylistic norm, but he does it on his own terms. Mograbi experiments with both narrative and stylistic solutions. Due to the specificity of his use of the documentary, the author of the article associated the director’s creative method with gonzo-journalism. The specific implementations of his strategy are analyzed on the example of selected films, sheding light on the nature of “reality” in documentaries and the way in which reality determines the creation of films and the filmmaker himself.


Keywords:

Avi Mograbi, gonzo-document, author's strategy, Israeli cinema, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, human rights

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Published
2021-11-16

Cited by

Kosińska-Krippner, B. (2021) “Avi Mograbi: Gonzo-Documents”, Kwartalnik Filmowy, (115), pp. 102–126. doi: 10.36744/kf.878.

Authors

Beata Kosińska-Krippner 
beata.krippner@ispan.pl
Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8096-9708

Ph.D. in Humanities; film studies and media studies scholar. Assistant Professor at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Warsaw). In 2011-2020, head of the Department of Cultural Anthropology, Film and Audiovisual Arts at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Member of the editorial team of Kwartalnik Filmowy, in which in 1993-2003 she published, i.a. an annual chronicle of film events. Her scientific papers on the history and theory of film and television were published, among others, in Kwartalnik Filmowy and edited volumes. She collaborated with the quarterly Polish Culture (1997-2015). She was a member of the jury of the International Short Film Festival in Lublin (2013-2014) and a member of the expert committee at the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (2012-2014). Member of the Polish Society for Film and Media Studies. Her research interests include the documentary film in the context of hybrid border genres (including mock-document and docusoap), the history and theory of film and television genres, as well as Austrian cinema.



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