I haven’t much felt like watching television or movies recently. The news from Israel has been so shattering, so anxiety-inducing, that all I have been able to do for the past few days is read the news, and talk to friends and family members affected by the situation.
I’ve been actively trying to avoid Twitter, which is full of deliberate misinformation and run by a far-right zealot who is amplifying antisemitic voices, and have mostly encountered videos from the Hamas attacks through the New York Times and the Times of Israel, along with videos shared via WhatsApp from friends and family in Israel.
I have been thinking a lot about Roland Barthes’ concept of the punctum, from his book on photography Camera Lucida. The punctum, as all of you who may remember your cultural-studies courses from college, is Barthes’ notion of the odd, surprising, or unsettling detail from a photograph, which proves to be more powerful or moving than the intended message or subject of the composition. For Barthes, photography is often a kind of reminder of the tactility and reality of other people, a statement that says, “I am alive.”
Today, I am thinking about all the images of Israelis—children, the elderly, women, men—taken hostage by Hamas and subject to an uncertain fate in Gaza. And in almost every one of the images I have encountered, there is a punctum that grabs my heart and refuses to let go.
I watched the video of Erez Kalderon, a 12-year-old boy taken by Hamas from his family home, gripped under his arms by unseen hands, and was struck by the thin cotton T-shirt and black shorts he wears. I could not help but see this video as a father, and be reminded that October nights can be chilly. I worry Erez will be cold.
In another video, a Hamas militant clumsily attempts to place a blue handkerchief over an older woman’s head as she sits in the back of a jeep. The brief
clip gives us a sense of driving under direct sunlight, and my first instinct is to assume that this is intended as a solicitous gesture, protecting her from sunstroke. But the more times I watch, the more I wonder whether the kerchief is somehow meant to echo the blue of the Israeli flag, and whether it is meant to mark her as other, foreign, worthy of appalling treatment. The video is only a few seconds long, and so I keep coming back to the placing of the kerchief, as if the sum total of this interaction between these two people, kidnapper and the kidnapped, consists of this awkward dance.
In the last of the videos that grabbed my heart, an elderly woman sits in the passenger seat of what looks like a golf cart or ATV, smiling vaguely. Her name is Yaffa Adar, and she is 85 years old. Yaffa has been kidnapped, she is in the hands of Hamas, and the offputting detail of this brief clip is her smile. Yaffa’s relatives noted that friends reached out, wondering if Yaffa was suffering from dementia. They were asking because the smile seemed so out of keeping with the situation. What kidnapped person smiles?
But the more I looked at Yaffa’s smile, the more it appeared to be a private affair, the kind of facial gesture that spills across your face when a private thought emerges that gives you succor in a moment of uncertainty or pain. I am reminded that in moments of terror, we might retreat into whatever deeply personal frame of reference that might protect us from knowledge of the worst. Yaffa’s smile is not soothing for us, not encouragement to smile or breathe a sigh of relief. It is, instead, a further expression of horror. It is an indication of just how bad things are in this moment captured on video that Yaffa is reduced to smiling.
In each of these videos, we are returning to the Barthesian notion of a photograph or video providing testimony to life while also undermining that very notion. Are these people still alive? These videos testify to absolute knowledge that, in the moment where someone pressed record on their smartphone, they were. The question of whether that fact is still true, whether that testimony is still applicable, is heart-wrenching.